Her grapes and path

Shalini Sekhar ’01 exchanged her piccolo for pinot

Words by Jason Wilson

Shalini Sekhar '01 at Ricci Vineyard in Sonoma, California

For acclaimed winemaker Shalini Sekhar, the autumn harvest in California wine country is a busy time of year. When the grapes arrive into the cellar, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort to sort and press the fruit, to keep a watchful eye on the fermenting juice, and then to send the finished product into the barrel. For Sekhar, recently named a winemaker to watch by the San Francisco Chronicle, wine is a passion that has become all-consuming.

First “bitten by the wine bug” as an undergrad at TCNJ, Sekhar would save her spending money and splurge on nicer glasses of wine at local restaurants. “I was learning and really getting into wine,” she says. But a career in that world wasn’t on her radar yet. “It was a bit of a circuitous route,” she says. “An Indian American woman from New Jersey is not who you picture when you hear ‘winemaker.’”

A music major at TCNJ, she played the piccolo in classical ensembles and continued on to New York University for a master’s degree in music performance. She taught music at Princeton Day School and Mercer County Community College, married her high school sweetheart, and settled into “living in the ’burbs.”

It was a special bottle on her first wedding anniversary, a 1995 Château La Nerthe Chateauneuf-du-Pape, that changed her trajectory. “That bottle was the ‘aha’ wine moment for me.” It was then, she says, that wine turned from something that was nice to have at a meal to something she started thinking deeply about and had to know more.

Around the same time, her husband was offered a job on the West Coast, and the couple moved to San Francisco. Sekhar had a hard time finding work teaching music in California and auditioned, unsuccessfully, for a spot in a symphony. “There are like 50 piccolo jobs in the world to be had,” she says. “The odds are poor, regardless of skill level.”

Channeling her love of wine, Sekhar instead took a part-time job in a tasting room at Rosenblum Cellars in Alameda. She was quickly promoted to tasting room manager, but, about two years in, decided she wanted to make wine. She left her office job and became an hourly harvest intern at Rosenblum.

“The harvest is totally grunt labor,” she says. For years, she worked 14-hour days, seven days a week, for months without a break. She walked up and down steep slopes in the vineyard and sorted grape clusters by hand. She lifted 60-gallon barrels onto racks. She climbed into open-top tanks to shovel out skins and pulp from the fermenting juice of the grapes.

“And I loved it,” she says. 

A self-proclaimed nerd who likes to study, she enrolled along the way in the viticulture and enology program at Fresno State University to learn the science of growing grapes and making wine. Then it was on to what would be a years-long apprenticeship in winemaking. “After you finish school, you think you’re qualified to be a winemaker, but you’re not,” she says. “You get to be a harvest intern again and again and again.”

She worked harvests and in the cellars of well-known wineries such as Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and Williams Selyem, gaining expertise in working with pinot noir, a popular dry, red, fruity wine. She soon earned the title of winemaker — the person who makes all the decisions, from when to pick to what yeasts to use to the analysis of grape chemistry, to name a few.

She focused her winemaking on three clients: Neely, an estate in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Waits-Mast Family Cellars in Mendocino County, and Xander Soren Wines in Santa Rita Hills. In 2015, Sekhar won winemaker of the year at the San Francisco International Wine Competition.

Not long after the acclaim, Sekhar had the opportunity to start her own wine label, Ottavino. Her first vintage came out in 2020. The label’s name calls back to her early musical passions — ottavino means “little octave” and is how the piccolo is notated on a musical score in Italian.

With Ottavino, Sekhar began by making different wines from the pinot noir she had previously been known for. Ottavino focuses on relatively obscure Austrian grape varieties — grüner veltliner and St. Laurent — grown in northern California. “That’s the fun part,” she says. “Opening people’s eyes to something else out there.”

Photos: Peter Prato