When the Winds Roar:Letting Go and Lifting Others with Amy Bess Cook and Kira Ballotta

Podcast EpisodesWine EducationWomen In WineWine IndustryNapa and Sonoma

May 12

When the Winds Roar: Women in Wine, Hustle, and the Courage to Change

A conversation with Amy Bess Cook of Woman-Owned Wineries and winemaker Kira Ballotta of Olivia Brion and Cantadora Wines

Links and How to Support the Women in this Episode:

Everything mentioned in this episode is linked below. If you've been moved to put your money where your values are — and I hope you have — here's where to start:

Woman-Owned Wineries — Amy Bess has created a resources page for consumers who want to continue supporting women in wine now that the club is closing.
Visit Amy Bess Cook's website to see her writing portfolio and work in the press
Olivia Brion Wines — Kira's Pinot Noir-centric brand celebrating trailblazing women from history
Cantadora Wines — Kira's Rhône-focused brand featuring real women doing profound community work
Sollevato Wines — Nikki's wines, including the 2023 pink-label Grenache benefiting the V Foundation for Cancer Research
GlupGlup— Amy Bess's Sip Spotlight $20 Spanish Grenache find, made for Barcelona Wine Bar and widely available

Episode Notes and Topics:

What Happens When Women in Wine Tell their Truths?

There's a quote that surfaced in this episode that I can't stop thinking about: "What would happen if a woman told her truth? The world would crack open."

That's exactly what happened here.

I invited Amy Bess Cook — founder of the Woman-Owned Wineries directory and wine club — onto the podcast after receiving her email announcing the closure of her wine club. Sollevato is listed in her directory, and I had been planning to reach out about being featured — and then the news landed. Amy asked to bring along winemaker Kira Ballotta, whose work blending wine, storytelling, and social impact she deeply admires.

What followed was one of the most layered, honest, and unexpectedly moving conversations this podcast has ever had. Wine, women, fire, cancer, motherhood, hustle — and what it really costs to build something in an industry that wasn't built for you.

The State of Wine in 2026

Wine is a luxury good, and right now the industry is in a reckoning. Economic uncertainty, shifting consumer habits, a sober-curious younger generation, and a post-pandemic glut of grapes have created a painful convergence. Closing the Woman Owned Wineries wine club wasn't a decision Amy Bess made quickly — and she was clear that she's far from alone in making it.

The twist: I'm launching a wine club right now. Our first Sollevato shipments just went out. The difference is that Michael and I haven't quit our day jobs, we don't have a tasting room to fill, and we're growing slowly and intentionally. We're an anomaly — but the challenges are still real.

Who Is Amy Bess Cook?

Amy Bess is a writer, social entrepreneur, and the woman behind the largest public-facing directory of woman-owned wineries in the U.S. — now over 800 wineries strong.

It started with a wildfire. In 2017, Amy Bess was evacuated and couldn't help her neighbors, couldn't go home. So she sat down online and made a list. That list became Woman Owned Wineries. The average wine club membership lasts about two and a half years. Some of hers have stayed for eight.

She's been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. She studied and made wine, lived in wine country, and now lives in North Carolina — where she's learning firsthand just how thin the representation of women winemakers gets once you step outside the California bubble.

The Numbers — And Why They're Hard to Pin Down

Less than 15% of winemakers globally are women. In California, about 400 of 4,000 wineries have women as lead winemaker — and only around 4% of those women own their own brands. Enrollment at places like UC Davis is nearly gender-equal. Ownership is where it breaks down.

The harder truth: the research has dried up. After MeToo sparked a wave of workplace studies, we've entered what Amy Bess calls the backlash phase. Government funding for research that even mentions women or girls has been stripped. We can't quantify the problem — and if we can't quantify it, we can't solve it.

Who Is Kira Ballotta?

Kira started in finance, got tasked with valuing some wineries, went to Napa to do research — and never left. She worked harvests, ran a lab, spent four years on the winemaking team at Alpha Omega running enology trials, and worked at Quintessa and The Prisoner. She was also going to school at night and making wine in her garage. When her son was born in 2017, something had to give. She left her winery job, invested the money she'd saved for a master's degree into her business, and kept going.

She runs two brands today:

Olivia Brion — Pinot Noir-centric, light and bright. Each label follows a fictitious character on adventures inspired by real women from history: women who rode bicycles around the world in 1896, women who crossed the country by motorcycle in 1916 before paved roads existed.

Cantadora — Rhône varietals, richer and more contemplative. Each release features a real woman doing profound community work — a domestic violence shelter founder, a labor economist, and this fall, the legal director of the ACLU of Northern California alongside a longtime activist who worked with Harvey Milk.

"Wine can be power too," Kira said. I believe her.

Three Women, Three Grenaches

During our Sip Spotlight, something quietly perfect happened: all three of us were drinking Grenache.

I was sipping my Sollevato Grenache — Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County, pink-labeled this year in partnership with the V Foundation for Cancer Research, following my breast cancer diagnosis last fall. Kira was drinking a 100% Grenache from Shake Ridge Ranch in the Sierra Foothills, farmed by Ann Kramer, a grower Amy Bess noted has supplied multiple Woman Owned Wineries club selections over the years. And Amy Bess, now in North Carolina, walked into a local wine shop, asked what they had in Grenache, and walked out with Glup — a Spanish Grenache made for Barcelona Wine Bar, $20, widely available, and exactly the kind of accessible find she loves spotlighting.

Three women. Three Grenaches. Three completely different paths to the same grape.

On Hustle, Motherhood, and Making Hard Choices

All three of us claimed the word hustle — not as a badge of exhaustion, but as a real description of what it takes when the system wasn't built with you in mind.

Kira was honest about the cost. The women she knew who had kids and worked in wine were mostly leaving the industry — harvest hours alone are brutal when you have small children. Feeling that isolation, she turned it into fuel. She'd volunteered at a domestic violence shelter in San Francisco called La Casa de las Madres. When Cantadora took shape, she called them first and asked if there was someone in their community she could feature on a label. They introduced her to Sonia Melera — a Central American immigrant who founded La Casa at 22 and became a professor of social work. One remarkable woman led to the next. That's how the brand was built.

Amy Bess, the Fires, and Letting Go

Here's the part I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Amy Bess spent years learning to make wine. She made wine — a small-batch Grenache from Amador County, paired with a harvest journal featuring 40 contributors from around the world. She was building something. And then the wildfires came, she made the list, Woman-Owned Wineries took off, and her own wine project stayed in the past.

Eight years later, closing this chapter, she described a creative energy in herself that needs tending again — painting, writing, something. She said: "I think part of me letting this project go is that I need to maybe pause promoting the creativity of others and heed my own creativity again."

I read her the words she'd written in her closing email:

"When the winds of change blow, and lately they've been roaring through our world at gale force, we all do well to bend like the willow. Adapt, the ancient wisdom goes, or you'll break like a heavy oak."

I lost my entire neighborhood in the Tubbs Fire of 2017. We rebuilt. We've been back since 2019. My neighbor is still rebuilding next door. I know what it means to find purpose in the wreckage. Relieved and no longer worried — that's what Sollevato means. That's what I'm reaching for every day.