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 Rupali Bhatnagar is arguably India’s best sparkling winemaker today with more than 8 years experience crafting Sula’s traditional method sparklers, Sula Brut and Sula Rose Brut. Over the past few years Rupali has been instrumental in vastly increasing the quality and sophistication of these wines, which have set the benchmark which all Indian sparkling wines would be judged against.
Those are the words of Rajeev Samant, founder CEO of Sula Vineyards.
Rupali has obviously come a long way after getting Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology in 2006 from the University of Mumbai. She works as Deputy General Manager & Senior Winemaker Sparkling wines at Sula Vineyards, handling the entire Sparkling wine production at Sula, now touching around 60,000 cases a year.
During the 8 years, she has handled other portfolios of supervising lab analysis, production planning, monitoring wine stability, quality control and rejection handling. She has also been an active chairperson on the safety committee and part of the welfare committee for women employees at Sula. She has hands on experience in handling all issues starting from grapes to the bottled wine.
She started her career with Sula as a Lab-technician in 2006 and learnt the nitty-gritty of lab wine analysis, giving inputs to the microbiological analysis of various contaminants in wine and developed with the help of the Winemaker several Standard Protocols for isolation of wine micro-organisms.
Thanks to her hard work, she was promoted twice as Assistant Oenologist and Assistant Winemaker in 2 consecutive years. She handled many cellar functions including working on blending, filtration and stabilization of red and white wines. She also worked extensively on tirage bottling of sparkling wines. Owing to the hard work in this area she was promoted as an Associate Winemaker in Sparkling Wines and was given the entire charge of sparkling wines in 2010 when she worked on the “Methode Traditionelle” for sparkling wine production of Brut and Brut Rose besides working on an Asti-Spumante style white wine.
She was promoted as “Winemaker – Sparkling wines” in 2012 and was awarded as the “Best Employee” for the first Quarter of 2012. During this time, she worked on many trials with different varieties to bring up the quality of the Brut as well as the Brut Rose. This involved use of traditional Champagne and Cremánt varieties of Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc and Pinot Noir besides non-traditional varieties like Shiraz, Viognier, Riesling and Zinfandel. She was also instrumental in working with different types of dosage including barrel aged wines for making the liqueur d’expedition. A lot of work also went in improving the quality of the Sparkling Rose which has won many awards.
Rupali has travelled several times to Champagne to learn more about the sparkling wine process. She is very motivated and seems to be enjoying her work to the fullest. She is now working with different yeast strains. What is her objective during the next 3-5 years? ‘I believe my goal is to express my ideas through my work in Sparkling wines and with the many developments that are possible in this wonderful field of winemaking,’ she tells delWine.
Rupali breaks the myth that women cannot be good winemakers. She is a role model for young women who want to enter the wine industry and make winemaking as a career. We welcome Rupali Bhatnagar, DGM and Senior Winemaker Sparkling wines at Sula Vineyards as a new entrant.
Subhash Arora
WOW is a biennial feature of Indian Wine Academy and delWine, constantly on the search for women who are actively involved and currently focusing on about 95 of them pan India. The entrant to our Hall of Fame must have continuously been engaged in the industry for at least 5 years and will continue to be in the profession during the next three years at least. They ought to be ordinarily residents of India. Preference is given to those who are directly in production, followed by marketers, educations, sommeliers and journalists excluding PR specialists. We do not current rate or rank them due to non homogeneity. The names in the list will be released in a random fashion in this column; the final list will be in alphabetical order. Any suggestions are always welcome at arora@delwine.com-editor
For earlier article click WOW: Top Ten Women of Wine in India 2013 |