18 October 2026 · 6 min read · By Pal Vineyards

Growing Grapes in North-West India: Heat, Monsoon and the Research

North-west India is not an obvious home for wine grapes. The plains of Punjab are hot, the monsoon arrives on a tight schedule, and the cool-climate regions that make most of the world’s fine wine are a long way away. The published research is correspondingly thin. This note sets out what it does say about heat, rain and the vine, and is equally clear about what is still unmeasured.

A sub-tropical vine calendar

ICAR-NRC Grapes divides Indian grape-growing into three climate zones. In the tropical south and west, where about 94 per cent of the national grape area lies, growers use double pruning to shift ripening into the dry winter. The sub-tropical zone, which covers Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, western Uttar Pradesh and Delhi at roughly 28 to 32°N, works on a different calendar. Vines go dormant in winter, are pruned once in December or January, and carry a single crop that ripens in early summer.

The constraint is time. Only about 90 to 95 days separate budburst from the monsoon, and the sources agree that only the early-ripening Perlette table grape reliably beats the rains. Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, has centred its quality work on Perlette and its relatives, using techniques such as flower-bud thinning, girdling and gibberellic acid (GA3) dips. Current sources put the state’s grape area at roughly 1,400 hectares, with Perlette, Flame Seedless and Beauty Seedless as the main table varieties, a medium-confidence figure.

How hot is hot?

A computation summarised in Pal Vineyards’ research notes, built on Singh et al. in PLOS Climate, places the plains at a growing-season temperature of about 28.6 to 29.0°C. That puts them deep in Winkler Region V, the hottest class in the standard scheme, and in the “very hot” band of the Jones classification. It is an internal calculation, not a peer-reviewed result for Punjab, but it is consistent with the broader picture.

The picture is getting warmer. According to the same PLOS Climate synthesis, all-India temperatures are projected to rise by about 1.2 to 1.3°C by mid-century under the SSP2-4.5 scenario, with north-west India and the western Himalaya warming faster than the average. Heatwave seasons are projected to lengthen by one to two months, which narrows the pre-monsoon ripening window further, and summer monsoon rainfall is projected to rise by 6 to 8 per cent with more erratic timing. India’s Department of Science and Technology has reported that the diurnal temperature range, the gap between day and night, is shrinking fastest in parts of the north-west over recent decades, because night-time minima are rising faster than daytime maxima. Wine grapes depend on cool nights to keep acidity, so that matters.

One nuance deserves a flag. A 2012 study by Rai and colleagues in the Journal of Geophysical Research found that over the full 1901 to 2003 record the all-India diurnal range actually increased. The shrinking range is a feature of the last thirty to forty years, and should be cited as such. Observed warming has continued: the 2024 national mean was about 0.65°C above the 1991 to 2020 average and the warmest on record since 1901, as reported by Down To Earth from India Meteorological Department data.

The global frame

India’s plains are not alone in facing this. A 2013 study by Hannah and colleagues in PNAS modelled mid-century changes in suitable winegrowing area under a high-emissions scenario: a fall of 68 per cent in Mediterranean Europe, 60 per cent in California and 73 per cent in Mediterranean Australia, against rises of 99 per cent in northern Europe, 231 per cent in western North America and 168 per cent in New Zealand. A 2024 synthesis by van Leeuwen and colleagues in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment concluded that about 70 per cent of current wine regions could become unsuitable if warming exceeds about 2°C. The same review names the Pamir-Himalayan mountains among Asian zones with emerging potential, at coarse resolution.

Altitude is the obvious lever, and the review finds it has a ceiling: relocating upslope offsets only part of the losses in the Mediterranean. In the Himalaya, elevation-dependent warming adds a complication, since higher sites can warm faster. The strongest effect is reported above about 2,000 metres. The Himachal interior sites of roughly 1,450 to 1,550 metres sit below that band and are the least disadvantaged option in north-west India, but they are best described as marginal and experimental.

What Punjab’s one wine-grape trial found

The most direct evidence is a PAU Ludhiana study published in 2016. Brar, Gill, Arora and Dhaliwal examined the fruiting behaviour of six varieties during the 2011-12 season on a Y-trellis: Cardinal, Punjab Purple (H-516), Chardonnay, Merlot, Himrod and Pusa Navrang. Punjab Purple had the most bunches per vine, Chardonnay the most berries per bunch, Cardinal the largest and firmest berries, and Merlot the highest juice recovery. Overall, Punjab Purple, Himrod and Pusa Navrang were rated best on physico-chemical parameters, with Punjab Purple named the most promising variety for north Indian conditions.

The study shows that Chardonnay and Merlot can fruit on the Punjab plains. It is not a wine-quality study and it reports no disease-pressure or spray-load data. No other published wine-variety trial for the Punjab plains was located, and ICAR-NRC Grapes output found in the search relates mainly to Maharashtra.

