Fizzy Business - Regis College

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REGIS TODAY
B
“A male professor
said, ‘Nobody’s
going to hire you
because you’re a woman
and you won’t be able to
do the heavy barrel work.’”
ut in late August, her focus
telescopes to the grapes. Part
of each day is spent in the 350
acres under Domaine Carneros’s
direct control, eyeing the vines,
measuring sugar levels in the
fruit, and sipping juice. The most
reliable indicator is her palate.
“I can tell when the pH meter is
not working properly,” she says.
“Chemistry is the backup.”
The decision to initiate the
harvest is hers alone, and it puts approximately
60 pickers, cellar workers, chemists, and other
employees—not to mention untold millions in
machinery—into motion. Everything in the
winemaking business follows from this one
judgment call. Her window for getting it right
is about a day.
If this responsibility stresses Crane out, she
doesn’t show it. An air of confidence surrounds
her, grounded in her experience. “Winemaking
is not for people with short memories,” she says.
“When I started I used to worry a lot more than
I do now. When harvest comes I feel a sense of
excitement and anticipation. Every year you
want to have learned something from previous
years so that you can do a better job than the
year before.”
The roots of Crane’s sense of ease run deep.
This will be her 33rd harvest since arriving
in California. She’s unlikely
to come across a variable
she hasn’t seen before. And
bold decisions come easily
to her anyway.
SAFE RISkS
Crane is a daughter of Wall
Street: her father launched
the options trading desk and
ran international business
for Dean Witter following
World War II. From him she
learned how to break big decisions into smaller
chunks that can be examined from all angles. “I
learned very early on how to look at both sides,
how to evaluate whether this is a good thing or
a bad thing,” Crane says. “I don’t think I take
unwarranted risks.”
Crane’s father brought wine from his business
trips all over the world back to the
northern New Jersey home in which she was
raised. As a child she learned that a dusty bottle
can be a whole lot more—a story, a memory, the
key to a magical meal. From the age of eight,
Crane was allowed a cordial glass of whatever
was being served at Sunday dinner, and she
remained interested in wine throughout high
school and college.
But when Crane graduated from Regis in
1971 with a degree in sociology and a minor
in economics, winemaking was not an obvious
choice for women, or anyone else for that
matter. She had never met a winemaker, didn’t
know any winemaking families. “In the sixties
and early seventies it was just not done,” she
says. “I never thought of it as a career opportunity
for me. Even if I were a man I don’t think
I would have.”
Instead, Crane’s first professional path was
nutrition. After graduation she spent two years
in Venezuela doing social work with malnourished
schoolchildren, then earned a master’s
degree from the University of Connecticut
in 1975.
Wine remained close to her heart, however,
and as wine drinking gained currency in the
seventies her reputation as an expert among
her peers began to take on a life of its own.
At UConn, Crane helped organize social events
for the graduate council. Which is to say, she
chose the wine. Treks to the local liquor store
turned into a microindustry, with dozens of
classmates in tow.
“It got to be kind of an event,” Crane says.
“There would be a line out the door with people
wanting me to pick their wines out. I became
the wine guru for graduate school.”
After two years as a working nutritionist
in Connecticut, Crane enrolled in a 10-week
program at the Culinary Institute of America
in Hyde Park, New York. Her intention was to
become a chef, but at the Institute she met her
first real-life winemaker, whose father had a
small winery in Hudson Valley. “He mentioned
to the group there’s some place in California
called ‘Davis’ where you can actually take
classes in winemaking,” Crane says.
If the scene were a cartoon, a lightbulb would
have appeared above her head at this exact