Drenched, restless, uncorked. How wine handles the monsoon.

There is something profoundly annoying about the way the uninitiated romanticise the monsoon. We are constantly served the same syrupy fantasy: a soft blanket, a good book, a glass of something light and floral, and rain tapping politely at the window.

This is charming fiction, if you have never actually lived through a monsoon. Particularly a monsoon in Mumbai, a city that takes its weather personally.

The real thing is less hygge, more atmospheric siege. The sky bruises without warning. The air becomes something you wear rather than breathe. Wet concrete exhales after months of brutal heat, diesel hangs stubbornly above flooded roads, and trains acquire a philosophical relationship with timetables. Ceiling fans work heroically against humidity that has already won. Everything smells faintly of damp newspapers, petrichor, and something frying in the next building. The city does not pause for the rain. It simply becomes wetter and more itself.

This is not weather that calls for cheerful wine. It demands something that understands where you are.

Summer wines spend their lives talking about sunshine. Citrus, fresh herbs - they chatter on with relentless optimism, as though the sun has not disappeared behind a fortnight of charcoal clouds. The monsoon has no interest in such dispositions. It wants to be met.

This is the distinction the season forces upon you. You stop asking what the wine pairs with. You start asking what it knows.

A Nebbiolo knows something. Its stern tannins, its haunting suggestions of tar and dried roses and forest floor are entirely at home against a darkening sky. It is not trying to improve your mood. It merely acknowledges it. There is something oddly comforting about a wine that refuses to flatter you, particularly when the heavens have already decided your laundry will remain indoors for the foreseeable future. Nebbiolo does not console. It simply sits down beside you, which is sometimes the more honest gesture.

Then there is Syrah. Cracked pepper, smoked meat and dark earth, rather than ripe confectionery. It has enough warmth to stand up to the weather without becoming oppressive, enough savoury character to feel like an extension of the storm itself. You do not reach for it because it is cosy. You reach for it because it understands endurance. On a monsoon evening in a city that is half underwater and entirely unbothered by the fact, endurance is the quality you most respect in anything - human, architectural, or fermented.

Then, unexpectedly, there is Riesling - and here the season teaches its most interesting lesson.

A finely balanced off-dry Riesling does not belong to the monsoon because it reminds you of sunlight. It belongs because it offers relief without pretending the discomfort isn't there. Its acidity cuts through thick, sticky air with quiet precision. The electric lift of lime and wet stone does not feel like optimism here. It feels like rescue. Freshness, during a Mumbai monsoon, is not a mood. It is a necessary act. The wine earns its place not by competing with the weather but by giving you somewhere to breathe, briefly, cleanly.

There is a point in a monsoon evening when the thunder begins its performance and the lights flicker with familiar uncertainty. Somewhere outside, a car alarm mistakes lightning for theft. You pour another glass without quite deciding to. You watch the slow legs crawl down the bowl as rivulets race down the window. The storm no longer feels like an interruption. It has become the evening's whole architecture - its rhythm, its low light, its reason for staying put.

This is what the season quietly insists upon: meet it, not resist it. Not finding a wine that distracts you from the rain, but finding one willing to sit inside it with you. The bottle stops being a choice and becomes a companion - something present in the same room as your restlessness, your damp shoes and the particular inwardness of a city that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere during a downpour.

The monsoon is, in this sense, the most honest season for wine. Every other time of year, wine is asked to perform - to celebrate, to mark an occasion. In the monsoon, that performance falls away entirely. You are not curating an experience. You are simply waiting out the rain with something in your hand that seems to understand what waiting feels like.

Other seasons shape what you choose. The monsoon reveals just why you chose it.

The wine does not change. But the drinker does.

Wine should be enjoyed. Drink responsibly.

Disclaimer: All links provided in this column are based on my own research and are not paid or sponsored.

© 2026 Shishir V. Baxi. All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution without permission is prohibited.