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Celebrating Our Women in Wine | Santa Lucia Highlands
For Women's History Month, we're turning the spotlight on five extraordinary women who are farming, crafting, building, and leading in one of California's most exciting wine regions.
The Santa Lucia Highlands doesn't give anything away easily. Perched high above the Salinas Valley, battered by afternoon winds off Monterey Bay, and shrouded in morning fog that lingers until midday — this is a place that demands patience, grit, and a deep respect for the land. It also, it turns out, produces some of the most inspiring women in American wine.
From a former surgical pathologist who left medicine to chase Pinot Noir to a daughter quietly carrying one of the Highlands' founding families forward — these five women are doing something bigger than making great wine. They're building community, changing industries, and making the Santa Lucia Highlands a place that winemakers worldwide are paying attention to.
This Women's History Month, we're proud to introduce them to you.
Carmel-by-the-Sea & Salinas Valley
Sabrine Rodems — The Artist-Scientist of the Highlands
Winemaker, Wrath Wines & Scratch Wines
Before Sabrine Rodems ever set foot in a vineyard, she was hauling equipment at the San Francisco Opera House, union card in hand, surrounded by stagecraft and spectacle. She describes herself as "an artist who wanted to be a scientist" — and it shows in everything she makes.Sabrine started her career in film and theater and then went back to school mid-life to earn her Master of Science in Viticulture and Enology from UC-Davis. She then headed south to Monterey wine country when everyone else was heading north. For nearly two decades, she has been the winemaker at Wrath Wines, shaping one of the region's most acclaimed portfolios from the windswept Santa Lucia Highlands and the San Saba Vineyard below it. She also runs Scratch Wines, her own label producing small-lot Chardonnay sparkling, Riesling, Grenache, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon from Monterey, Arroyo Seco, Santa Lucia Highlands, and the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Sabrine doesn't make conventional wine, and she doesn't want to. She's made Falanghina in ancient Roman amphora. She's pushed the boundaries of what Grenache and sparkling Chardonnay can be on the Central Coast. She founded Wines of Danger, a renegade collective that banded together small, independent producers to get their wines in front of San Francisco audiences who might otherwise never find them.
Her Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noirs — sourced from some of the highest and most dramatic sites in the appellation — are among the most talked-about wines in the region. Edgy, precise, and full of the raw energy of a place that earns everything it produces.
Wrath Wines has tasting rooms in Carmel-by-the-Sea and on River Road in the Salinas Valley.
Salinas Valley
Sara Silacci — Keeping a Dream Alive
Co-Owner & Events Director, Rustiqué Winery
The name Rustiqué doesn't come from a design concept or a brand exercise. It comes from Rusti Lee Silacci — a Monterey County schoolteacher who spent nearly three decades teaching a love of biology to her students, and who, when she and her husband, Robert, began to think about retirement, dreamed of something more: an estate winery on the family ranch, a place to gather, a way to share what they'd built.
Rusti died of ovarian cancer in 2019. She never got to see Rustiqué fully open its doors.
Her daughter Sara — along with brother Chad, the winemaker — made sure it happened. The tasting room, housed in a 100-year-old barn on the Silacci family ranch in the foothills of the Santa Lucia range, opened in 2021. And Sara has turned it into something that would have made her mother proud: Not just a place to drink wine, but a genuine community hub for a part of Monterey County wine country that has long needed one.
"We do anything from public to private: comedy shows, concerts, workout classes, yoga, sound baths, you name it," Sara says. "We get the community out here for a variety of events that I really think this region is needing." The siblings are also adding a farm stand and u-pick flower field in the summer of 2026.
She runs the marketing, the social media, the events calendar — and through partnerships with local chefs, musicians, and makers, she is weaving Rustiqué into the cultural fabric of the Salinas Valley. It's a tribute. It's also a vision that immerses visitors in wine country farm life.
Rustiqué Winery is located on River Road in the Salinas Valley.
Heidi Scheid — The Executive Who Changed the Game
Executive Vice President, Scheid Family Wines | Carmel-by-the-Sea & Salinas Valley
Heidi Scheid didn't grow up thinking she'd run a wine company. She studied finance at University of Southern California, did a stint at Ernst & Young, built a career in corporate consulting — and then the family business called. She answered, and Monterey wine has never been the same.