Disease: the monsoon problem

Heat is one problem, humidity is another. Downy mildew thrives in warm, wet weather, and fungus-resistant varieties, known as PIWI (from the German for fungus-resistant), are one proposed answer. A 2023 review by Eisenmann and colleagues in Plants reported that such cultivars cut plant-protection treatments by 60 to 90 per cent and applied copper and sulfur by 52 to 79 per cent, and a 2025 European review by Trapp and colleagues gives a consolidated reduction of 50 to 80 per cent in fungicide input. Both stress that this is a large reduction, not elimination.

There are caveats. A strain of downy mildew collected in 2023 from Cilaos on Réunion, a warm and humid island site at about 1,200 metres, overcame three resistance loci at once, showing that resistance can collapse under exactly the conditions a monsoon vineyard imposes. The warm-humid trial evidence comes from highland southern Brazil, at 830 and 1,100 metres, not from hot plains. And as of June 2026, no published Indian field trial of PIWI wine grapes was located. The virulence of Indian downy-mildew populations against these resistance loci has not been characterised.

Root systems matter too. Rootstocks such as 110R and 1103 Paulsen are noted for drought tolerance, with 1103 Paulsen also reported to cope relatively well with salt, while Dogridge is vigorous and is not salt tolerant. These characterisations are supported by general literature; the India-specific trial figures were not located in a primary source.

What is still unknown

No downscaled projection of vineyard suitability exists for Punjab or the Himachal foothill belt to 2050 or 2070. Field evidence for adaptation tools under a combined monsoon and pre-monsoon-heat calendar is essentially absent. The best-validated tool in the literature is dynamic agrivoltaics, which in a six-year trial on Grenache Noir at Piolenc in France delayed ripening by two to five days and harvest by up to seven, and raised acidity at similar sugar. Those are French results, and they may not transfer to a monsoon calendar.

Pal Vineyards is a house rooted in Punjab, and this note is a reading of the public research, not a description of any vineyard. The regional context is in India’s wine regions.

Sources

1. ICAR-NRC Grapes (Pune), climate-zone and double-pruning material; NHB grape guidance. https://nrcgrapes.icar.gov.in/ and https://nhb.gov.in/pdf/fruits/grape/gra005.pdf
2. Pal Vineyards research note, Indian Grapes & Wine Industry (updated 2026-06-11, fact-check update 2026-06-30), on the sub-tropical zone, Perlette, Punjab grape area (medium confidence) and the PAU quality work.
3. Pal Vineyards research note, Climate Change & the Future of Winegrowing (NW India) (updated 2026-09-22), including its computation built on Singh et al., post-AR6 update on observed and projected climate change in India, PLOS Climate. https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000724
4. Rai, A. et al. (2012), “Variations in diurnal temperature range over India: under global warming scenario”, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2011JD016697
5. Department of Science and Technology (India), “Accelerating decline in diurnal temperature range in parts of India over 30 years”. https://dst.gov.in/accelerating-decline-diurnal-temperature-range-parts-india-over-30-years-may-put-agriculture-health
6. Down To Earth, “2025 marked by rising night-time temperatures and extreme rainfall across seasons in India”, reporting India Meteorological Department data. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/2025-marked-by-rising-night-time-temperatures-and-extreme-rainfall-across-seasons-in-india
7. Hannah, L. et al. (2013), “Climate change, wine, and conservation”, PNAS 110(17): 6907-6912. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3637704/
8. van Leeuwen, C. et al. (2024), “Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production”, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 5: 258-275. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00521-5; with Eos, “Climate Change Threatens 70% of Winemaking Regions”. https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-threatens-70-of-winemaking-regions
9. Springer, “Unravelling Climate Change in the Hindu Kush Himalaya: Rapid Warming in the Mountains and Increasing Extremes”. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-92288-1_3
10. Brar, G.S., Gill, M.I.S., Arora, N.K. and Dhaliwal, H.S. (2016), “Fruiting behaviour of table and wine grape varieties under North Indian conditions”, Journal of Applied Horticulture 18(2): 160-163, PAU Ludhiana. https://doi.org/10.37855/jah.2016.v18i02.28
11. Pal Vineyards research note, PIWI & Disease-Resistant Wine Varieties: Hot-Humid Performance & India Import Feasibility (fact-check update June 2026), citing Eisenmann et al. (2023), Plants 12(17): 3120; Trapp et al. (2025) European review; Paineau et al. (2022), Phytopathology 112(11): 2329-2340; and “Response of PIWI grapevine cultivars to downy mildew in highland region of southern Brazil”, European Journal of Plant Pathology (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10658-019-01725-y
12. Pal Vineyards research note, Grapevine Genetics & Breeding, on rootstocks (medium confidence; India-specific trial data not located).
13. IVES Open Science, “Shading grapevines with dynamic agrivoltaics addresses early ripening and wine quality related with climate change” (Piolenc, 2019 to 2024). https://ives-openscience.eu/55101/