When Women Took the Lead
Women Shaping Napa Valley, Part 5: Roundtable
This is the final chapter in a series on Napa Valley. You can find the previous chapters here.
If you’ve been following along this Women’s Month, thank you.
Over the past four weeks we’ve explored Napa Valley through the stories of some remarkable women — Carissa Mondavi, Maya and Naoko Dalla Valle, and Cathy and Grace Corison — tracing the evolution of one of the world’s most iconic wine regions through the women shaping it today. If you missed these conversations, I hope you’ll go back and explore them in the archive.
This week brings us to the final installment. On our final afternoon filming Her Way, rather than focus on a single voice, we decided to widen the lens.
So we gathered a group of wine women around a table at Cadet Wine Bar in downtown Napa.
Cadet is owned by Taylor Domin and Aubrey Bailey, whose warm hospitality and thoughtful wine list have made the space a hub for industry folks drifting in after long days in vineyards and cellars.
Joining Taylor Domin at the table were winemaker Priyanka Dhar French of Ghost Block and Napa Wine Co., wine writer J’nai Gaither — the first Black editor in the history of Wine Enthusiast — and multi-faceted wine entrepreneur Stevie Stacionis. Taylor herself, of course, sits right at the intersection of the people who make wine and the people who drink it.
We opened bottles from women winemakers across Napa and noshed on casual snacks as a reminder that wine in this valley doesn’t always have to feel fancy. Sometimes chips and popcorn are the best pairing, especially when you’re hanging out with your girlfriends and spilling the tea—er, wine.
In true ladies-who-lunch fashion, the conversation stretched for over two hours and could easily have gone longer. Everyone left feeling energized by the work the others were doing — proof that when you put a group of women around a table with a few bottles of wine, the conversation has a way of becoming something bigger.
In fact, I hope listening to this inspires you to call up your gal pals, crack open a bottle, and spend a couple of hours solving the world’s problems together.
A Valley That Wasn’t Built for Them
As the afternoon unfolded at Cadet, a common thread began to emerge. Each of these women had carved out a career in wine through very different paths — winemaking, writing, hospitality, advocacy — but their experiences echoed the same quiet reality.
Wine has long been a male-dominated industry.
That reality is slowly changing, but the expectation that women must constantly prove their credibility still lingers in ways both subtle and overt.
Taylor captured the feeling candidly: “It can be so frustrating to be a woman in business,” she said. “I’m so tired of proving myself and being like, ‘take me seriously.’”
She described the constant feeling of needing to justify her success — sometimes over something as mundane as a lease negotiation — while watching male peers move through the same conversations with far fewer questions about their competence.
Around the table, several heads nodded. Priyanka knows that feeling well.
She grew up in Mumbai and didn’t come from a wine background at all. When she first told her parents she wanted to study winemaking, they weren’t even sure it was a real career path for a woman. So she did what any determined future winemaker might do: she went home and started researching.
As Priyanka recalled, “Over the next week I sat down and did a whole deep dive into women winemakers across the world. And then I made a PowerPoint presentation that I presented to my parents.”
At the time she had already narrowed her choices down to two places: Davis, California or Montpellier, France. Her presentation highlighted the women working in both regions — proof that this wasn’t some impossible dream.
Eventually she landed at UC Davis. And like many young women entering the wine industry, she quickly began seeking out mentors who had already carved a path.
If someone like Cathy Corison came through town, she wasn’t shy about introducing herself. “I would elbow my way in and be like, ‘Hi Cathy, how are you? Big fan.’”
Moments like that may seem small, but they matter. For generations of women entering wine, simply seeing someone who looks like you doing the job — successfully and unapologetically — can make a huge difference.
Several of the women around the table described similar experiences early in their careers: working a little harder, arriving a little more prepared, constantly aware that they were stepping into an industry that hadn’t been built with them in mind.
Progress, many of them acknowledged, has certainly been made. But the path into wine can still ask women to carve out space in ways their male counterparts rarely have to consider.
Here’s a peek at our roundtable conversation from the Napa episode of Her Way.
The full video conversation is hosted by Todos Media, while the audio version is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The Cost of Being First
For Priyanka, being a woman in wine already meant pushing against her parents’ expectations. But she was also navigating something more complicated: entering a historically white industry as a woman of color.
She wasn’t the only one at the table who understood that dynamic.
J’nai Gaither has spent her career writing about wine and the culture that surrounds it. Along the way she became the first Black editor in the history of Wine Enthusiast — not to mention the first Black woman editor — at a publication that had existed for more than four decades.
Her family was proud, of course. But her aunt’s response has always stuck with her:
“That is so wonderful… and so sad.”
How had it taken forty years for that door to open? And once it did, the pressure that came with it was immediate.
“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with being first,” J’nai said. “Because being Black, you literally can’t make any mistakes.”
Priyanka nodded knowingly. Working long days in the cellar early in her career, she described the quiet mental strain of constantly feeling like she could never show any weakness.
