The short version.

• India’s wine market was worth US$195.3 million in 2023 and is forecast to reach US$802.9 million by 2032 — a 17.01% CAGR, off a base still under 2% of India’s total alcoholic-beverage volume.
• Per-capita wine consumption is about 9 millilitres a year — roughly 1/8000th of France’s, and near the bottom of any country’s wine table.
• Maharashtra (mostly around Nashik) and Karnataka’s Bengaluru–Bijapur–Hampi belt account for almost all domestic production. A 2022 government count put Maharashtra alone at 35+ wineries on about 1,500 acres of wine grapes.
• Three companies dominate. Sula Vineyards alone held 52.6% of the domestic 100%-grape-wine category in FY2021 and about 61% of the Elite/Premium segment in FY2022. Fratelli Wines and Grover Zampa are the other two names that matter.
• A 150% import duty — India’s WTO-bound ceiling on wine — has kept foreign wine largely out of reach. The India–EU trade deal, agreed 27 January 2026, would eventually cut that to 20% for premium wine and 30% for mid-range. It is not yet in force, and ratification is not expected before 2027–2028.
• The consumer base has shifted: millennials aged 25–34 make up roughly 45% of wine drinkers, and wine tourism — Sula alone drew 3.3 lakh+ visitors in FY2025 — is now as much the business as the bottle.
• A third state is watching from the sidelines: Tamil Nadu grows grapes at scale (Theni district alone is 78% of the state’s grape area) and, per July 2025 reporting, is now exploring wine production — with one winery already built at Anamalayanpatti.

A market too small to argue about, in absolute terms

Start with the number that gets repeated in almost every trade write-up on Indian wine: US$195.3 million. That is IMARC Group’s estimate of the size of India’s wine market in 2023, and the same report projects it reaching US$802.9 million by 2032 — a compound annual growth rate of 17.01%. Growth of that speed sounds dramatic; the absolute numbers keep it in perspective. India’s entire wine industry, at its 2032 target, would still be smaller than a single mid-sized FMCG brand’s annual India revenue.

Market-size and CAGR figures are IMARC Group’s India Wine Market report. Per-capita consumption and wine’s share of the alcoholic-beverage market are triangulated across trade and industry sources (see Sources and caveats) and are reported as a range rather than a single false-precision number, because estimates of India’s informal/unrecorded alcohol consumption vary widely.

Two states, one river valley, most of the wine

Indian wine production is geographically narrow. The Ministry of Commerce & Industry, in a 2022 release on APEDA’s participation in the London Wine Fair, put Maharashtra at more than 35 wineries using roughly 1,500 acres of land under wine-grape cultivation — the state government had by then declared wine-making a small-scale industry and offered excise concessions to encourage it. Most of that capacity sits around Nashik, on the Godavari river, commonly called India’s “Wine Capital”; trade estimates put the district’s winery count closer to 45–50 by the mid-2020s, with clusters around Sanjegaon, Dindori and the Gangapur Dam backwaters.

Karnataka is the second hub, smaller but distinct in style: vineyards cluster around Bengaluru and southern Karnataka, around Bijapur, and in the Hampi Hills — a UNESCO World Heritage landscape where the altitude and rocky soil are associated with Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc plantings.

Maharashtra winery count and acreage: PIB release PRID 1832846 (Ministry of Commerce & Industry / APEDA, 10 June 2022). District-level winery counts for Nashik in the mid-2020s and the Karnataka regional breakdown are trade and travel-industry estimates, not government figures, and are reported as such.

A third state watching from the sidelines: Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu is not a wine-producing state in the way Maharashtra or Karnataka are — but it already grows the raw material at scale, just for the table rather than the bottle. State horticulture figures put Tamil Nadu’s grape area at roughly 2,800 hectares, of which Theni district alone accounts for 2,184 hectares (78%) and 76% of the state’s grape production — about 29,338 tonnes, mostly from the Cumbum Valley.

That has started to change on paper. In July 2025, Sommelier India reported that Tamil Nadu was exploring wine production in earnest, from both grapes and the less conventional cashew apple, explicitly citing Maharashtra’s and Karnataka’s example. On the ground, a winery has already been built at Anamalayanpatti, in the Theni–Dindigul belt, using French technology, with a stated capacity of about 75,000 litres a year.

This is early-stage. Tamil Nadu does not yet appear in national wine-market breakdowns the way Maharashtra and Karnataka do, its grape crop has historically gone to fresh consumption rather than wine, and the 75,000-litre figure describes one winery’s stated capacity, not the state’s wine output. See Sources and caveats.

Three companies, most of what's left

Domestic wine in India is concentrated in very few hands. Sula Vineyards, the Nashik pioneer, reported holding 52.6% of the domestic 100%-grape-wine category in FY2021 — up from 33% in FY2009 — and roughly 61% of the Elite and Premium price segments in FY2022, according to its own IPO-era disclosures. Sula listed on the BSE and NSE in December 2022 through a ₹960 crore offer-for-sale at a price band of ₹340–357 per share. Wine tourism is now central to its business rather than incidental to it: the company reported more than 3.3 lakh visitors to its Nashik properties in FY2025, alongside a reported 10–12% annual revenue surge and events such as SulaFest driving resort occupancy.

