2015 Winemaker of the Year: Bibiana Gonzalez Rave
5:10 a.m.: Bibiana González Rave, waylaid by a 10-minute detour to Starbucks, is driving to work. Her job, or at least one of them, is tending the Wayfarer Vineyard, near Fort Ross, about an hour and a half northwest from her home in Santa Rosa. She speaks about the destination with a palpable thrill — “this vineyard is so extreme, so exceptional” — while intermittently singing along to the radio. It’s a lot of output for such an early hour, but whether Rave is a “morning person” seems irrelevant. If she’s awake at all, she’s awake entirely, effervescing with this fiery, unfiltered energy that feels refreshing here in America but she swears is normal in her home country of Colombia.
By 6:45, undeterred by the piercing cold, Rave (pronounced RAH-vay) is walking through the blocks of Wayfarer. The sun begins to rise and reveal the vineyard, mostly bare now that the vibrant yellow and orange leaves have fallen. This time of year is when Rave, 37, gets to truly see the vine skeletons, to check her vineyard crew’s work from the previous year. She climbs and descends the rows’ sharp inclines, remarking on leaf vigor and shoot positioning with so much confident familiarity that you’d think she’d planted it herself.
But this sunrise meditation doesn’t last long. The work orders issued, it’s time for Rave to go. She’s got other vineyards and other wines. Before leaving, she FaceTimes with her 8-month-old son, Lucas. Then it’s back to Santa Rosa, where she stops by her office at the Pisoni winery. She might speed-taste from barrels. She might jet to St. Helena to meet with noted Napa wine family the Pahlmeyers. She might scoop Lucas from his nanny and bring him to a vineyard in Carneros or Russian River.
Who knows? Every day is a new route through Wine Country. “It’s very rare that I’m one full day at a single place,” Rave says.
What does it mean to name someone the “winemaker of the year”? The identity of a California winemaker has never been more complicated than it is in 2015.
The dream of the estate is all but impossible for the nascent generation of California winemakers. For many, the road to success involves working a day job while pouring your spare time into a fledgling personal project; buying 1-ton lots, piecemeal, because that’s all you can afford, from vineyards all over the state; custom-crushing or begging your employer to let you use their equipment. For more and more winemakers here, the goal is not to have just one project, but to consult for many.
Bibiana González Rave, The Chronicle’s 2015 Winemaker of the Year, exemplifies this modern vintner. She is an accomplished winemaker, crafting outstanding wines that speak of their place, firmly rooted in the lessons she learned in French cellars while reveling in the wild freedom that California affords. And she represents what a California winemaker in 2015 can be.
Which is a lot. Rave’s got a day job of sorts, at Wayfarer, owned by Napa-based Pahlmeyer — though she’s a consultant, not on payroll, “because that way I keep my freedom.” She’s got her own label, Cattleya, named for Colombia’s national flower, the orchid. With her husband, Jeff Pisoni, Rave makes Shared Notes, a high-end line of Sauvignon Blanc. In an ambitious new move, she’s launching Alma de Cattleya, a value-priced brand of California wines for distribution in Colombia.
She is not pigeonholed to a single grape, nor confined to a single region. Her vineyards stretch as far north as Fort Ross and as far south as Monterey. She makes her wines not in an idyllic château, but in a Santa Rosa industrial park. She’s a mom.
Or, if you prefer Jayson Pahlmeyer’s summary: “She’s a genius.”
Rave came to California wine from both the likeliest and the least likely places: Bordeaux, France and Medellín, Colombia.
Raised in Medellín in the days of Pablo Escobar’s de-facto reign (“Have you seen “Narcos”? That’s exactly what it was like!” she says, referencing the American television drama), the teenage Rave had never seen a vineyard when the notion that she would be a winemaker possessed her. “I just knew that I would make wine,” she shrugs, unable to explain.
Her electrical engineer father and economist mother wanted their bright daughter to become the CEO of a big company. No one in Colombia drank wine. The drink of choice was the potent sugarcane and anise liquor aguardiente.
After studying chemical engineering in Colombia, Rave went to France to study at universities in Bordeaux and Cognac. Meanwhile she worked a string of harvests, including at Bordeaux’s Château Haut-Brion, the Northern Rhône’s Domaine Michel & Stéphane Ogier and Burgundy’s Domaine Du Devevey — where she made a big impression on some of France’s most legendary vintners.
“I rarely had such a curious intern,” says Jean Philippe Masclef, Haut-Brion maître du chai, or cellar master.
