THE setting could be the Hunter Valley or Napa. The drinkers sit on leather seats on a balcony overlooking rows of vines as they sip their sauvignon blanc and nibble on olives and goat’s cheese.

The fading light simultaneously catches on their glasses and the surface of a distant lake, marking the end of another day on a commercial winery. But this is not Australia or California. Closer inspection reveals the drinkers in this tasting to be Indian farmers enjoying the fruits of their labour in a nascent industry to which they are now happy suppliers.

The lake on the horizon is in fact a silty dam pumping drinking water to the 1.2 million people of Nashik, an industrial hub four hours northeast of Bombay and one of the world’s fastest-growing wine regions.

Scavenging birds are the least worry for the scarecrow at Sula Vineyards, the country’s second-biggest winemaker. In this part of the world, leopards emerge from the forested hills to prowl around the crops.

Welcome to the wonderfully exotic world of Indian winemaking, where shrines to Hindu gods help to protect the grapes from evil spirits and the bottling is done by hand by women in saris.

Rajeev Samant, Sula’s chief executive, is one of a handful of people bidding to turn a near-cottage industry into a multi-national business taken seriously by connoisseurs and wine snobs the world over.

A former industrial engineer for Oracle in Silicon Valley, he returned to his native India in 1993 to set up a vineyard on land belonging to his father. “I started growing tomatoes and mangoes. I had no idea Nashik was grape country,” he said. “But the climate is perfect.”

India is the only northern hemisphere wine region to harvest during the winter. The monsoon rules out the summer. At an altitude of nearly 600 metres, the temperature in Nashik in the winter is 25C during the day and a cool 8C at night.

“It is somewhere between New Zealand and South Africa,” Ajoy Shaw, chief winemaker, said. “We get the right balance of acid and sugar. The most successful grape is the shiraz but there is a lot of potential for cabernet.”

It is a measure of the youth of the industry that Mr Shaw was a microbiology graduate from Pune University and learnt on the job with input from Kerry Damskey, a California wine consultant.

Sula produced its first bottle in 1999, a sauvignon blanc cultivated from French cuttings. The company, which has annual sales of $8 million (£4.2 million), is getting ready for its ninth harvest and will produce 1.5 million bottles this year. It expects 20 per cent growth for the next six to seven years and is upgrading to Italian-made bottling machines to handle increased production.

The growth forecasts are based on a paradigm shift in social drinking patterns that has seen the affluent classes turn away from hard liquor, such as whisky, to wine — a more expensive but fashionable option.

Hindi actors and music producers are now regularly snapped on Page Three, India’s society page, with glasses of wine in their hands. It is a powerful statement in a country where Bollywood stars set the trends.

Mr Samant has called on his own connections to push the Sula brand abroad. Liz Hurley, the English actress, bought his wines for her Raj-themed 40th birthday brunch party in London last year because her boyfriend, Arun Nayar, was a school friend.

Sula wines can be bought in London restaurants including the Cinnamon Club and Yauatcha, but the main focus is India where consumption is projected to grow tenfold over the next decade, albeit from a very low base.

“Wine-drinking is not in the Indian culture so this is a totally new audience,” Mr Samant said. “Consumption is still minuscule. India drinks in a year what London does in a big party weekend. It is equivalent to about 7ml, or a teaspoon, a head. There is so much to be done here.”

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