The Women in Wine Network

The international Women in Wine Expo brings women from around the world together to collaborate and exchange experiences. Ruma Singh attended the Expo in London this year

- Ruma Singh

Last year, just as the pandemic was waning, I received an invitation to attend the Women in Wine Expo. The all-women’s wine conference was to be held in Georgia — a country long on my bucket list. The visit did not eventually materialize owing to visa issues, so this year when I was invited to the UK edition, I was determined to participate.

What exactly is the Women in Wine Expo? It is a global network that builds a community of women entrepreneurs in the wine sector that comes together in annual conferences, usually held over two to three days in different winemaking countries of the world. In other words, “a boot camp of diversity, discovery, networking, education, fun, sisterhood, business and philanthropy”. The common factor is that the participants are all women from the wine industry from around the world.

The idea of bringing together women entrepreneurs in wine germinated with Turkish-origin journalist and founder, Senay Ozdemir 12 years ago, while she was driving from Austin to Houston Texas looking for hard-to-locate Turkish wine for a dinner party. The idea that Turkish wine was so little represented anywhere set her thinking: here was a country with a history of 7000 years of winemaking with barely any awareness or representation in international wine markets. Shortly thereafter, Senay moved to the Netherlands and started importing top-end Turkish wines into European markets and organizing wine tastings for business events in the Benelux region.