Breaking the Grape Ceiling

(TheDailyBeast) - Half of the graduates at UC-Davis’ oenology program are female. So why do women lead only 10 percent of California’s wineries? Adrienne Vogt investigates the history and present-day culture of Sonoma's old-boys’ club.

As autumn falls upon us, America’s vintners are busy finishing up their harvests and getting ready for crowds to visit their wineries, taste their wines, and buy their products. But when you look at a bottle of California Chardonnay or Oregon Pinot—or better yet, when you swirl and sniff its contents—do you ever wonder about the winemaker who poured his (or her) heart and soul into the glass?

“It’d be really interesting to do a tasting to see if you could tell the difference between wine made by a man and wine made by a woman,” says Megan Schofield, winemaker at Simi Winery in California's prestigious Sonoma County.

Even though winemaking has traditionally been dominated by men—both in the States and abroad—women in the U.S. have made important strides to catch up to their male counterparts in terms of creating complex wines that connoisseurs love. Still, a gender gap remains. The enrollment ratio at the University of California-Davis viniculture and enology program has been about 45 percent female and 55 percent male for the last 10 years, according to graduate program adviser Judy L. Blevins. Yet only about 10 percent of California wineries have women as their lead winemakers.

“There definitely is an old-boys culture in a lot of places, a kind of old-boys club,” Schofield says.

Wide-ranging comparisons between female and male winemakers in the U.S. are hard to come by. The 10 percent number comes from 2011 research by Lucia Albino Gilbert, a psychology professor at Santa Clara University. Out of California’s more than 3,200 wineries, Albino Gilbert said she expected the number to be closer to 15-20 percent. Yet even though she's just finished updating her database of California wineries on her website Women Winemakers of California, the female percentage has remained level has remained stubbornly low.