Natural Wine Has Finally Landed in India. Properly.
There is a specific kind of dinner party that happened in Mumbai for years. Someone would come back from a trip abroad and mention a wine they had at a small place in Paris, or a bar in Copenhagen. Something orange, something alive, something the waiter had been genuinely excited to pour. Everyone at the table would nod with interest, and nobody would be able to find a bottle the next day.
Natural wine existed in India largely as a reference point. A category you discovered elsewhere and brought home as a conversation, rather than a bottle.
That is beginning to change. Not loudly, not with a grand announcement, but in the way things that actually stick tend to change: gradually, and then all at once.
Natural Wine, Minus The Mystery
Natural wine is not a precise category. There is no universally accepted legal definition, and no single standard everyone agrees on. Broadly, it refers to wine made with minimal intervention: grapes often grown organically or biodynamically, fermented with native yeasts rather than commercial ones, with little to no added sulphur dioxide, and as little added or taken away in the cellar as possible.
The result is wine that can feel alive, unpredictable, complex, and occasionally a little funky in ways conventional wine often is not. At its best, it tastes like somewhere. It tastes like the person who made it.
In cities where natural wine has properly taken root- Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen- it did not spread through supermarket shelves or advertising campaigns. It spread through restaurants with sommeliers who cared, through small importers who believed in the product before the market validated it, and through the specific pleasure of someone putting a glass in front of you and saying: try this, I think you’ll love it.
That is a culture. And cultures take time to build.
India is building one now.
The People Doing The Work
Nikhil Agarwal of All Things Nice is one of the people most responsible for making serious wine culture in India feel possible. His career has moved through Sula, LVMH and Diageo, before he founded All Things Nice, but what he has built is not simply a shop or a publication. It is something more useful: a platform.
Nikhil Agarwal at All Things Nice
Events, education, trade connections, tastings, and ProWine Mumbai, the annual gathering that has become one of the most important rooms in India’s wine calendar. The 2025 edition brought together 213 exhibitors from 21 countries and 5,485 trade visitors, numbers that would have felt difficult to imagine not very long ago. The conversation inside that room is no longer just about whether India is a wine market. It is about what kind of wine market it wants to become.
At Masque, Hridhay Mehra has been doing the more intimate version of the same work. His job title is sommelier, but what he does is closer to cultural translation: building a wine list for one of Mumbai’s most serious restaurants, designing pairings for a menu that changes with the seasons, and slowly introducing a certain kind of diner to bottles they may not have thought to ask for.
Hridhay Mehra at Masque
Masque has already played with this space in a meaningful way. In 2022, it collaborated with Nashik-based Vallonne Vineyards on Kustavaan, an orange wine made for the restaurant, at a time when orange wines were still far from mainstream in India. That matters because this category needs context. It needs someone at the table who can explain why a wine looks cloudy, smells different, tastes textured, or refuses to behave like the Chardonnay someone thought they knew.
What people like Agarwal and Mehra share is the willingness to build something before the conditions are easy. To put unfamiliar bottles in front of people. To create rooms where wine can be spoken about without making it feel like an exam. To believe the appetite exists even when the infrastructure is still catching up.
Why Right Now Is Different
The structural problem has always been simple and brutal. India imposes a 150% central customs duty on imported wine, with additional state-level taxes layered on top. Alcohol also sits outside the national GST system, which means each state has its own duties, licensing rules and pricing structures.
A bottle that is affordable at the source can become several times more expensive by the time it reaches a restaurant list in Mumbai or Delhi. For natural wine specifically, which is often made in smaller quantities and can already be more expensive to produce than conventional wine, building a serious portfolio has required conviction rather than comfortable business logic.
This is why the India-EU free trade agreement matters. Negotiations concluded in January 2026, and the published EU factsheet provides for wine tariffs to fall from 150% to 20% for premium wines and 30% for medium-range wines, subject to legal revision, signature and domestic approval procedures. It does not solve everything immediately. State taxes remain, and phased reductions are exactly that: phased. But it signals that the economics of imported wine in India may finally begin to change.
The importers, restaurants and sommeliers who built this culture when the conditions were difficult may soon find the conditions a little less so.
Where To Start
The restaurants with thoughtful wine lists are still the best place to begin. Masque is the obvious answer, because the list reflects a point of view rather than just a selection. The Table has been serious about wine for years. A few newer restaurants and bars in Mumbai are also beginning to stock bottles that would have required a flight, or at least a very persuasive friend abroad, a few years ago.
The natural wine conversation in India is still intimate enough that the sommelier matters enormously. This is not always a category you navigate alone. It rewards curiosity, trust, and a willingness to be steered.
Ask what is interesting right now. Ask what is open by the glass. Ask for something you would not have ordered yourself.
That question, in the right room, can take you somewhere.
