According to a study by Santa Clara University, as of March 2021, only 14% of California’s 4,200-plus bonded wineries have a woman as their lead winemaker. This represents only a modest increase from 2011 when that figure was only 10%.
Today there’s more attention than ever on diverse voices in the wine industry. These South Bay and Bay Area winemakers come from backgrounds as varied as the wines they craft. None started with a fortune. Financing and distribution obstacles, the glass ceiling and racial bias still exist. Nonetheless, they are adding to the conversation in our local wine communities, serving as role models, and their wines and voices are worth seeking out.
An unlikely winemaker in many ways, Shalini Sekhar grew up in New Jersey with a love of music. Her proficiency on the piccolo led her to pursue an advanced degree in performance. On moving to California, she intended to continue her music career, but discovered a passion for wine. She stepped into the field by working harvests, and then she began making wine.
Sekhar honed her skills at Williams Selyem in Sonoma, and crafted wine for custom clients like Waits-Mast Family Cellars. As the maker of Furthermore Pinot Noir at Roar Wines in San Francisco, she developed a passion for that grape along with an interest in minimal-intervention winemaking. Since 2015, she’s been the head winemaker for Neely Vineyards at Spring Hill Vineyard in Portola Valley, where she makes wines from the Neely family’s organically farmed fruit.
With family roots in India, Sekhar has encountered racism along her path through winemaking, experiencing different treatment from customers and feeling excluded from the club. Until recently, she didn’t see faces that looked like hers. Yet, inside Bay Area wineries, she’s found support in an industry that appeals to a naturally diverse consumer base. “By showing different backgrounds races, and experiences in the way we appeal to customers,” she says, “we show that the world of wine is for everyone, not just an elite few.”
She also feels Latinx field and winery workers tend to get overlooked. Sekhar makes efforts at Neely to offer her crew growth and learning opportunities, providing mentoring to women just getting started in the industry.
It may be tempting to call Megan Bell a natural winemaker, but she prefers the term “low interventionist.” Her definition requires sourcing organically farmed grapes, using native yeast fermentations, including no winemaking additives, and never filtering.
After early stints in Oregon and Napa, Bell landed in the Santa Cruz Mountains region. She launched her Margins label in 2016 while making wine at Beauregard Vineyards, and now continues her work at a facility shared with other natural winemakers.
For Bell, making wine on the margins means using lesser-known varieties from lesser-known vineyards, such as the Cabernet Franc from the Santa Cruz Mountains, Chenin Blanc and Muscat Blanc from Contra Costa County, or Mourvèdre and Counoise sourced from Santa Clara Valley.
She feels there’s still a long way to go when it comes to diversity in her Santa Cruz Mountains locale, and says access and opportunity are key. The Black Lives Matter movement drove home how important it is for business owners to help make opportunities for people in disadvantaged communities.
“A good first step would be to begin filling positions that include more responsibilities, and therefore increased salaries, with people besides white men,” she says.
Wachira’s family immigrated to the United States in 1998 seeking better opportunities and education. Growing up in Kenya, Wachira says everybody looked like her, talked like her, had hair like hers. However, it wasn’t until she came to the U.S. that she learned she was a Black woman.
“I had all the disparities ascribed to me just because of my race. That was new to me,” she says.
Wachira notes that many BIPOC would-be winemakers experience challenges with access to capital and options for distribution. Since she succeeded in raising her own money and becoming her own distributor, Wachira realized she could help other BIPOC makers, which led her to open the Karibu Wine Lounge by Wachira in Alameda.
“I am a strong believer in, ‘If they do not invite you to their table, create your own,’” Wachira says.
Wine isn’t just made from grapes. All manner of fruits, plus rice and honey, have long been made into wines, so, why not flowers? That’s what biologist and herbalist Aaliyah Nitoto thought as she learned about wines made with flowers in ancient Chinese, Greek and Roman cultures. Sourcing local, organic flowers such as lavender and rose, Nitoto developed her craft and launched Free Range Flower Winery in 2018 with a lavender sparkling wine. Today, marigold, rose petal and rose-hibiscus wines, all with striking floral labels, come out of her urban Oakland winery.
Navigating the grape-based wine world hasn’t been easy for Nitoto. Finding a custom crush partner ended up in sexual advances. Deals were dropped at the last minute for no apparent reason. “When Black representation in the industry is something like a fraction of 1%, that’s not diversity,” Nitoto says. “We’ve had to deal with sexism, racism, even grape supremacy, if you can believe that.”
She found resistance at local bottle shops and wine bars whose owners professed to be progressive and small-business supporters yet were anything but. Nitoto persevered, and now her flower wines are headed for the online behemoth Total Wine & More.
Nitoto sees change coming about in the wake of Black Lives Matter. To address the lack of diversity, she envisions hiring and mentoring more BIPOC and women who want to work in wine.
“There seem to be more and more wine lovers looking to actively support Black-owned wineries and Black-owned businesses in general,” she says. “I hope the majority of people in this country understand the value of diversity, and hopefully they will show up for us in the wine industry.”
Thèrése Martin embodies the marriage of wine, food and love. She and husband, Dan, own Martin Ranch Vineyards in Gilroy, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Martin makes her wines (Pinot Noir, Syrah) for the Thèrése Vineyards label; Dan crafts wine (Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon) under the J.D. Hurley label, and together they create Soulmate (Nebbiolo, Chardonnay).
When they launched Martin Ranch in 2002, Martin joined Pamela Storrs of Storrs Winery and trailblazer Kathryn Kennedy, who launched her eponymous label in the early 1970s, as the region’s female winemakers. Now, more than a half dozen women have joined that list.
“There is a validation that women in the wine industry are very strong and positive and making a strong contribution,” Martin says.
She’s also a healthy-lifestyle advocate, and incorporates that into the winery’s culture. An avid gardener and plant-based chef, Martin hosts minute-long Wellness Wednesday videos from her kitchen and garden. “By putting in the garden, sharing what we do in the garden and how we eat and how wine is a part of that, people are more receptive to the honesty and authenticity of that,” she says. “They see you are just normal people sharing a privilege.”
There was no wine in Rosa Fierro’s blue-collar upbringing. Her heritage is Spanish and Mexican, and she grew up in New Mexico, later moving with her family to San Lorenzo. While working as a young legal assistant, this avid photographer took portraits on the side.
Fierro was assisting a friend at a Livermore Valley winery tasting room when the owner, who noticed Fierro had a good palate, invited her to blend wine with him. She launched her own label, starting with Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Zinfandel grapes purchased from Livermore Valley vineyards and processing them at local custom-crush facilities.
Her photographer’s eye remained active as Fierro discovered an interesting subject in the sediment left at the bottoms of just-emptied wine fermentation tanks. Those photos, with their bold colors and unique patterns, grace the labels of her Rosa Fierro Cellars wines.
In 2020, Fierro moved into her own tasting room and winery, a shared space with Livermore’s Favalora Vineyards. As one of a very few sole-female wine proprietors in the valley, she also takes pride in her small, all-female crew, though she didn’t plan it that way.
“I look for inspiration as a woman from other women,” says Fierro, who also launched a local women’s winemaker group.
Instead of numbering her wine tanks, Fierro has named them for strong women, so on a walk through the winery, you’ll meet up with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Maya Angelou, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Jane Goodall.
“In my head, it gives strength to the wine,” Fierro says.
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