Sula Vineyards has announced plans to expand its wine tourism operations by launching a 30-room resort at York Winery, located on the company’s Nashik property, in 2026.

Currently, as part of its tourism and hospitality business, Sula has two other hotels - the 37-room Beyond by Sula and the 66-room The Source at Sula. The new hotel, an asset-like model for the company, will be built by a third party who will lease it to them.

“We have been focusing on expanding our wine tourism operations because we view that as the face of our business. We get almost four lakh visitors a year between our winery in Nashik and the one outside of Bangalore,” said Karan Vasani, COO, of Sula Vineyards. He added that the company is also expanding its restaurant and building a new tasting area in its Bangalore property.  

Founded in 1999, in the last 10 months, the company has added 35 keys to its Nashik property. Alongside, they also made two acquisitions - N D Wines in April 2024 and York Winery in 2021, both located in Nashik.

97 percent of Sula’s sales happen domestically, with only three percent of the total market being from exports. Their products are exported predominantly to the EU, with smaller amounts going to Japan, the US, Turkey, and the Nordic countries. Additionally, some exports have gone to Canada and the UAE.

“In India, we are present everywhere we can legally be present, except for some dry states, so our pan-India distribution happens almost everywhere. This includes the army, navy, and border security force canteens,” said Vasani.

The company’s entire production happens across its wineries in Maharashtra and Karnataka. However, 10 percent is produced in Karnataka and 90 per cent in Maharashtra. Adding that wine consumption is highest in Maharashtra and Karnataka because these states grow grapes and make wine, Vasani said,” Maharashtra and Karnataka, our largest markets put together, account for around 65 percent of our sales, with Maharashtra being 50 percent and Karnataka about 15 per cent of our sales. Hyderabad in Telangana has been seeing high growth recently.”

“The winery in Karnataka, located near Channapatna, supplies the Karnataka and Kerala market, along with parts of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry. The rest of the country is supplied out of the winery in Nashik,” he said.

Sula has four wineries in Nashik and one in Karnataka. The Nashik winery, which the COO says is the face of Sula’s tourism business, has a capacity of 4.2 million litres. York Winery, smaller in size, has 0.7 million litres in capacity.  

“This year, we hope to sell around 1.1 million cases. A case is nine litres, meaning 12 bottles of 750 ml. And today, we run at capacity utilizations of around 85 per cent. The current capacity of our tanks is around 16.5 million litres, and we are adding another 1 million,” said the COO.

Any Sula product that costs ₹700-1000 rupees falls into the premium category, and anything over ₹1,000 belongs to the elite category. The share of wines sold for over ₹750 per 750 ml bottle is 75 per cent of their sales value, an increase from 60-62 percent from a few years ago.

Sula’s The Source range has six wines, all priced around ₹1,100 - 1,500 per bottle. The Rasa series of red wines are priced between ₹1,600 - 2,100 a bottle. Sula’s portfolio exceeds 50 labels across more than 10 brands.

The company went public in late 2022. In Q1 of this fiscal year, revenue from Sula’s brands was recorded to be ₹104.4 crore, a 2.7 percent increase year on year (YoY) from Q1 FY24’s ₹101.6 crore. Wine tourism saw a 2.5 percent decline (YoY) in revenue at ₹11.3 crore in the first quarter of FY25, as opposed to ₹11.5 crore in the corresponding quarter last fiscal. Net revenue was ₹129.6 crore, up 9.7 per cent YoY from Q1 FY24’s ₹118.2 crore.

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