Stéphane Ogier agrees: “I didn‘t want to take a worker that year, but I could feel immediately that Bibiana was special. In her wines now, you sense her passion.”
France provided a rigorous training in the classics, but Rave knew that the path to success there would be long. “I’d work in France only if I could be the winemaker at Roumier,” she half-jokes, referring to the famous Burgundy domaine. “It takes 30 years to become an actual winemaker.”
California offered “a chance to work with benchmark French varieties,” like Syrah, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc, but with total freedom to chart one’s own course.
Here, you don’t have to inherit a domaine in order to be its winemaker. You’re not restricted to certain grape varieties (like Pinot Noir in Burgundy) or certain winemaking techniques. You’re not told by the government which sites are “grand cru.” In California there is the possibility, however remote for the young and the broke, of purchasing land.
Before breaking out on her own, there were more years of hemisphere-hopping — three years in South Africa, harvests in California at Peay, Au Bon Climat, Qupé — and then, in 2009, a full-time winemaking gig at Sonoma’s Lynmar Estate. By the time Rave left Lynmar in 2011, she was ready to work for herself. She began consulting for Wayfarer and launched Cattleya and Shared Notes.
Rave is fully a French-style vigneron — a much-encompassing description of someone who is both grape grower and winemaker. “She is so connected to the vineyard,” says Anne Moller-Racke, who manages the Donum vineyard, from which Rave buys Pinot Noir for Cattleya. “That’s something a lot of people say, but for Bibiana it’s really true.”
When she came on board as consulting winemaker at Wayfarer, Rave butted heads with the then-vineyard manager. She told the Pahlmeyers: My way or the highway. They let the vineyard manager go. “She wasn’t going to mess around with inferior workmanship,” says Jayson Pahlmeyer. “And she turned that vineyard around tremendously,” implementing a new three-tiered irrigation system, restoring a new vigilance on vine canopy management, creating habitats for birds to eliminate pesticide use. “That vineyard is her baby,” Pahlmeyer says.
In 2011, Rave married Jeff Pisoni — the California equivalent of marrying into a classed-growth legacy. She could have easily been subsumed by the Pisoni Vineyards business. Yet, though they make their wines in the same facility, she maintains total separation from her husband’s work — so much separation, in fact, that the couple decided to launch Shared Notes so that they could do something together.
“There’s no sense of entitlement,” she says of her relationship with the Pisonis. Her brother-in-law Mark charges her for Soberanes Vineyard Syrah as he would charge anyone. When she realizes her ultimate dream of buying a Cattleya vineyard, it will be with Cattleya money. No investors, no Pisonis.
Not only is Rave at the forefront of a revolution in what it means to be a California winemaker — independent, multifaceted and resourceful, tied more to one’s own identity than to any pedigreed estate — but she is also leading a revolution in what California wine itself should be. Her radicalism is to reject polarization. Rave‘s wines exist in some liminal space between warm, generous California, land of the free, and the strictures of the Old World, with its time-proven traditions.
This sensibility leaves Rave unswayed by the moving needle of winemaking fads. She listens only to her own inner compass. Among its Fort Ross-Seaview neighbors, the Wayfarer wines stand defiantly for the principle that rich, velvety wines can still be balanced. “Hirsch, Failla, Flowers have been so decisive on what they want the Sonoma Coast to be — so light,” she says. “But that’s not what Wayfarer gives us.”
She can’t understand the current obsession with low alcohol levels. In France, she says, it was not discussed; alcohol is not on her mind when she makes harvest decisions. “I’m not a 13.5% winemaker,” she shrugs. “I don’t think you get aromatic compounds at veraison,” referring to the ever-earlier trend of pick dates that tends to render more austere, lower-alcohol wines.
The Wayfarer and Cattleya Pinot Noirs, nevertheless, are elegant, refined and relentlessly floral — as with Burgundy, they have more finesse than power. Her Cattleya Syrah is meaty and angular, a California Côte-Rôtie. The Shared Notes Sauvignon Blancs include a stunning ode to the Haut-Brion Blanc, expansive and structured.
The impatience with winemakers who seek to reinvent the wheel comes partly from Rave’s classical education, but also from her own personality. Just as she maintains complete autonomy from the Pisonis, so does she forge her own independent path stylistically.
That style may be a little bit French and a little bit Californian; Rave insists it’s Colombian. “Intensity and passion,” she says, “are in my blood.”
