Women at work
In Wine Country, women are increasingly tending to the vines. For many, it’s an opportunity that comes with a cost.
To an outsider, Maria Bucio would seem to have a good thing going. Her job at Renteria Vineyard Management in Napa Valley is secure. It pays well. She recently got a promotion. She lives in a nice apartment in Fairfield with her partner, José. They’re happy together.
But on the inside, it isn’t that simple. Bucio hasn’t seen her three children, who live thousands of miles away in her native Michoacán, in six years. Her 10-year-old son, Manuel, has cerebral palsy, requiring expensive medical care. In Mexico, she couldn’t provide for her children, where here she can. But as long as she’s apart from them, she’ll never grow deep roots in California.
“Sometimes I say to myself, ‘What kind of life is this here?’ ” Bucio says. During the fall — harvest time, a vineyard worker’s busiest season — her days felt like an endless reel of waking up at 3:30 a.m., commuting to Napa in traffic, toiling for 12 hours in the vineyards and returning home just in time for four hours of sleep, to do it all over again. The heat, the exhaustion, the pressure of faster, faster,
faster — exacerbated, this year, by the chaos of October’s wildfires — on repeat.
The thousands of women working in California vineyards would find Bucio’s story familiar. Increasingly, women are performing a larger share of California’s vineyard work; the demographic shift in recent years has been striking. Bucio’s employer Renteria Vineyard Management, which farms about two dozen Napa Valley vineyards,has seen the number of women swell to 30 percent of its workforce, up from just 7 percent three years ago.
(California’s Employment Development Department does not track wine industry employees by gender, so statewide data is unavailable, but each California grape grower interviewed for this story over a six-month period confirmed they employ more women now than 10 years ago.)
The growing presence of women vineyard workers comes as a relief to their employers, who have scrambled in recent years to find enough hands to prune, sucker and pick the grapes amid a labor shortage that many say is approaching crisis levels. “The pace at which women are saving our industry is incredible,” says the company’s owner, Oscar Renteria.
On one hand, these women are the lucky ones: Vineyard work offers higher wages, more autonomy and more job security than many other employment options available to them in California — and certainly more than in rural Mexico, where many women, like Bucio, say they couldn’t find jobs at all. Here, as the men who traditionally worked in vineyards have left for jobs in restaurants, construction or cannabis fields, women are in high demand in the wine industry.
Yet life for these women, virtually all from rural Mexico, is built on fragile foundations. The border between subsistence and hardship can be as thin as one E-Verify scan, one lowyielding harvest, one change in the wind when wildfires are near. The complexities that many working women face —finding child care, negotiating better pay and, crucially, navigating a work environment that can be fraught with sexual harassment — leave women vineyard workers, many of whom are un-
“The pace at which women are saving our industry is incredible.” Oscar Renteria, Renteria Vineyard Management in Napa