A Guide to Top Women Winemakers, Still Rare in the World of Grapes

by Elin McCoy, 7/1/20

A few days before the pandemic lockdown began in New York, I’m at Balthazar restaurant, sipping wines and dishing gossip with a group of female winemakers from Bordeaux.

“My grandmother was not allowed into the cellar at our estate,” says Sylvie Courselle, who runs Château Thieuley with her sister Marie. “My father wept that he had no son to succeed him in making wine. We finally convinced him we, his daughters, could.” She rolls her eyes.

Historically, such places as Bordeaux, Chianti, Margaret River, and Napa were male bastions, where, with few exceptions, men owned the wineries, worked the vineyards, ruled the cellars, and sold the bottles.

In the 19th century and through most of the 20th, the death of a spouse was the way women could take over family wine companies. Trailblazing widows in Champagne such as Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin (Veuve Clicquot) and Lily Bollinger were wildly successful, revolutionizing the wines and making the region famous.

In the 21st century, some things have changed, but some have not. For sure, ambitious women today have taken on top roles with gusto, which means there are plenty of their great wines to celebrate this summer’s 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in the U.S. But despite progress, the wine industry is still reckoning with gender inequality.

According to the recently published book Women Winemakers, by Lucia Albino Gilbert and John C. Gilbert, two emeritus professors at Santa Clara University, only 10% of California’s more than 4,000 wineries have female head winemakers, and women own only 4% of them. Yes, men were the ones attending the University of California at Davis’s viticulture and enology program until the first woman graduated from it in 1965. But by the 1990s, women made up half of all undergraduates. Today, women account for 45% of the 2020 graduating class at the Institut des Sciences de la Vignes et du Vin at Bordeaux University.