Sula Vineyards Zinfandel 2025
£11.25
The wine
Zinfandel outside California is genuinely rare, and Sula were among the first anywhere in Asia to plant it. Expect ripe bramble and red berry fruit with a warm, spicy edge and soft tannins, in a medium-bodied style rather than the heavy Californian model.
The grape is genetically identical to Primitivo in Puglia and Kratoshija in North Macedonia, all three descending from the Croatian variety Tribidrag, a connection established by DNA analysis only in the early 2000s. It ripens early and unevenly, which suits the compressed post-monsoon ripening season at Nashik.
The producer
Sula Vineyards
View all Sula Vineyards winesSula Vineyards was founded in 1999 by Rajeev Samant, who left a career in Silicon Valley and returned to his family's land at Nashik in Maharashtra to plant grapes where his father had grown mangoes. It is now by some distance India's largest wine producer.
India was not an obvious place to try. The country has a long history of viticulture but almost none of winemaking, and the modern industry dates only from the 1980s. Nashik works because of altitude: the vineyards sit at 600 to 900 metres on the Deccan plateau, high enough for cool nights despite the latitude, and the monsoon arrives in June and clears by September, leaving a dry ripening season. Vines are pruned twice a year, once to establish the canopy and once for fruit, which is a rhythm found in few other wine regions.
Sula built the Indian wine market as much as it supplied it, opening the country's first tasting room and running a music festival at the winery that draws tens of thousands. The Dindori Reserve wines are the senior range.