Sula’s market-share and IPO figures are from its own regulatory filings and IPO disclosures; the FY2021/FY2022 figures apply specifically to the 100%-grape-wine and Elite/Premium categories, not to all wine sold in India (which also includes imported and blended wine), so they should not be read as Sula’s share of every bottle consumed. Fratelli’s and Grover Zampa’s share figures are industry estimates repeated across trade sources and are less firmly documented than Sula’s filed numbers.

The 150% wall, and the deal that's supposed to bring it down

India’s protection for domestic wine has never been subtle. Under its WTO commitments, India’s bound tariff ceiling on wine and spirits imports is 150%, and in practice additional duties and state-level levies have at times pushed the effective burden higher still — the reason a bottle of imported wine in an Indian shop routinely costs three to five times what the same bottle sells for elsewhere. That wall is a large part of why Sula, Fratelli and Grover Zampa can hold the shares they do: imported wine has rarely been able to compete on price for the mass or even mid-premium market.

That is now, on paper, changing. On 27 January 2026, India and the European Union reached political agreement on a free trade agreement after nearly two decades of on-and-off negotiation. Among its provisions: wine tariffs would fall from 150% to an initial 75% on entry into force, phasing down over time to 20% for premium wine and 30% for mid-range wine. Spirits tariffs would fall to 40% and beer tariffs from 110% to 50%.

Tariff figures are from India–EU FTA trade reporting following the 27 January 2026 political agreement (see Sources and caveats). The phased schedule and exact staging dates for wine were not published in full in the sources used here.

That distinction matters more for this market than for most. A $195 million industry protected almost entirely by a tariff wall is exactly the kind of market where a multi-year delay, and a multi-year phase-down after that, changes very little in the short run and a great deal in the long run — and right now, both the delay and the phase-down are still assumptions rather than facts on the ground.

A carrot-and-stick anecdote, from this industry's own history

The two policy levers behind this market's shape are a textbook carrot and stick, and only one of them did much work. The carrot — Maharashtra's small-scale-industry status and excise concessions for wine-making, in place since well before 2022 — helped grow the state's industry to 35+ wineries on roughly 1,500 acres over some two decades: real, but modest. The stick — the 150% WTO-bound tariff wall, aimed not at domestic producers but at anyone trying to import around them — needed no active enforcement at all to keep foreign wine a rounding error in a $195 million market for that same stretch of time, simply by making a landed import cost three to five times what it does elsewhere.

The same asymmetry turns up in a completely different Indian industry: ethanol blending. A punitive ₹2-per-litre excise duty on unblended petrol — a stick, aimed at oil-marketing companies rather than farmers or distillers — pushed ethanol blending to 20% five years ahead of its original target. The softer, carrot-led alternative next to it — excise exemptions and assured procurement pricing for compressed biogas, backed by only an administrative shortfall charge — has struggled to clear even a 1% target on a comparable timeline (see this blog's piece on India's ethanol excise regime for the full figures). Wine and fuel ethanol share nothing else, but the pattern repeats: in Indian policy, a cost imposed on the unwanted behaviour has consistently moved markets faster and further than a reward offered for the wanted one.

Who's actually doing the drinking

The demand side has shifted faster than the supply side. Millennials aged roughly 25 to 34 are estimated to make up about 45% of India’s wine-drinking base, a generation more often described as drinking for the experience — a vineyard tour, a tasting flight, a weekend away — than for the effect. That shift is precisely why wine tourism has become a genuine second business line rather than a marketing add-on: it lets producers build a direct, high-margin relationship with a customer segment that alcohol-advertising restrictions in India otherwise make very hard to reach through conventional media. Sula’s reported 3.3 lakh-plus FY2025 visitor count, and events like SulaFest driving resort occupancy, are the clearest evidence that this channel now carries real revenue, not just brand-building.

What doesn't follow from any of this

It is tempting to read a 17% forecast CAGR and a falling tariff wall as a single story: cheaper imports plus faster growth equals a market about to be transformed. Two things argue against that reading. First, the tariff cut is not yet real — it is a signed political agreement awaiting ratification on both sides, with entry into force realistically two to three years out even on optimistic timelines, and a phased schedule after that. Second, domestic producers’ dominance was not built on tariffs alone: distribution reach, price points tuned to Indian incomes, and two decades of building brands like Sula around wine tourism rather than just retail shelf space are advantages a lower import duty does not automatically erase. A market this small, growing this fast off this narrow a base, is one where both the optimistic and the pessimistic story can be told from the same numbers — which is exactly why the two things worth tracking are the ratification timeline, not the headline tariff figure, and whether import volumes actually move once (and if) the cut takes effect.

Sources and caveats