Hyderabad Wine Society has been quietly revolutionizing the world of wines in Hyderabad since its inception in October 2017. What started off as a group of 20 odd people who first met to learn about wines is now an 800 plus active group. The group founded by Suryaveer Singh seeks to promote wine knowledge and culture in the city of Nawabs. Suryaveer Singh has previously worked with Four Seasons hotels in Beverly Hills and Bali, Indonesia in the capacity of a wine sommelier. He currently runs a hotel management company by the name of Trance Hotels and the wine society was started as a pure passion project. We started our first step with the help of Mr. Mohanchandran, GM of Taj Krishna, who hosted our first event. At first, we had no idea what we wanted the group to manifest, The idea was to just teach about wine and help educate people on how to drink and enjoy wine. A wine society in the city is a sign of the city growing culturally since all other Indian metros have multiple wine societies and events celebrating good food and vino.
Along the way, Vishal Fernandes, who is one of Hyderabad’s top Travel and lifestyle blogger, joined as a co-admin in order to handle logistics and marketing of the event. Our focus at first was plain and simple- spread the word of what we do, get more bums on seats but never at the cost of quality. All of our dinners have been held at five star and top establishments of the city who have an impressive wine list and have an impressive kitchen brigade which can do justice to our wines. All hotels and restaurants have been very helpful with providing these dinners with no focus on profit-making- all our dinners are done at cost price which probably is the reason why our dinners are priced low. Ideally, a 5-course gourmet dinner paired with wine and education could be priced at 9,000 rupees and above, however, all our partners are very well aware that growing this community and making wine cool will help evolve the Hyderabadi diner beyond biryani and chai.
Overall we have seen a great increase in our attendance with multiple sold-out events and we have recently completed our one year anniversary at the esteemed Taj Falaknuma Palace on November 3rd, 2018. Moving forward we project to see a strong growth in interest which will inevitably increase the wine portfolio in the city. People just need to know and explore how awesome wine can be. On the surface, wine seems complicated to the masses and thus people don’t know what to look for and what to pair with their dinner. In the pursuit of educating everyone Suryaveer has also started the group’s very own Youtube Channel called- Wine Made Easy TV– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY5prHaL-Dg&t=
We have some exciting events coming up in 2019 and both Suryaveer and Vishal Fernandes are ready to transform the way Hyderabadi’s perceive wine.