While planning for my trip to India I knew I wanted to do my yoga teacher training course and that I wanted to go to the wine area, Nasik, outside Mumbai. Really, outside of those two things, I hadn’t actually planned a single thing.

After travelling in Rajasthan for 3 weeks I was ready to leave. It had been wonderful, don’t get me wrong but it had been exhausting and I really didn’t want to go visit another city. I’d had enough. We decided to fly from Udaipur to Mumbai, spend some time there and then make our way out to Nasik. As we met travellers, most were on route to Goa from Mumbai and none of them had heard of the wine area (and why would they, most backpackers aren’t travelling to go to the wine region of a country). 

We set off on our journey to Nasik at 6am via 1 hour taxi, 3 hour train, and another 1 hour taxi and we finally made it to the resort we were staying at, Soma Vine Village. The temperature was so pleasant in comparison to Mumbai’s scorching heat. We were upgraded to a deluxe room and given welcome wines on our balcony. We were absolutely buzzing! I hadn’t had wine since I was in Sri Lanka 2 months ago, I hadn’t stayed anywhere luxurious since Sri Lanka when Graeme and I booked a swanky hotel for our last night and I hadn’t had access to a pool on this trip at all. 

We sat on the balcony admiring the vineyards, supping on chennin blanc, which is made on site, loving our lives! We ordered a cheese board and a bottle of wine and basked in the sun. In fairness, the cheese board was actually very poor but standards of cheese in India are completely different and I still bloody loved it!

We scheduled our wine tour and tasting of Soma Vine Village (literally behind the resort, a 2 minutes walk through vineyards, bliss) for that afternoon where we met Kevin, a french guy who worked in Monaco but was travelling for as long as he possibly could. He was staying at Soma (either volunteering or paid work, I’m not too sure) and working with them to develop some of the wines. He brought us around the production area within about 5 minutes, gave us some information about the winery and then we got on with the tastings. We tasted 5 different wines in this tasting: sauvignon blanc, chennin blanc, syrah, cabernet sauv and a dessert wine. The dessert wine was sickly sweet but I thought the reds and whites were delicious!

From the age of 18 I hated white wine! This was probably due to my only tasting ever being a £5 bottle of white wine from Tesco. I assumed I hated white wine all these years but having tried some Riesling in Copenhagen when I visited friends over the summer I had been surprised to find out I love white wine too. We finished our wine tour and tasting and I was asked to do a little video for the winery, just a quick synopsis of my experience of the wine tasting. I blabbered on trying to behave soberly about how wonderful the experience was and how much we enjoyed it. I hope to god that video doesn’t show up to haunt me in years to come when Indias wine region is taking off!

We continued our wine drinking upstairs with a bottle of Cab Sav and a bowl of wedges with cheese sauce (again the cheese was questionable but we were half shot and starving). We frolicked through the vineyards on route back to our hotel, literally frolicked half pissed the whole way back (all 500m). We rolled up the legs of our trousers and ordered another bottle of wine to sit with our legs in the pool and sup on. We sat, chatting nonsense and watching the sunset over the resort. I honestly can’t explain how content I was feeling to just forget about backpacking for a while and just enjoy the luxury of a hotel, some great wine, delicious food and the wonderful company of Shannon.

We finished our wine and went back to the room to shower and get ready for dinner. We’d stayed in decent enough hostels and guest houses along the way but a nice shower is something we didn’t really have anywhere. This shower was the shower of all showers! I could have spent an hour in there if I wasn’t so conscious of wasting water! It was piping hot, spacious, clean and powerful! Honestly, the joy in having a good functioning shower after this long of travelling was amazing!

We got ourselves down to dinner and had another bottle of wine, looking over the vineyards and pool absolutely delighted with ourselves. The food was very mediocre but we were still happy. The cheese and garlic naan alongside the wine being the best part of the meal!

The following morning we got up at around 9am for our breakfast, which was a buffet breakfast down in the restaurant (again, mediocre food but who cares when there’s wine). We went back to bed for a lazy morning of reading and tea and then I did some yoga on the balcony. I miss having my own space for yoga. I’m doing yoga every day for at least 1.5 hours but I do look forward to the day that I have my own yoga room in my house with my own energy and space.

