|
 A veteran of the Indian magazine industry, Reva K. Singh is the editor and publisher of Sommelier India Wine Magazine, India’s first print publication dedicated to wine and the culture surrounding it, with an online version as well.
Prior to publishing the magazine, Reva edited The Oberoi Group Magazine for six years, raising it to a level of excellence comparable to the best international hotel magazines. She has led or been on the editorial team of several high profile publications in India and abroad over her 30-year publishing career.
Reva has also made a formidable reputation for herself in the Indian wine industry. In 2009 she organized the Sommelier India Wine Competition (SIWC) for Indian wines, of which she was co-chairperson with Steven Spurrier. She served on the international jury of the Santiago Cata d’Or Wine Awards, a prominent wine and spirits competition in Chile. She was invited in 2013 to join an international panel of judges for the Michelangelo International Wine Competition in Cape Town, South Africa.
Reva was born in Delhi but grew up in Shimla where she spent eleven years at Tara Hall, an elite boarding school for girls run by Irish Catholic nuns. She attained her Bachelor and Master of Arts in English Honours from Miranda House, University of Delhi, and subsequently capped her experience as a journalist by attending the Radcliffe Publishing Course and receiving a certificate in The Business of Publishing from Harvard University.
 She grew up drinking Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry and Cockburn’s port. Spirits were a male bastion and not considered appropriate for women. Married to an international banker meant that her early exposure to the wine lifestyle developed further as she discovered French wines.
About Sommelier India she says, ‘when I took the decision to launch the magazine, there was no wine periodical in India and few people knew anything about wine. Liquor was the drink of choice in many homes but hardly any wine was drunk when I got married. Foreign wines were almost non-existent and very little decent wine was being produced in India then.’
As it turned out the timing was right and it was a savvy publishing decision. Featured in The Limca Book of Records as India’s only wine magazine, it was a slender publication because she didn’t want to lose her reader by racing ahead. ‘In step with our publishing mission of demystifying wine and fostering the wine drinking culture in India, we have grown in step with our readers’ interest,’ she says. Reva has not succumbed to the lure of adding spirits in her magazine, which would make better commercial sense and it continues to be the only wine dedicated print magazine in India.
This summer she is pursuing a deep immersion course in Provence, called Extreme Wine. This intense course is described as a luxury boot camp. But she is also anxious about having a succession plan in place and handing over the management to a younger generation with more time and energy, while devoting herself to reading and writing about wine and sharing the pleasure with others.
Sommelier India is a well established print wine magazine with a consumer bias that keeps the subscribers well-informed about the Indian wine industry and the world of wine, thanks to the dedicated efforts of women like Reva Singh whom we are glad to welcome again for the second edition of WOW 2015-Top Ten Women of Wine in India.
Subhash Arora
Earlier articles
WOW 2015: Rojita Tiwari-Journalist and Consultant
WOW 2015: Sonal Holland from ITC Hotels
WOW 2015: Karishma Grover-Winemaker at GroverZ
WOW 2015: Rupali Bhatnagar-Winemaker at Sula |