Visit to the winery – Chateau Indage, Narayangaon India

Note: I meant to write this blog a long time ago, but for some reason I kept postponing it. I had it saved in my draft so thought about posting it now!

Not many people know that India has a great wine making tradition. And many wineries are located in, near and around Nasik, which is a fertile belt ideal for growing grapes. One such winery in Chateau Indage (formerly Champagne Indage).

Chateau Indage was established in the year 1982 after collaboration with Champagne Technologies of France. Since then this winery has been producing exquisite wines for both local and international consumption.

We went there on 2nd October 2010 - a dry day!  :-(
A dry day in India is a day when no liquor is sold or served and all liquor shops are closed. So our plan to have a nice afternoon lunch while sipping Chardonnay was crushed :-(

However the proprietor was very kind to us and he offered to sell us the wine with a condition that we don’t open the bottle at his premises :-) - to say the least. I was over the moon!! :-)

So we purchased 6 bottles of the finest wines the winery could offer.

The vineyard/winery had a nice restaurant where they served us a very nice lunch

	The IVY Restaurant @ the winery
	Adu all set for the lunch :-) Lovely cuisine!
	Something of interest to me :-)
	The restaurant from outside…
	The vineyard. Its a beautiful place!
	The Winery.
	The main gate, leading to the vineyard and winery. The Winery also has a guesthouse where you can book rooms and stay. You will be given a tour of wine making process and during the harvest period, they say, you can actually crush the grapes as well. Hmmmm… Sounds interesting. I will see if I can go then! :-)
	On the way to the winery, a colorful building! :-)
	On the way from back from Narayangaon, we took a halt at the place called Avasari Ghat. It had a nice trekking trail which went right inside the forest. Quite Amazing!! We halted here for few minutes. i will go there for a trek next time!

I will be back there soon!

All pics taken using Olympus E-330 and 25mm pancake. E-330 has this irritating quirk of overexposing and washing out longer wavelength colors (i.e. yellow, orange and reds). I did a mild HDR processing on the single RAW exposure to get the colors and exposure back.

I never had much faith in 25mm pancake before, but on E-300 its a perfect fit as it makes the system small and easy to carry.

CIAO