What’s more wine-themed than a burgundy bathtub in the centre of your room?

Most of us know what it means to want a vacation from a vacation. So, my agenda for a day-long staycation at Hotel Irada, about two hours from Pune, was not to have that itinerary-filled holiday but to enjoy a relaxing day off. I arrived there carrying the residue of a long year of work, travel, and running on autopilot, looking for a brief reset before the new year begins and my calendar demands attention again. The idea was to remove deadlines, assignments, and other daily stressors and sign up for a solid out-of-office plan.

The newly renovated Hotel Irada is designed to make you feel this way: to slow down, to breathe and to savour the tarty sweetness of the grapes. But this peaceful, vineyard-wrapped manor was once anything but quiet—it used to be Vijay Mallya’s countryside escape near Baramati, a place built for parties, spectacle, and excess.

Today, Irada has some of the wine-fuelled hedonism of its past but it repackages it inside a beautifully done-up hotel where you can have a good time with a good glass of wine in hand but without the hangover. While Maharashtra’s wine tourism is largely centred around Nashik— from The Source at Sula to boutique Airbnbs nestled among smaller vineyards —Irada, set on a 66-acre winery near Baramati in rural Maharashtra, charts a quieter course, one that leads away from the crowd.

Its welcome is engineered for exhaling—a cool towel, a citrusy spritz, and a check-in so smooth, it almost tricks you into thinking you’ve always lived like this. Crossing the courtyard—a lush oasis of palms and shrubs dotted with sit-outs and board games—my attendant, Amy, shows me to my Gallery room, which opens onto a small patio that flows straight back into the shared space. While she’s explaining the where’s-what and the how’s-how of everything, the first thing to catch my attention is the huge burgundy bathtub right in the centre of the room, placed next to a bed that looks like it was made to jump in.

Bedroom bathtubs are a familiar sight across boutique hotels in Europe but remain relatively rare in India, which makes this one feel like an invitation to treat rest as part of the room’s experience rather than something tucked away behind a door.

Next, I’m transfixed by the collage of seven artworks on top of the bed. “It’s sourced from the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen, the world’s largest and most famous flea market,” Amy tells me about the framed finds from Saint-Ouen, a commune just outside Paris. Somehow, in the middle of rural Maharashtra, the team has created a space overlooking the vineyards that looks straight out of an Italian travelogue (though Mallaya is said to be inspired by the mansions of Bordeaux). And I have just 24 hours to make the most of it.

I start where all hotel guests must convene at some point—the stunning pool deck—where I plan how I’ll use every single amenity at the hotel, take a billion pictures (I’m a grid-curating zillennial, after all), and eat and drink my way through the property. My feed is as full as my stomach, but the hotel’s offerings can’t be crammed into a day-long itinerary.

The pool deck is styled with burgundy loungers, burgundy-striped towels and burgundy sun umbrellas

By sunset, I am still debating whether to book a stone grounding therapy at the Nyāsa spa or sign up for a game of padel. That’s when the estate manager, Craig Wedge, previously brand director at Fratelli Wines, joins me, and I tell him how my grand plans of doing everything and nothing have completely fallen apart. “That’s what everyone says when they leave. In the city, our lives are always go-go-go, but the moment you come here—all the space, the fresh air, the wine—your mind finally has room to stretch. People plan to do everything—the padel, the pickleball, the walking trails, the cycles through the vineyards—but end up doing half and still leave completely satisfied.”

As the sun drops below the horizon and a chill began to settle in, I realise he is right—all I want to do is refill my glass with the crisp estate white with notes of lemon and green apple and stare into the pink skies.

Touted as India’s first five-star wine resort, at Irada the wine takes centre stage, not just on the menu but also in the way the property is imagined, built, and experienced. Set on an operational winery, the hotel’s basement hums with the quiet machinery of the harvest, where the grapes are crushed, fermented, and aged into the pours that eventually reach your glass. The wine programme itself is thoughtfully curated, grouped into four terroirs—Forest, Mountain, Ocean, and Orchard—a rethink of the usual reds-and-whites classification that lets guests explore by mood rather than jargon. The list moves fluidly between global favourites from Barossa, Burgundy, Marlborough, and California, and the estate’s own signatures: a crisp Chenin Blanc and a full-bodied Cabernet-Shiraz blend that one can sip on through the day.

The wine here, though, isn’t limited to the glass; it spills into every part of the experience. With guided tours through the winery, tasting experiences, sip-and-paint workshops, seasonal grape-stomping ceremonies, and long-table dinners set on a helipad between the vines, Irada turns wine into something you feel as much as you taste.

Like me, if your aim is to rest and relax, pick a spot at one of the two in-house restaurants. At Irada Pool Club, the poolside all-day restaurant, you can partake in Maharashtrian fusion (misal pav crostini), tandoori (Za’atar paneer tikka), continental (truffle and mushroom croquettes) and pan-Asian (wok-tossed udon noodles). The other restaurant, Rosso, as the name suggests, leans wholly into Italy, serving ingredient-first dishes that instantly make you feel like you’ve wandered into a countryside trattoria. The menu has hand-rolled pastas, Neapolitan-style pizzas, and plates that look deceptively simple but taste so good. I order the Caprese crostini, followed by the chef’s special forest morel tagliatelle with a side of Parmesan and truffle patatas bravas to put me in a mushroom-infused food coma that only a tiramisu can rescue me from.

At Irada—Hindi for ‘intention’—even the design feels just as considered. Each space is shaped to slow you down. Limewashed walls in soft cream tones, warm wood furniture, brushed brass fixtures, and plants tucked into nearly every corner bring a sense of grounding with each step. The rooms follow the same design language; uncluttered, light-filled spaces accented with rust, terracotta, and burgundy prioritise calm over excess. The front desk manager, Sohail, tells me that turning Mallya’s former party pad into this space for R&R wasn’t easy. Kerala-based design studio Humming Tree was commissioned to refurbish the estate into 32 rooms across multiple categories, including Reserve and Gallery Rooms, Vineyard Suites, and a lone Presidential Suite, priced at ₹78,500 per night. Handmade artefacts deepen the sense of intention. In the sunlit lobby, a large Jaipur Rugs tapestry captures life at Irada: the vineyards, the padel courts, the sauna and spa, and even the resident dogs, Lucy and Tiger, who wander across the 66-acre property.

My 24 hours are already over, and the only feats I have achieved are that I’ve (1) downed a whole bottle of the estate red; (2) soaked in the burgundy bathtub; (3) eaten till my stomach gave out; and (4) slept for nine hours straight.

What’s left for another visit (or two) is a spa day, an early morning chinkara spotting, jungle trail walks, an evening at the padel and pickle courts… But that’s the point. Irada is built for your intention, and mine was to treat my city-worn limbs to do nothing.

The next day, as I woke up and made a double-shot espresso on the in-room DeLonghi machine, I was already feeling more relaxed and present than I have been in a while. After a delicious breakfast, on the drive home I didn’t slip into autopilot this time. And maybe that was the Irada after all.

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