We got into our bikinis and took to the pool for a bottle of wine, jalapeno cheese poppers, swims and photo shoots! We had a right laugh and it was glorious to be in a bikini. We’re pretty covered in India all the time and are becoming more and more scandalised by tourists showing shoulders or legs! Like what have we become? Get us to Thailand so we get used to seeing the human body on show like we’re used to in our respective countries. We lounged around for a while and got ourselves ready for our next tour and tasting.

We had contacted the resort in advance to request bicycles. We wanted to cycle from our resort to the other 2 big wineries in the area. The resort responded saying they could organise this. When we saw the bicycles, we were sorely disappointed but also we laughed so much at the absolute state of them. Most had flat tires, majority of the brakes didn’t work on the bikes and some of the saddles were in very questionable positions. After a couple of failed attempts on the bikes we came to terms with the fact that we weren’t biking anywhere! The resort was able to order us a tuk tuk and off we went to Sula Vineyards.

Sula Vinyards is one of the most well known wineries in India. Upon arrival we paid 200 rupees (£2.15) entrance and made our way to the main desk to book onto a tour. Already, you could feel the difference between Soma Vine Village and Sula Wineries. Sula was much grander and well organised. It was more expensive and well laid out. We were able to join a tour immediately (another 200 rupees for the tour and tasting so a total of £4.30 for the tour and tasting) which was far more official than the Soma Vineyard tour. We were shown where all the fermenting and aging takes place and then brought into the tasting room. I’m glad I did the tours but to be honest I don’t need to go on anymore tours of vineyards, I just want to do the tastings!

We were given 6 wines during this tasting; brut chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, dindori reserve chardonnay, syrah, cabernet sauvignon and chenin blanc. They weren’t as generous helpings as Soma but still delicious. They all tasted great and I would drink them all again bar the sauvignon blanc. I’m just getting to know my white wines. We swung by the wine rooms to see if we would get some wine shipped home to Ireland and Australia but instead we were met with some stares from a group of guys. They felt seedy and were making me uncomfortable. One of them walked up and down past us a few times with his phone in his hand so we knew he was going to ask to take a selfie (common practise in India). When he asked and my answer was a firm no, he actually had the cheek to ask why. I firmly said no, go away. A few minutes later his mate walks past us with his phone up and takes a picture of us. I approached him and told him to delete it to which his response was a grunt. These lads were drunk and their behaviour was disgusting. His phone was on loud and we heard it click. I was rightly pissed off at this stage so I went to the main desk to complain and ask them to remove the men from the premises. The staff were very helpful and tended to the matter immediately. They had the guys removed so we celebrated our small victory with another bottle of wine upstairs in the restaurant with a cheese board. This time we got a small bottle of reisling and a small bottle of chennin blanc. I was pretty proud of myself for holding it together with the whole incident and glad I made the complaint. I wasn’t sure how well it would be received by the staff but they were amazing. They dealt with it quickly and efficiently.

We sat in the restaurant watching the sunset with our cheese and wine and were absolutely loving life. We rang our resort who organised another tuk tuk to come and pick us up and bring us to our next winery, York winery. Considering the bikes were such a let down, the resort really redeemed themselves by helping us out with all the tuk tuks. 

We arrived in York winery where we went for a tasting (cost about £4). The man working there was really nice, very knowledgeable and actually the most professional tasting guy we had. In the previous tastings we didn’t change out the glasses or anything. This guy knew what he was at. We ordered some more cheese and wine and perched at the window looking over York winery. The sun had set and the fairy lights all over the garden were beautiful. Again, more questionable cheese but we ate all of it!

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We headed back down to our tuk tuk driver who brought us back safe and sound to Soma vine village, where we ended the day with a bottle of wine with our legs in the pool. There was more wine and food and nonsense but I think it’s best left at that for that evening.

The following day we had our taxi man, Vijay, booked for 8am. He was early and we were late (both feeling a bit rough) but we made it back to Nasik train station in time for our train back to Mumbai. Although I had spent a lot of money and I was feeling a little worse for wear, I can honestly say that the trip was worth every penny. I think this wine area is going to be really popular in the next few years. A part from our one incident in Sula winery, everyone was so lovely, helpful, kind and best of all, we sampled delicious wine for 2 full days while in India!