Vistamar Brisa Cabernet Sauvignon

THERE was a time when the wine business was almost exclusively male but thankfully those days are long gone.

Women are generally better than men at wine tasting thanks to their more finely tuned senses, and it only makes sense that they would be just as good at the other aspects of the business.

Winemakers are still mostly male but this is changing with many superstar women winemakers in Australia and California and increasingly in Europe and Latin America. I got the chance to chat and taste some wines recently with my first Chilean female winemaker Irene Paiva, the wine director of Vistamar whose wines are newly arrived on the Irish market thanks to the good people at The Vineyard in Galway who distribute them nationwide.