Ragini Parmar was fortunate to retire early from a thriving tech career on the West Coast. But after moving back home to the Main Line, she was hungry for a new mission. Waiting for her “eureka” moment, she sat down to brainstorm and poured herself a glass of natural wine.
“When I moved back from the West Coast, I noticed that [natural wine] did not exist here in this area,” Parmar says. “When you talk about natural wines, people assume that means organic. They’re actually very different sectors… I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and I thought there was a great opportunity to bring that to the community.”
Set to open in Wayne in the summer of 2025, Nature’s Vin is a wine bar and boutique shop that focuses on natural, biodynamic and organic wines made by women worldwide. Beyond typical wine bar fare, Parmar aims for the venue to be an education hub and tasting room for locals to explore natural wines.
While natural and organic wines both prioritize minimal intervention and sustainable practices, natural wines go a step further and require that nothing be added to or removed from the product. Meanwhile, biodynamic wines typically feature a holistic approach to the growing and harvesting of the grapes.
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Though Parmar is a natural wine enthusiast, she knew she had to make a compromise in order to emphasize the women-made aspect of Nature’s Vin. The industry is dominated both by men and by commercialized wines, so exploring the niche market of women-made natural wines proved a daunting task.
“I had to pick: do I want to focus only on natural wine or do I want to focus on women?” Parmar says. “And I chose women because it was the better choice. And from there I expanded to [include] biodynamic and organic.”
From that point, Parmar was ready to curate her collection. She went the extra mile while searching for wines, touring several female-owned vineyards in Italy last year. Despite the language barrier, she found a welcoming community of women—and even helped make the wine herself.
After two and a half weeks of stomping grapes in the Italian countryside, Parmar gained a new appreciation for the effort that goes into the natural, biodynamic and organic wine processes. On top of that, she says that meeting and working with the winemakers has further motivated her to foster community through wine, both globally and locally on the Main Line.
“The thing about the wine industry is that a lot of the stories are passed down by oral tradition,” Parmar says. “I didn’t want to rely on secondhand stories. I wanted to meet these women for myself so that when I brought their stories back here and I’m sharing the wines with the people in our community… [I can share them] authentically.”
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This isn’t Parmar’s first rodeo in empowering and connecting with other women. Her career in the tech industry, which she built from “nothing but determination,” focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“Even though the progress [in DEI initiatives] took a long time, just moving the needle forward was very impactful work,” Parmar says. “[It was impactful] not just for the entire tech industry, but for me because of my own personal and professional experience as a woman of color.”
Although she loved the work, she was ready to help women more directly after her early retirement. Parmar was inspired to combine her skills with her passion for wine after the pandemic caused a nationwide shift toward mass resignation.
“During COVID, there was this whole kind of ‘Great Resignation’ movement,” Parmar says. “And people were really trying to figure out how else they could change their career but use their transferable skill set. When I was brainstorming, I was literally drinking [wine] and thinking, ‘I know how to work in the DEI space, and I love wine. So how do I pair this all together?’”
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With DEI a hot topic presently, Parmar says that her expectations for Nature’s Vin haven’t shifted and that her motivation to create a local space by and for women has only increased.
“I want it to be a very special place for women in the community,” Parmar says. “My expectations have never been changed. I wanted to empower women and have a place for women to come together. That has never changed, and it’s never going to change.”
After several years of conceptualizing and planning, Parmar’s brainchild is nearly finished. She is grateful for her community in Radnor Township, which has shown immediate support for the upcoming business. As for her own future, Parmar has no doubts that Nature’s Vin is the path she was destined to follow.
“I never think about, like, ‘do I think I’d be doing something else?’” she says. “For me, it just feels very kismet, like this is where I’m supposed to be.”
Nature’s Vin
Wayne (coming soon)
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