unfinished VIP tasting room at Fess Parker. Not to mention tasting many, many wines.We visited about ten wineries and in our free time, a few wine shops. There were two things that stood out to me about the experience. One, we heard a lot about biodynamics which as has always seemed like new age, shamanism, hoodoo, but I'll write more about that in another post. The second thing was that during our entire tour of Santa Barbara, I only met one woman who worked in production. I'd also been interviewing for several jobs during this time and only heard about a female winemaker as well.
Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. The students on the trip were almost evenly split between women and men, most of the top students are women and eleven of the twenty-nine graduate of 2008 are women. When a married couple became co-presidents of the student run tasting Enology Society this year, Kathe made it a point to invite women winemakers to speak when she realized that the previous year all the speakers had been men.
Needless to say, I found it very encouraging to finally meet a woman in production, so after the winery tour and lecture, I went up to Denise Shurtleff to thank her. She has been in production for 25 years, and she told me an interesting anecdote. She had attended a wine event and when she told someone she worked at Cambria Winery, they asked her how she enjoyed working in the tasting room.
She said it happened to her all the time.
She also graciously offered her assistance if I needed anything in the future. Women helping women ensures that the wine industry will be more diverse in the coming years. There are new organizations like Women for Wine Sense popping up that bode for well for the future of women in wine as well.
