Like India’s wines themselves, the tourist experience in the country’s winemaking capital is a work in progress. No one would mistake Nashik for California’s Napa Valley, with its Michelin-starred restaurants and pricey mud baths. Nor is it anything like Italy’s Tuscany, where medieval towns, farmhouse inns and family wineries are scattered across the region. Yet Nashik’s lack of a tourist-industrial complex is part of its charm. During our three-day excursion, we tasted wines with the people who made them, explored caves full of ancient Buddhist carvings and ate a lovely lunch while gazing across grapevines to a sun-dappled lake. We even found some delightful wines.

Another bonus: There were hardly any other tourists. Even among Indians, the Nashik area is best known for its onions and table grapes, farmer activism,and its many temples, including Trimbakeshwar, where a major Hindu festival, the Kumbh Mela, is held once every 12 years.

Nobody even produces a decent map of the Nashik’s three dozen wineries, forcing visitors to rely on word-of-mouth or well-phrased Google searches. The tourism body of Maharashtra, the state where Nashik is located, is so apathetic that it erroneously refers to the wineries as “breweries” in a brief mention on its website. The biggest hotel in the area, the Gateway, is owned by the luxury Taj chain but has all the charm of a roadside Holiday Inn.

“India is very good at hospitality,” said Sonal Holland, a Mumbai wine entrepreneur and educator who runs India’s premier tasting event, the India Wine Awards. “It’s a real shame that the industry has failed to take advantage of this massive opportunity that wine tourism can unlock.”

My wife and I had been itching to check out Nashik ever since we moved to Mumbai from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017. We both love wine, and it has been part of some of the most important moments in our lives: I proposed to her during a birthday trip to Napa, and we were married at a winery in Brooklyn, N.Y.