womenwinemakers.com

A new website, womenwinemakers.com, presents a comprehensive directory of women winemakers and research data which answers, for the first time, the question of how many California wineries have female winemakers.  It’s the creation of Dr. Lucia Albino Gilbert, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University, and her husband, John Gilbert, Ph.D., also a professor there.  The website offers up-to-date information on women winemakers in California, the wineries for which they craft their wine, where they are located within the state, and the evolution of their careers.  A key purpose of developing the database was to test the hypothesis that women constitute 15 to 2O percent of the winemakers, a widely purported percentage, even though no comprehensive information was available to support the assumption.  The results of Gilbert’s study indicate that the percentage overall is below this range, although women in the more prominent wine regions of Napa and Sonoma appear to be making greater progress in this regard.  The study results found that only 9.8 percent of California wineries have a woman winemaker.  The percentage of wineries with women winemakers for the various regions ranged from 4.7 percent to 12.4 percent, with Sonoma/Marin and Napa having the highest percentages of 12.4 and 12.2 percent, respectively.