Varinder Sahi is the leader at Copia Vineyards and Winery as its Owner and Winemaker. His family history of farming and fascination with engineering drew him to a calling that could encompass all of his deep-rooted passions. He heads all of Copia’s winemaking and viticulture.

Varinder was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in Punjab, a state in northwest India. Agriculture is a big part of the Punjabi community and farming goes back 13+ generations in his family. His formative years were spent in a communal, self-sufficient and agrarian society. He internalized this way of living and it carries through to everything he does.

His undergraduate studies took him to Bangalore, India in the South, for electrical engineering and later across an ocean to Toronto to earn his MBA at York University. As a young engineer, he worked in a corporate environment and that’s where the spark for wine was lit as he enjoyed many a fine meal during work with his team. To Varinder, fermented grape juice started as such a simple idea, but he was beginning to see that there was so much more to it. He sprinted toward more and more wine knowledge as he began to explore different varietals and diverse wine regions in his corporate travels. He fell in love with wine and in those early years, he made a promise to himself that when life’s busy schedule abated, he would take time to make wine.

Studying and earning his winemaking certification from UC Davis sparked the development of a vineyard property with his younger brother in Lodi, California in 2015. Desiring to bring a piece of history to the endeavor, this property was purchased using funds received from the sale of Sahi Family ancestral property in Punjab. Later in the same year, he met his future wife Anita and the two communed on their shared passion for wine. They traveled to Paso Robles Wine Country on an educational tour and one could say that the rest is history in the making. Copia has been a calling that brought Varinder back to his roots: In 2017, Varinder found and purchased what was to be Copia’s Kiler Canyon Estate Vineyard.