A Californian making wine in Bengaluru

Sula Vineyards is an Indian wine company that exports its wines to the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia.

Rajeev Samant, Founder and CEO of Sula Vineyards. / LinkedIn

Thirty miles from Bengaluru, along the Bengaluru-Mysore highway, clear signs guide travelers to Sula Domaine wine tours, leading them to four acres of picturesque wine country. In the midst of rice, corn, mango and coconut plantations. Sula Domaine’s wine-day-out offers a wine tour, a wine tasting, a gift shop, grape stomping and more.

Sula Vineyards is an Indian wine company that exports its wines to the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. The company was founded by Rajeev Samant in the late 1990s on return from studying at Stanford University and working at Oracle in California. Rajeev spent three months at a small winery in California that belonged to Kerry Damskey.

“Rajeev and I met in Glen Ellen, California, in Sonoma Valley in 1997. We talked about my traveling to India to develop the first premium wine grape vineyards in Nashik,” said Damskey to Sommelier India. Damskey hired Rajeev to work in the winery in Mendocino County, California where he was the chief winemaker and partner. “Rajeev wanted to get first-hand knowledge of how wine was made.”

Damskey and Samant would frequent Asian and Indian restaurants and order different wines to see which wines went best with Indian cuisines. “We all agreed fruit-forward white wines and rosés were best suited. We were establishing what would become the protocol for the soon-to-be realized Indian wine consumer,” said Damskey.

Tasting room Sula wines Bengaluru. / Ritu Marwah

A pioneer in the wine industry of India, Sula is now making wine an accessible drink. Karnataka is the second-largest grape-producing region in India, the first being Maharashtra. Sula has wine-making industries in both states.

Guided tours and wine tastings in both states encourage people to taste the wine and develop a palate. “It needs to be done in the way Robert Mondavi did in California in the 70’s and 80’s. Marketing the idea that wine is a natural beverage to be enjoyed with friends, as a part of the meal. It’s a part of cuisine and the food scene,” said Damskey.

Leading the tour through the winery and production facility Anuj, a graduate of Burgundy spelled out in simple terms the difference between sparkling wine and champagne, what gives Rose wine its pink color, what gives red wine its redness. “Only fruit the wine is made from is grapes. If someone tries to sell you apple wine or strawberry wine it is not real wine,” said Anuj.

Sparkling, Rosé, Chardonnay, Cabernet, Moscato are all swirled, sniffed and sipped under the pedantic eyes of their tour guide, who tells them to swirl some wines and not the others, hold the glass from the stem and not the goblet, clean the glass of red wine before getting a taste of the moscato etc. For many it is their first time tasting wine.

“This is our highest seller,” says Anuj as his tour peers at the Dindori Shiraz.

“We brought in American oak barrels to age our Syrah, creating the first Indian-made barrel-aged red wine in 2002,” said Damskey who traveled to India three times a year for 25 years to work on winemaking, blending and vineyard protocol development. He was Sula's master winemaker.

Sula Domaine hopes to become the pioneers of wine tourism destinations in the country. A restaurant, gift shop and tasting room sits next to a grape crushing room where visitors can stomp on grapes for a mere 600 INR (US$ 7).

Open everyday from 11.00 am to 8.00 pm (local time), the facility is an Instagrammer's dream. Large bottles of wine are juxtaposed against muraled walls. Plans for the future include treehouse accommodation with a vineyard view.