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Welcome to the first issue of Merobebe

and Happy Women’s History Month!

We’re here to level up your wine game and celebrate the women who work in this male-dominated industry, all while having a grape time (I had to…).

In every issue, you'll find a piece that explores a wide range of topics related to wine, a profile of an inspiring woman in the industry, and a vino-tainment pairing for the week.

To kick things off, we’re getting our science on with malolactic fermentation and talking to Jill Osur, CEO and founder of digital winery Teneral Cellars. So pour yourself a glass and cheers to great wine and elevating women with Merobebe!

Chardonnay
To Butter or Not To Butter

I know, this one’s pretty basic. But this popular white varietal is super versatile and can often get pigeonholed before a die-hard Sauvy B drinker gives it a chance!

Some of you may think “oaky” “buttery” and “vanilla” when you hear chardonnay. Others may think of a crisp Chablis, or maybe your preferred method of consuming chardonnay is in its sparkling Blanc de Blanc Champagne form.

So what exactly is chardonnay?

One of the world’s most popular grapes, it grows in Argentina, Spain, South Africa, Chile, New Zealand, Austria, Germany, Australia, Italy, the United States (where you might find it as far south as Santa Barbara, CA or as high up as Columbia Valley, WA), and many more countries.

Outside of the inherent differences in the regions that can impact the wine (such as the temperature or type of soil), a couple key steps in the winemaking process also determines whether the chardonnay will come out creamy and buttery (which I dislike) or crisp and zesty (which I love). This differentiation starts in the fermentation process.

Often, white wines are fermented in temperature-controlled, stainless steel fermentation tanks to preserve the freshness and delicacy of the grape. However, chardonnay is one of the lucky grapes that can also go through fermentation in small oak barrels. This oak contact adds those toasty, vanilla flavors to chardonnay that it would not get from a stainless steel tank. That’s the first step resulting in differences between your crisp, Chablis-like chardonnay or your Russian River Valley buttery chard.

From there, a winemaker may decide to put the wine through another important chemical transformation: malolactic fermentation (stay with me). Unlike the previous alcoholic fermentation which is done by yeasts, this months-long process is carried about by bacteria. The bacteria’s job? To convert malic acid in the wine to lactic acid. If your eyes are glossing over right now, here’s an easier way to think of it:

• Malic acid is that tart, sour feeling in your mouth – like when you bite into a crisp, green apple

• Lactic acid, like the name suggests, feels much softer – like when you’re drinking milk!

Basically, the bacteria takes that tart, sour feeling in your mouth and makes it milky and soft instead.

Finally, the star of the buttery chardonnay is a key by-product of malolactic fermentation: a molecule called diacetyl. This tasty molecule is what makes butter taste like butter (aka my favorite molecule)! From there, some winemakers choose to decrease the buttery flavor by allowing any remaining yeasts to eat up the buttery diacetyl.

What all of that means is that it’s not the chardonnay grape itself that tastes buttery, but the fermentation in oak and malolactic fermentation that the winemaker chooses that adds the vanilla, toast, and butter to the chardonnay. On the other hand, the chardonnay that ferments in steel and does not go through malolactic fermentation will taste and feel more crisp.

The good news? You can now show off this science knowledge at your next dinner party. The bad news is that it isn’t easy to know if a wine has gone through malolactic fermentation. The technique is usually not listed on the label, so unless you pick up a bottle of chardonnay and it specifically calls out being “crisp” or “buttery,” you may need to do a little more research to figure out what type of chardonnay it is.

If the label says that the chardonnay was “oaked” or has notes of vanilla, brioche, creme brûlée, etc., that’s a good hint that it has seen oak and possibly gone through the malolactic fermentation process. Sometimes the specific region can also help. For example, Chablis, which is in the northernmost wine region of Burgundy, France, always has crisp chardonnays. Santa Rita Hills and Santa Maria in the Santa Barbara area often have more ripe fruit with tropical flavors (like pineapple), and tend to go through oak aging and malolactic fermentation. You can also ask your sommelier or someone at the wine store - or take a gamble, buy the bottle, and open it up!

When I worked at a wine store, I had to go through each bottle and learn which ones were oaked and which were not (turns out customers in Beverly Hills are very particular about which chardonnay they find acceptable to drink…)

Join me this week in trying an oaked and unoaked chardonnay of relatively equal price points and compare the taste, smell, and mouthfeel between the two!

Jill Osur
Founder & CEO of Teneral Cellars

This interview has been edited for clarity and truncated for the newsletter.

This week, we’re talking with Jill Osur of Teneral Cellars, a California winery that is 100% woman-owned and operated.

Merobebe

You’ve mentioned that women sommeliers make $0.70 for every dollar their male counterparts make, and also that women are supertasters. What does that mean? How are we supertasters?

