Two weeks ago, we started something.
And if the response to the first two conversations — with Carissa Mondavi and Maya Dalla Valle — has told us anything, it’s that these stories were worth telling. That people are hungry for them. That the women who have shaped this industry deserve more than footnotes.
So we keep going.
This week, we return to Napa one more time. But we leave the hills of Oakville behind and come back down to the valley floor — to Highway 29, the road that carries everyone through the heart of wine country. And somewhere along that stretch, between Rutherford and St. Helena, sits a small blue farmhouse and a steepled gray barn that most cars blow right past.
There’s no imposing gate. No carved stone sign. Just a modest wooden placard that reads: Corison Winery.
What lives behind that gravel drive is one of the most important stories in American wine.
Cathy Corison arrived in Napa Valley in 1975, two days after graduating from Pomona College, and she arrived with a plan. She was going to make wine. Which, as she’ll tell you herself, made absolutely no sense. Americans didn’t particularly care what they drank. And women didn’t make wine.
She did anyway.
She enrolled at UC Davis, was one of two women in her eight-person oenology class, and spent the years that followed learning the craft from the ground up — hauling hoses in cellars that had never seen a woman before, harvesting grapes in a valley that was just beginning to find its footing. When the 1980s arrived and Napa’s stylistic identity began to shift — bigger, richer, riper, shaped by the influence of scores and critics and a market hungry for wines that announced themselves loudly — Cathy made a quiet, almost stubborn choice.
She kept making the wine she believed in.
Elegant. Fresh. Built on balance rather than brawn. Always under 14% alcohol, in a decade when that was starting to look like a liability.
She never submitted her wines for scores. She never chased the trend. She just kept going — vintage after vintage, growing grapes on the same valley floor vines she had fallen in love with years earlier, vines so old and gnarly and irreplaceable that they are now, quietly, one of the most valuable things in Napa.
It would have been easy to call that stubbornness. It turned out to be integrity.
And now, as the pendulum swings back — as a new generation of wine drinkers reaches for exactly the kind of wines Corison has always made — Cathy isn’t gloating. She’s just still there. Still farming. Still making the same wine.
With her daughter Grace beside her.
Before you listen, read what Kelsey wrote to accompany this conversation. It’s called “When Less Became More” — and it traces the arc of Napa’s stylistic evolution through the lens of one woman who refused to follow it. It’s careful, deeply felt, and the kind of writing that makes you hear the conversation differently once you press play.
Read it first. It’s worth it.
The full audio version lives on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If this is the kind of work you want more of, consider becoming a paid subscriber. The filmed episodes are still coming — May is getting closer — and every bit of support between now and then matters.
