Women in Wine: Pioneers and Trailblazers

The Hidden History

Wine has been made, managed, and marketed by women for as long as it has been made at all. Archaeological evidence from the ancient world shows women prominently involved in wine production — Mesopotamian tablets record women as innkeepers and wine sellers, Egyptian tomb paintings depict women in vineyard scenes, and Roman historical accounts mention female tavern keepers across the empire.

Yet wine history as it has been conventionally written has largely overlooked women's contributions. When women appear at all in wine narratives, they tend to appear as wives or daughters of male proprietors, or as anomalies who succeeded despite their gender rather than because of their talent. The reality is considerably more complex and considerably more interesting.

The Widow Clicquot: Reinventing Champagne

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin

No single woman in wine history has had a greater documented impact on the industry than Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot — universally known as the Veuve (Widow) Clicquot. Born in 1777 in Reims, the heart of the Champagne region, she married François Clicquot in 1798 and became deeply involved in the family wine business almost immediately.

When François died in 1805, leaving her a widow at 27, the conventional expectation was that she would sell the business or hand it to a male manager. Instead, she took sole control of Maison Clicquot and proceeded to transform it into one of the great Champagne houses of the nineteenth century.

Her most enduring technical contribution was the invention — or at least the systematic perfection — of riddling (remuage), the process by which sediment formed during secondary fermentation in the bottle is gradually worked down to the neck, allowing it to be expelled (dégorgement) to produce a clear, brilliant sparkling wine. Before riddling was systematized, Champagne was often cloudy or required extensive decanting. The A-frame riddling rack (pupitre) that Clicquot developed with her cellar master Antoine Müller became the standard method for making clear sparkling wine and remained so until the invention of automated gyropalettes in the 1970s.

Clicquot was also a brilliant businesswoman. She identified Russia as an enormous potential market for Champagne at a time when most of Europe was embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars. When peace came in 1814, she smuggled a shipment of her wine to St. Petersburg ahead of her competitors, capturing the Russian market before anyone else could respond. "La Grande Dame de la Champagne," as she came to be known, ran Maison Clicquot until her death in 1866 at the age of 88. The house she built remains one of the most recognized Champagne brands in the world, and its prestige cuvée is named "La Grande Dame" in her honor.

The Widows of Champagne

Clicquot was not unique in her era — she was part of a pattern. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced numerous formidable women who took control of Champagne houses after their husbands' deaths: Louise Pommery, who transformed the Pommery house after her husband's death in 1858 and pioneered the dry (brut) Champagne style; Mathilde-Émile Laurent-Perrier, who ran Laurent-Perrier for 40 years after her husband died in 1887; Lily Bollinger, who managed Champagne Bollinger through World War II and into the 1970s, famously answering a journalist's question about when she drank Champagne: "I drink it when I'm happy and when I'm sad. Sometimes I drink it when I'm alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I'm not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it — unless I'm thirsty."

These women succeeded partly because widowhood gave them unusual legal standing in societies that otherwise limited women's economic autonomy. The irony — that women could access power in the wine industry primarily through the deaths of their husbands — is not lost on modern observers. But their achievements were genuine and their impact on Champagne's development substantial.

Bordeaux and the Grande Dame of Wine

Hélène de Lencquesaing

Among the many figures who have shaped the wine culture of Bordeaux, few are as influential as Hélène de Lencquesaing, who managed Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande — universally known as Pichon-Lalande — from 1978 to 2007. Under her stewardship, Pichon-Lalande achieved a reputation that frequently surpassed its Second Growth classification, earning comparisons to First Growths in the best vintages.

De Lencquesaing was known for her meticulous quality standards, her hospitality, and her skill at positioning Pichon-Lalande in the international market. She was also a forthright advocate for women in the wine industry at a time when female proprietors in Bordeaux remained rare. When she eventually sold the property to the Rouzaud family of Roederer Champagne in 2007, the price reflected the reputation she had built over three decades.

May-Eliane de Lencquesaing's Legacy

The broader point that de Lencquesaing exemplifies is that Bordeaux Château ownership has been less uniformly male than the region's public image suggests. Numerous Bordeaux properties have been managed or owned by women, often behind the scenes. The documentation of this history has been incomplete because women's contributions were frequently attributed to the family or estate rather than to the individual woman.

Burgundy: Breaking the Winemaker Barrier

Lalou Bize-Leroy

Lalou Bize-Leroy is arguably the most influential winemaker in the history of Burgundy who did not inherit a famous domaine. Born in 1932, she became co-director of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in 1974, a position she held until 1992 when she was forced out following disputes with her co-director. That dismissal led her to transform her own Domaine Leroy, which she had purchased in 1988, into one of the most respected — and most expensive — estates in Bourgogne.

Bize-Leroy is a committed biodynamic farmer who holds that yields must be kept extraordinarily low and the vine must be allowed to express its terroir without chemical interference. Her wines consistently receive the highest critical scores in Burgundy, often rivaling the far more famous DRC. The Domaine Leroy Musigny — a Grand Cru Pinot Noir from a tiny plot — regularly sells for thousands of dollars per bottle.

Her career illustrates a pattern: women in Burgundy have achieved significant winemaking recognition, but often against institutional resistance that male peers did not face. The Domaine structure of Burgundy, with its small family operations, paradoxically created space for women's participation in ways that the more corporate structure of Bordeaux chateaux did not always allow.

The New World: Different Rules

California Pioneers

The New World wine industry, younger and less encrusted with tradition, offered women somewhat more accessible pathways to recognition. In California, women became prominent in the wine industry from the revival of the 1960s and 1970s onward.

Zelma Long became head winemaker at Robert Mondavi Winery in 1973, at a time when female winemakers were rarities. She later became CEO of Simi Winery and is credited with establishing the style of California Sauvignon Blanc. Merry Edwards established herself as one of the leading Pinot Noir producers in Sonoma County through a career spanning four decades. Helen Turley became the most sought-after consulting winemaker in California in the 1990s, credited with creating the "Turley style" of rich, powerful, high-alcohol wines that defined a generation of California reds.

Australia and the Global Scene

In Barossa Valley, women including Prue Henschke (who manages the viticulture of the Henschke estate, including the legendary Hill of Grace Shiraz vineyard) have become prominent. In South Africa's Stellenbosch, Bruwer Raats and other female producers have been central to the region's quality revolution.

The International Wine and Spirits Competition (IWSC) and other major competitions have increasingly awarded top prizes to wines made by women, reflecting both improved representation in the industry and, perhaps, the end of historical biases in tasting panels.

The Present and Future

The wine industry of the early twenty-first century is not equal. Women remain underrepresented in senior positions at major wine companies, in wine journalism, and in the sommelier profession at the highest level. The Court of Master Sommeliers had certified only 26 female Master Sommeliers in its entire history by 2020, compared to over 200 men.

But the trajectory is unmistakably toward greater representation and recognition. A new generation of female winemakers, viticulturalists, wine educators, and wine writers is reshaping the industry from the ground up. Organizations like Women in Wine and Les Dames d'Escoffier provide networking and mentorship. Wine education programs at universities and culinary schools now graduate equal or near-equal numbers of men and women.

The irony is that wine history has always contained women like Clicquot, de Lencquesaing, and Bize-Leroy — towering figures whose contributions shaped the wines we drink today. The project of recovering and celebrating that history is not merely corrective. It is essential to understanding how wine actually evolved.