How Two Women Are Disrupting the Spirits Industry — And Inspiring the Next Generation

Photo Credit: Chandon

For most of its history, the global wine and spirits industry has been shaped behind closed cellar doors and bar counters by men. From vineyard leadership to distillery floors to the cocktail programs defining nightlife culture, women were often present — but rarely positioned at the center of decision-making. They poured, they served, they smiled. They were there for the atmosphere and absent from the architecture. That landscape, however, has been steadily shifting as a new generation of female leaders pushes into spaces once considered firmly out of reach — not because the industry handed them anything, but because enough women before them refused to leave quietly.

Two of those women are Ana Paula Bartolucci and Inés de los Santos — though their paths to this moment look nothing alike, and that difference is actually the whole story. And we’re here to tell it as International Women’s Month comes to a close.

Bartolucci came up in a winemaking world that, by her own account, had already begun to change by the time she arrived. The battles had been fought. The resistance had been worn down. The women who came before her had done the harder, lonelier work of existing in rooms that didn’t want them there, of being taken seriously through sheer force of talent and refusal to disappear, of leaving doors open behind them that had previously only swung one way. By the time Bartolucci was building her career in the vineyards and cellars of Mendoza, the ground had already been cleared. Not perfectly. Not completely. But enough.

De los Santos is those women.

She started in 1988. The bar world she entered was overwhelmingly, unapologetically male — not in the quiet, institutional way that industries can be male without quite admitting it, but in the explicit, this-is-not-your-space way that required a specific kind of nerve to push back against. She pushed back. For thirty years she built a career and a reputation across Latin America, founding Cochinchina in Buenos Aires and 

in São Paulo, becoming one of the most respected voices in the international bar community, and doing all of it in conditions that the next generation of women entering the industry will largely never have to face — because she and women like her made sure of it. When Bartolucci speaks about the pioneers who made her path possible, she is, without quite saying it, describing the woman sitting across from her.

Which makes what happened next feel less like a collaboration and more like a closing of a loop.

Photo Credit: Chandon

The project began within Chandon, the sparkling wine house founded in 1959 when Champagne visionary Robert-Jean de Vogüé made the then-radical decision to take traditional Champagne expertise beyond France and into vineyards across the globe. Starting in Mendoza, Argentina, the brand eventually expanded to California, Brazil, Australia, China, and India, building a network of wineries united by a shared approach to sparkling wine craftsmanship and a willingness to experiment at the edges of what sparkling wine could be. Within that ecosystem, Bartolucci has become one of the most influential voices in Argentine winemaking — overseeing the delicate balance between vineyard expression and technical precision that defines the best of what the region produces.

But when Chandon began thinking seriously about the spritz — a drink that has moved rapidly from European terrace tradition to global cocktail staple, and that most of the industry has treated accordingly, as something to be bottled quickly and positioned prettily — the winemaking team realized that redefining it would require a perspective the cellar couldn’t provide on its own. You can make a great sparkling wine without ever thinking about how it feels to hold the glass. You cannot make a great spritz that way. For that, you need someone who thinks from the other side of the bar.

Enter de los Santos.

The two had never met before. And when the approach came, the whole project was — as de los Santos describes it — highly confidential. She knew she’d be working with experts. She didn’t know much more than that. There was a leap of faith required before the information arrived to justify it. She took the leap. And then, for four years, the two women (alongside Chandon’s California-based winemaker, Pauline Lhote) worked across disciplines and continents, blending the structure and precision of sparkling winemaking with the instinctive, guest-first logic of cocktail culture — asking not just what the drink could be technically, but how it would actually live in the real world, in glasses held by guests, at tables surrounded by friends, in the kind of unhurried evening that a great spritz is designed to extend.

Four years. For a spritz. That number is worth sitting with, because it tells you exactly what kind of project this actually was — and exactly what kind of women were running it.

The result is a trio of expressions that pull ingredients from across Argentina with an almost unreasonable level of specificity: hibiscus from the tropical north, berries from Patagonia, oranges from a particular organic farm that has worked the land for three decades and only ever organically. Ready to serve — accessible, unpretentious, designed for real life — but built with the same obsessive sourcing standards you’d expect from a serious wine program. The accessibility is the point. The craft is non-negotiable. Both things, simultaneously, without apology.

Beyond the product itself, the collaboration quietly reflects something larger happening across the drinks world. Women have moved steadily into leadership roles across both winemaking and hospitality — industries that, not long ago, made that movement as difficult as possible. The progress is real. It is also incomplete, and everyone in this conversation knows it. Bartolucci is aware that she is standing on ground someone else cleared. De los Santos is aware that she is part of the reason the clearing happened. And both of them are aware that the work of making space — genuinely, sustainably, not just symbolically — falls to the women who have already made it through.

That responsibility is not abstract for either of them. It is specific, and practical, and present in how they talk about their careers, their choices, and what they hope the next generation of women entering this industry will find waiting for them.

In the conversation that follows, Bartolucci and de los Santos discuss the creative process behind the collaboration, the evolution of the spritz as a global drink, what luxury actually means when craft is the throughline, and what it looks like to build a career — and a voice — in an industry that is still, slowly, learning how to share the spotlight.