“I’d go home and take two Advil because I was lugging 50 pounds of stuff around [all day]. I didn’t want anyone in the cellar to ever think I wasn’t strong enough to do the job.”
Around the table, we all recognized the feeling — the pressure to arrive more prepared, work harder, and avoid mistakes that might reinforce someone else’s assumptions.
“You work twice as hard… to be considered half as good,” Priyanka summed up.
That pressure can show up in different ways depending on who you are. Stevie Stacionis spoke about navigating those dynamics alongside her husband, who has been her business partner for years.
“He’s a brown man,” she explained wryly. And over time, they’ve learned to read the room before they even walk into it. “We strategize. There are certain people that will prioritize masculinity over race — and some that it’s the opposite.”
The comment drew laughter around the table, but the reality behind it was clear…Credibility in wine is something women still have to claim. And then defend.
Collaboration Over Competition
And yet — if the first half of the conversation surfaced the challenges women still face in wine, the second half revealed something equally important: that community helps make those challenges a little easier to navigate.
For all its global prestige, Napa Valley still functions in many ways like a small town.
Taylor sees that spirit every day at Cadet. What outsiders often imagine as a cutthroat or exclusive industry can feel surprisingly generous once you’re inside it.
As she put it, “You ask for a dollar here and people give you two.”
That openness was one of the first things Stevie Stacionis noticed when she moved west from New York. She had always imagined Napa as the polished, prestige-driven place most of us picture from the outside. But the reality was very different.
She described showing up to a barbecue shortly after arriving and finding herself surrounded by the iconic winemakers she had admired from afar.
“I was totally starstruck,” she admitted. “But everyone was just throwing stuff on the grill and hanging out.”
Moments like that helped shape the kind of culture these women have built their careers inside — where relationships matter, information flows freely, and other women don’t pull the ladder up behind them.
That sense of support has made it easier not only to navigate the industry, but to step more confidently into leadership within it.
Taylor reflected on how she approaches challenging moments now.
“If you’ve never been brought up to see a woman in power, it can be uncomfortable for people. I try to have a little bit of grace and think, if you don’t know any better, I’ll teach you how it’s done,” she grinned.
The Future of Napa
Conversations like this made me hopeful for what the wine industry could look like with women leading it.
Priyanka remarked sagely that, when people describe leadership, “they’re like—a good leader is kind and empathetic and level-headed. You’re literally describing a woman! If they would just let women become the leaders that they can, we wouldn’t need to correct what leadership is supposed to look like.”
For generations, leadership has often been defined through traditionally masculine traits — authority, hierarchy, competition. Yet these women painted the picture of a different kind of leadership taking root in Napa today: one grounded in mentorship, collaboration, and shared knowledge.
Stevie Stacionis has helped nurture that shift through Batonnage, an initiative she helped launch after a series of informal gatherings revealed how many women in wine were quietly navigating the same challenges. What began as a small dinner conversation has since grown into a broader community focused on mentorship, advocacy, and creating space for more women to thrive in this industry.
In fact, Priyanka now works with Batonnage too. As she became more established as a winemaker, younger women began reaching out for advice in their own careers. And remembering how she had once elbowed her way into mentorship opportunities herself, she has developed a passion for helping make that path easier for the next generation.
Batonnage connects women across different corners of the wine world and helps ensure the next generation has a clearer path than the one many of them found themselves navigating.
A New Chapter
Of course, gender isn’t the only challenge Napa Valley is navigating right now. Our conversation also touched on the broader pressures facing the region: the astronomical cost of land, rising labor and farming expenses, and the constant balancing act between tradition and evolution.
And yet, listening to them talk, the outlook didn’t feel bleak.
These are thoughtful, creative, deeply committed women who care not just about making great wine, but about the future of the valley itself. If the next chapter of Napa is being shaped by voices like theirs, it’s hard not to feel hopeful about where things are headed.
At one point toward the end of our conversation, Stevie offered a reminder of what all of this ultimately comes back to.
“Wine is about joy,” she said. “And unity. And more of that encourages other people to do the same.”
Sitting there that afternoon at Cadet — surrounded by a table full of passionate women and more than a few bottles of wine — it was hard not to feel the promise of possibility.
My own outlook certainly felt brighter and, after a week spent exploring this iconic valley, I’m more excited than ever to share Napa’s stories with you today.
Thank you for following along over the past month and for exploring Napa Valley through the lens of its oh-so-inspiring women. I hope these conversations offered a fresh perspective on a region many of us thought we already knew.
If you’d like to hear the full roundtable conversation, you can listen on Apple or Spotify — or watch the video version on the Todos Media Substack.
And if you crack open a bottle of Napa wine anytime soon, I hope you’ll raise a glass to the women helping guide the valley into its next chapter.
If you missed the previous four chapters in this series, you can find them here.
P.S. If you’d like to taste wine together instead of just reading about it, my next tasting is Bordeaux on April 2nd with members of the Raise a Glass tasting club.