India's harvest season

Lynne has this question via email:

Lynne said...

Hi! I'm a winemaker that is interested in doing seasonal work in India. I was just wondering if you could tell me which month(s) are generally the harvest/vintage season?

I doubt they have a small window of opportunity like ours...the few people I have talked with kind of shrug when I ask.

I have posted before on Thailand having 2 harvests per year due to the climate & weather, but I think it would depend on the vintage conditions and the varietal that they are growing...but it seems that India is following suit with multiple “vintages” per annum. Perhaps “Pre Monsoon” and “Post Monsson” offerings are available?...I don't know how they differentiate between the fermentation batches.

The following link may be helpful to you – sort of an FAQ on Indian viticulture:
http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x6897e/x6897e06.htm

...and from it we see the dates for harvesting are nearly year-round…

But I would imagine they’d have it all wrapped up in India right before the monsoon season...(that date changes yearly due to weather patterns and ocean temps, but it generally runs from June 1 thru the first weeks of September). Because of the weather over the Indian subcontinent, grapes are harvested nearly all year long (again, I wouldn't expect much to be happening during the monsoons, but otherwise the answer might be “anytime”), so you may have a larger window of opportunity to find work there than the narrower season we have in North America, or the EU.

Good luck!

And if you do go, please check in from time to time to give us an update on what your experiences are! It would be nice to have a direct pipeline into what the conditions are over there...

Vini