On women and (re)generation and time.

With a glass of Favia's 2012 Linea Sauvignon Blanc Coombsville Napa Valley

Back in March, I had the privilege of interviewing viticulturist Annie Favia and winemaker Cathy Corison as part of a series of conversations at Meadowood, where I work in Napa Valley. They are two transplants to Napa who wanted to make it in the wine industry, as well as intrepid women who have carved their own paths in fields where women were in short supply. Tremendously, especially in a modern Napa context, they built their businesses from the ground up, often while juggling other careers, all while raising their own girls in the process. I find them both inspiring.

I learned in our preparation for this chat that Annie, looking for a strong woman to mentor her, had sought out Cathy, connected by their mutual acquaintance John Kongsgaard (living here, you realize most roads lead to John). Through her time working with Corison, Annie found her true passion for viticulture, and both have gone on to be tremendous advocates for organic and biodynamic farming, working with native plants, and more.

Our conversation meandered, but we really focused on farming: owning the process as much as possible, organic and biodynamic practices, soil rehabilitation. As Annie said, “when you’re farming, it’s all about listening to plants… I know it sounds kind of groovy, but the reality is that’s how you become a good farmer. The best farming you can do is really listening and sensing.” Groovy, yes, especially coming from Annie, who looks like your quintessential surfer chick, but also true. There are so many cues you can get from just being in the vineyard: the give to the soil, what’s flying around, the array of colors of the grasses and leaves. These all tell a story about what each individual site, even a block within a site, needs.

We also talked about the dimension of time — in wine, as in all great things, you can’t underestimate patience. When thinking about the timeline from planting a vineyard to first fruit, which can take a handful of years, to then making wine and aging it in the cellar and bottle, two to three years more, wine as a business seems really crazy. “In the wine business, we’re always thinking back a decade and forward a decade,” Cathy noted, who replanted the front half of her highway 29 property a few years ago, after letting it lie fallow; it’s producing some fruit now, but not yet fully online. (The back side of her property is home to the Kronos vineyard, beautiful old girls producing elegant, concentrated fruit from some of Napa’s oldest cabernet vines).

It can take three years for a standard Napa Cab to reach the market from an established site; seven to ten years can elapse before a wine is released from a new vineyard (that’s after the vines go in the ground). A release is when you can actually begin to recoup your investment. Crazy. It’s easy to get caught up in the vagaries of changing tastes to make sure you can finally sell the wine when it’s ready to leave the cellar, but Cathy has always been true to the vision of the wine she wanted to bring into the world from the start of her brand: a lighter, fresher take on cabernet sauvignon, an homage to the valley’s historically great wines coming off of the gravelly soils of the bench land, the rocky debris at the foothills of the Mayacamas mountain range. Her consistency and commitment to this vision wasn’t easy when the world wanted big, jammy cabs, but the world has come around. It just took time.

Of course, this is also true of vineyards; Annie and her husband Andy Erickson recently partnered with the Huneeus family (of Quintessa, Flowers, and Faust) to rehabilitate a valley-floor site in Oakville that has been conventionally farmed for decades. The soil was rock hard when they arrived, like cement, and it is taking time to bring the site back to life in the way they intend — which is to say a living, breathing place, as it once was when the Wappo tribe tended the land here, nearest the river back when it was a life-giving resource.

While we talked, the crowd sipped Cathy’s elegant, poised 2019 Corison Cabernet Sauvignon, and Favia’s richer, denser 2011 CERRO SUR Cabernet Franc. I find myself gravitating increasingly to white wines, however, so I nursed my glass of Favia’s 2012 LÍNEA Sauvignon Blanc from Coombsville. I chose it for this talk and tasting for all of the nuance it represented. It spoke to the farming: the vines were dry-farmed (not irrigated) in one of the cooler pockets of Napa Valley. The label spoke of heritage: the name, for the lineage of sauvignon blanc, a parent of cabernet sauvignon; the image, a nest, for the family unit. It had a little age on it, too, something pulled from their very small library, showcasing the way hard edges soften with time. They no longer make the wine from this original vineyard, as they sold it to buy another property in Coombsville, where they also now live, so it spoke as well to the trade-off’s of making a small business work, of building one’s dream.

After our public discussion, the three of us shared a meal, and they spoke, tenderly, this time about their lives. What they’d been doing in the intervening years since they’d worked together. How they met their husbands. How proud they were of their girls, now grown. Annie talked about upcoming travel with one of her daughters. Cathy was aglow when she spoke of how one now works by her side in the winery; both spent the three years during COVID back in Napa at the winery, this time as adults, and you could tell it was her dream come true to have her family want to be involved.

Listening to them, in that intimate conversation at the dinner table, a feeling came over me that I had not quite expected. I’ve spent most of my life unsure of whether I ever wanted children, never one of those women who knew it was a certainty in her future. I had assumed that, marrying the right guy, hitting the right age, that feeling would eventually come. This May, it’ll be our third anniversary, and my guy loves children. He’s that obnoxious stranger on a plane making faces at all the kids he passes; some parents are into it, others are not. I just turned 38.

And yet, pregnancy is something I've been completely terrified of. I hit puberty quite young and spent my teenage years feeling matronly, with overdeveloped breasts and a complex related to my nickname, Mamma Bray. I’ve been scared of the changes it can wreak on the female body, compounded by health complications I’ve had since I got COVID in 2020. I’ve talked to friends who have had children and who share their challenges, bearing witness to the troughs of motherhood, not just the peaks. I’ve retreated into myself, shying from the idea of building a family, of that lifelong commitment, at the same time I’ve been making other, lifelong commitments.

But I also fear that my time is running out. I think back to a conversation last year with a college friend, parent to a little girl. She knows how much I love my mother, my grandmother, my family; they are my inspiration, my rock, and a great source of my joy. “I think you’ll surprise yourself with how much it will mean to you to feel that love flow in a new, different direction,” she said, as we talked through my fears, her challenges, and the love she has for her marvelous child. This comment came back to me, listening to Annie and Cathy speak.

Maybe it’s time.

Photos of the event by Gracie Snedgar. Vineyard shot my own.