Jill

A woman’s palate is an amazing thing. There's an official test to become a supertaster, and there [have] been more women that have qualified as supertasters.

Image courtesy of Teneral Cellars

It's the dynamics in the industry that [make] getting your Master Sommelier certification extremely difficult. If you look at why there are fewer women, it's often because it's just such a tough journey to get there, especially if you're a woman and you have children, so there's a lot of women that tend to drop out.

It's not that women aren't qualified. Right now the president of the Court of Master Sommeliers is Emily Wines. And yes, that's her last name. She's got her seventh grade yearbook to prove that. She’s a supertaster – I think she was one of only 15 master sommeliers to pass all the tests on the first first round. But Emily came in and it completely changed the Court of Master Sommeliers after the huge scandal that happened in 2020. So many of these men were literally abusing the women that they were supposed to be mentoring or bringing up. And we've made sommeliers, especially Master sommeliers – we've given them this rockstar status and they were abusing that power.

I think part of it is – I'm totally making this up from my own intuition – but I feel like women are more in touch with what we feel, and what we feel has a lot to do with what we taste and smell. I think there is something really beautiful about that. But everyone has a unique palate, right? Your palate is uniquely yours. Mine is uniquely mine. I don't want to go drink a wine because somebody says I should drink a wine. I'd like to drink a wine that really pairs perfectly with my palate.

That’s why we brought this woman-owned technology on our website called Tastry. They've tested 179 million palates, they've tested our wines, and it's a 20-30 second test.

You take the test, it will shoot you back wines from Teneral Cellars that pair perfectly with your palate.

That's always a joy for me when I'm tasting. Because somebody will say, “I don't like merlot.” And I'm like, Well, is it for a reason other than the movie Sideways? What is it that you don’t really like? And then I explain that you could give five different winemakers the same exact fruit and the wine will present itself in five very different ways because that's the artistic expression of a winemaker.

It's really about finding the styles you like, finding the winemakers you like. It's also obviously important for me that you find producers that sustainably farm and produce so that you're not putting toxins and chemicals in your body and damaging Mother Earth. But that's my preference.

Merobebe

It’s a perfect blend of art and science inside the bottle.

Jill

Yeah, it is. That is wine – the world of wine – when done right.

Merobebe

Because Teneral Cellars works with 100% women-owned vendors, has it been difficult to find vendors, just because there are so few women in the wine industry?

Jill

It was challenging to find a women-owned company that prints wine labels. Printing, no biggie, but printing wine labels. We found one, and the first one we weren't necessarily happy with the quality of their production, but now we have a fantastic women-owned printing company - they do amazing stuff. The other one that was challenging was finding a fulfillment house, but it turned out that probably the one that's closest to us up here where we are in El Dorado County is women-owned.

It's a mom and her daughter [that] run the company. It's fantastic. I do want to clarify – I started out with 100% women-owned [vendors/partners]. And I did transition to either women or minority-owned businesses because for me, yes, our focus is on women. But if I can also hire minority-owned business people that have been marginalized, it's making the right kind of impact.

We have a Black-owned company that helps us with some media buying. It's not majority-owned by a woman, but I feel very aligned that that is still the right play for us to make the kind of impact we want to make in the world.

Merobebe

What are some other ways you think that the wine industry can better support and also promote the work of female or minority wine producers or owners?

Jill

I think they have to take a step back and take an honest look at themselves and look at who their biggest customers are, because the industry isn't reflecting that. We need to get the bigger companies to make that difference and to recognize how not only male dominated it is, but white male dominated, and to look at the necessary representation that is needed.

If 70% of wine is purchased by women, then we should have that kind of representation on the shelf. I do feel like there needs to be more public commitments to really shaking up the C-suite and giving women more opportunities to really move up that leadership ladder in the wine industry.

Read the full interview at our website here.

Get a wine-related movie or book pairing for your weekend.

Today’s pairing is The Lost Vintage by Ann Mah

This page-turning novel follows Kate as she returns to her family’s ancestral vineyard in Burgundy to prepare for her upcoming Master of Wine examination. While there, she uncovers a secret that her family has been keeping since World War II, finding a hidden room with a cot, Resistance pamphlets, and tons of valuable wine. What was her family hiding during the war, and why are some of the important bottles from the family’s cellar collection missing?

See the reviews and buy The Lost Vintage from a local bookstore here.

Thank you for making it to the end of our inaugural issue!

It means so much that you’ve joined this community of wine-lovers and women-empowerers! If you enjoyed what you saw, please share it with your fellow wine-loving friends. After all, sharing wine & wine knowledge is the best kind of caring…

Next week, we’ll be talking to wine educator Brianne Cohen and drinking about Vinho Verde so stay tuned for the next issue on Wednesday.

Cheers,

Megumi

Have questions or feedback? Want to suggest a woman in wine, vinotainment pairing, or wine topic? Just hit reply to this email!

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