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The woman who dares to can good wine in Spain

2022-05-11T12:48:27.696Z


Sana Khouja has a business vision that defies oenological tradition: putting noble wines in foil containers. He maintains that comfort is increasingly prioritized and predicts the death of the corkscrew.


Every eight years Sana Khouja (33 years old) has a losing streak.

She noticed her drawing her life line for a school exercise.

Her misfortunes came in droves just like that, every eight years: motorcycle accident, arranged marriage that never came to fruition, lupus diagnosis, father in prison.

In between, times of stability.

She now lives one of those good cycles, that she is getting longer.

She crosses her fingers that the eight-year curse has been broken.

Khouja is the founder and CEO of Zeena, the first Spanish canned wine, an idea based in the United States but not very well seen in Spain.

Zeena only cans “quality Spanish monovarietals”, wines originally designed to follow the oenological liturgy where a can is still a sacrilege.

"The can is the future because the youngest don't know how to open a bottle of wine," she says.

The woman who defies centuries of oenological tradition is the eldest daughter of a Berber family established in the 1990s in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona.

“My father was a piece, he had many problems with alcohol and drugs.

I arrived in Spain when I was two weeks old, in the arms of my mother, who was married at the age of 15.

She did not speak Spanish, my father then had a bar where she would do marathon days in the kitchen, with me in the cart”.

So her early childhood photos of her are of a baby surrounded by smoke and drunks.

"I always knew that he did not have the option to complain because nobody was going to take my chestnuts out of the fire."

Later, two brothers were born, whom she put in a foster home because her father threatened to kill them.

Wine bottled by the company Zeena.

Anna Huix

With scholarships he studied at the La Salle school, at ESADE and at IESE.

“For many years I was ashamed of my origins, I didn't tell anyone that I was from Morocco, that my mother cleaned floors or that my father was a drug addict.

The day she was accepted to study Finance and Accounting she couldn't share her joy.

“My father was drunk.

My mother didn't know what ESADE was”, she shrugs.

Since the age of 18, Khouja has changed flats three or four times a year, traveling the world sharing rooms, meeting people and learning.

She speaks six languages: Berber, Arabic, French, English, Catalan and Spanish.

The idea of ​​canning wine came to him by opening a refrigerator in New York.

“A friend told me: 'Open the fridge and take the wine you want.'

I searched and found nothing.

She insisted: 'You have a white, a rosé and a red'.

I, of course, expected bottles, but there were three cans.

Khouja had worked for five years at the Mas Perinet winery in Tarragona.

Something remained of the wine tradition.

She took a can from her friend's fridge thinking, "That's disgusting!"

She tasted it and it was a very good Californian Grenache.

"She drove me crazy," she recalls.

In May 2020, he founded Mindful Drinkers, owner of the Zeena brand with 10,000 euros that his brother received as compensation for an accident.

He closed his first round of financing of 200,000 euros on the day of the Holy Innocents and ended 2021 with 50,000 cans sold and a turnover of 100,000 euros.

By 2022 she hopes to triple those figures.

70% of their clientele is in Spain, they also sell in Andorra and Japan and in a few months their cans will enter Mexico and Colombia.

After a global pandemic and in the middle of a war, Sana Khouja thinks that now she can only play to fly high.

The curse will have to wait, at least, another eight years.

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Source: elparis

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