Meet Neeta Mittal

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Neeta Mittal a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Neeta, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

My purpose has always been the same: to design how culture is felt, not just seen.
It just took me a while to recognize it.

It began with dance — where I learned that movement could hold emotion, that rhythm could tell a story without language.
Then came film, where I tried to capture that same emotion in light and frame. But even then, something was missing — I wanted people not just to see beauty, but to feel it.

That instinct led me to wine, a new language for storytelling — place, memory, and craft expressed through the senses. When I began pairing wine with spice, it all clicked: this was culture in its most tangible form — texture, scent, warmth.

That same philosophy guided my work with people who had lost their sense of taste after cancer treatment. Through spice and scent, we built bridges back to one of life’s simplest joys — the ability to taste.

The mediums have changed — from movement, to image, to taste — but the purpose has always played the same quiet note underneath: translating culture into sensation, helping people feel the world again.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m the co-founder and winemaker at LXV Wine in Paso Robles — a house built on the idea that wine can be a form of cultural design.

At LXV, every wine is paired with a spice blend — not for novelty, but to remind us that taste is memory, place, and story meeting on the palate.

What began as an experiment in sensory storytelling has become a quiet movement. Chefs use it in their kitchens. Educators in their tastings. Even cancer patients in sensory-rehabilitation experiments. The goal is simple and radical at once: to make people feel again.

That philosophy now extends through Maison Mittal, our Bordeaux-inspired label exploring reverence — for land, for craft, for culture — and through The Perfumed Garden, a tasting kit that carries our experience into homes across the country.

At its core, LXV is a question: What if tasting could teach us to see the world differently?
That’s what keeps me creating — designing not just wines, but ways of feeling culture.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I’ve always lived between worlds. I’m a classically trained Indian Kathak dancer and a materials science engineer — logic and rhythm have always coexisted in me. Later, when I began making films, those two languages merged: precision met emotion, structure met story.

Wine became the next evolution of that conversation. It allowed me to design experiences that let a wine tell its story — through texture, scent, and time. And when I began bringing in my Indian roots — the spices, the philosophy of the senses — it felt like everything I’d learned finally belonged in the same frame.

Curiosity is what let me keep crossing boundaries — from science to dance to film to vineyards — always asking, what else could this become? My advice: treat curiosity not as a phase, but as a practice.

Translation became my real art — turning ideas from one world into experiences that another could feel. Innovation usually begins in that act of translation.

And resilience — the quiet kind — is what made reinvention possible. Every chapter began with something ending, and I learned to trust that rhythm.

Because the truth is, I’ve never really switched paths — I’ve just kept finding new ways to tell the same story.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I’m always drawn to collaborators who see culture as something we design — not just inherit.

That could mean a chef exploring flavor as storytelling, a neuroscientist studying how the senses hold memory, or a filmmaker translating terroir into light and sound. I’m interested in the edges where disciplines blur — where art, science, and emotion overlap to create new ways of feeling.

At LXV and Maison Mittal, we’re already in conversation with artists, researchers, and creators who share that curiosity. If someone reading this feels that same pull — toward the sensory, the thoughtful, the cross-cultural — I’d love to keep the conversation going.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

theBrandFoto
Maxime Messaoudene @ Foudre Productions

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