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Book Review: Women on the river of life: A fifty-year study of adult development

I have often admired authors for the product of their labors. But with Women Winemakers, I also envy the research process that produced this book—a decade of talking with women winemakers around the world, often while sharing a glass of good wine! The Gilberts interviewed dozens of highly accomplished women in the wine industry, beginning in California and then expanding their coverage to France, Italy, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand. Their coverage is chronological, geographical, and also thematic, the latter presented in terms of four somewhat distinct pathways that women took in developing their careers (e.g., family traditions, formal university programs). The women described numerous obstacles on their career paths, many of which have been reported in other work areas, from professional fields like law and medicine to the steel mills of the Midwest and the coal mines of West Virginia. Norms and traditions that safeguard those fields for men (primarily White men) have been pervasive in the wine industry, sometimes supported by legal structures (e.g., Italian inheritance laws that precluded daughters taking ownership of a family vineyard). Other obstacles were created not by laws but by stereotypic beliefs. In the wine industry, these beliefs often focused on specific job requirements; for example, that work in the cellars, often considered a prerequisite to being a head winemaker, is too physically demanding and that the more removed locale of the lab is more gender-appropriate. Unique to the wine industry was a belief that women’s menstrual blood would contaminate the wine process, presumably justifying the exclusion of women from the cellar. As women’s stories illustrate, positive counterforces emerged to make women’s progress possible. In terms of the California wine industry, the enology program at the University of California at Davis has been a major player. In particular, the authors single out Ann Noble, a prolific researcher and influential mentor who taught in the program from 1974 to 2003. Through her and subsequently her students, women winemakers (especially in northern California) were able to find positions in the wine industry and create female networks that continue to benefit succeeding generations. Unquestionably, the strengthening of women’s movement during the last decades of the 20th century, with its challenges to implicit gender assumptions, also helped to break open the long-standing dams of resistance to women in the wine industry. Have women made progress? Clearly so. Have they fully established their place in the wine industry? Not yet. Hannah Weinberger, the first woman known to have been head of a California winery, assumed that position in 1882 on the death of her husband. Nearly a century passed until Mary Ann Graf became head winemaker at Simi in 1973. Now it is estimated that 10% of head winemakers in California are women, with parity a goal yet to be achieved. (Predictably, the road to equal representation is far longer for non-White aspirants). The authors’ stated goal was “to make lead women winemakers more visible.” They have done that and more. In this relatively slim volume (164 pages of text), the authors not only recount personal odysseys but also provide valuable reference material and documentation: a list of all the women winemakers that they interviewed, biographic profiles of the women in California who first pushed open doors between 1965 and 1984, maps of wine regions that the authors visited in their research, a list of their interview questions, and a glossary of wine terms. Together, these materials will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in winemaking and the women who have helped to develop the industry. A toast to the authors from the oenophiles of the world!