Heidi Fielding
Co-owner, Fielding Estate Winery, Beamsville
Even though she’s seen the spectacular view from her home and winery nearly every day for the past 15 years, Heidi Fielding never takes it for granted. It’s easy to see how she could, with the estate vineyards sprawling down the hill toward vast Lake Ontario. On a clear day, you can see the entire Toronto skyline. That helped convince the Fielding family this was the right patch of land in Niagara’s Bench region for them to start living their dream.
Fielding says there are so many more women working in wine now than there were when she started out 20 years ago, as part of the opening team for Jackson-Triggs. Still, there were some others back then, too, and she started to develop close friendships with women in the industry. “We would taste wines from all over,” says Fielding, “but we often also talked about industry issues and politics, so I’ve been fortunate to have a really solid group of women friends in wine around me. We’re all here to help each other, a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ sort of thing.”