When Heidi joined Scheid Family Wines in 1992, the Salinas Valley estate was a grape-growing operation. Today, under her leadership in sales and marketing, it has grown to nearly one million cases annually, with wines in every U.S. state and more than 30 countries. The company now offers estate-driven winemaking across the Central Coast. All of the company’s vineyards are certified sustainable, and all powered by a 400-foot wind turbine that generates 100 percent of the winery's energy needs — making Scheid Family Wines the only large-scale winery in the world running entirely on renewable energy.
In 2020, Wine Enthusiast named Heidi its Person of the Year — the wine industry's most prestigious individual honor — citing her leadership in sustainable growth, creative product development, and her 28 years of service to the Wine Market Council, including two years as Chair.
She's also the person who stood in a grocery store aisle, noticed that consumers were starting to care deeply about sugar content and low-alcohol options, and launched Sunny with a Chance of Flowers before almost anyone else saw the "better for you" wine category coming. It became one of the fastest-growing wine brands in the country.
Scrappy, data-driven, and deeply committed to her community, Heidi is proof that business owners who listen to their customers and innovate always shine brightest.
Scheid Family Wines has tasting rooms in Carmel-by-the-Sea and Greenfield.
Kristen McIntyre — The Next Generation of a Founding Family
General Manager, McIntyre Vineyards | Carmel Valley & Santa Lucia Highlands
The McIntyre Estate Vineyard was among the first planted in the Santa Lucia Highlands, with vines going in as early as 1973. Steve McIntyre, its founder, purchased the vineyard when it was about to be abandoned in the 1980s. He has also planted more than 20 percent of the entire appellation — farmed nearly a third of its vineyards — and built his vineyard management company Monterey Pacific into the largest farming operation in Monterey County. The legacy is immense.
Kristen McIntyre, Steve’s daughter, is the one stepping into it.
As General Manager of McIntyre Vineyards, Kristen oversees the tasting room, direct sales, and the hospitality center at the McIntyre Vineyard— the face of the brand to the thousands of visitors who come to experience it each year. She works closely with colleague Anna who manages wholesale sales. She's also a board member of the Santa Lucia Highlands Wine Artisans and a fixture on the committee for the annual Sun, Wind & Wine Festival, the region's signature consumer event in May at Mer Soleil Vineyard.
But it's her approach to growing her family's legacy in the region that sets her apart. Under Kristin's stewardship, McIntyre has deepened its commitment to regenerative and sustainable farming: maintaining owl boxes to keep vineyard pests in check without pesticides, native cover crops to build soil health, and — in a detail that says everything about how this family thinks — a recent grant to plant milkweed across the vineyard to support struggling Monarch butterfly populations. Working alongside her cousin Jessica of Sitos Group, Kristen and Steve replanted a block of Pinot Noir at the McIntyre Estate Vineyard using biochar to enrich the soil and sequester carbon to fight climate change.
She pours the wines with the quiet confidence of someone who grew up knowing every block of those vines. And the wines — particularly the Estate Pinot Noir and Estate Chardonnay under winemaker Byron Kosuge — are some of the most critically praised the label has ever produced.
McIntyre Family Wines tasting studio is in Carmel Valley Village.
Kerith Overstreet — The Doctor Who Chose Pinot
Winemaker & Proprietor, Bruliam Wines | Sourcing from Santa Lucia Highlands
Kerith Overstreet's father conceded that she could be anything she wanted — after medical school. So after studying English Literature at Cornell University, she duly attended medical school at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, followed by her residency and two fellowships in surgical pathology at UC-San Diego. She published papers, taught residents, and appeared to launch a successful and fulfilling career.
And then she started making wine.
"Leaving wasn't easy," she says. "But after 17 years of winemaking, it's clear that I draw on the same skill set every day, just differently. Winemaking is a magical elixir of science and art, just like the best physicians combine rigor and technique with a big dose of humanity."
Starting with a single barrel from the 2008 harvest, Kerith built Bruliam Wines into a boutique producer of around 1,200 cases a year of single-vineyard Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Zinfandel. She holds every title at the winery herself including Winemaker, Chief Marketing Officer, Director of Sales, Head of Grower Relations, and Ever Obliging Tank Sanitizer. Furthermore, Bruliam has donated to over 100 charities since the winery's founding.
Her connection to the Santa Lucia Highlands is personal and long-standing. The Pinot Noir that altered her career path was sourced from Garys' Vineyard in the SLH, a bottle recommended in a 2003 Wall Street Journal column that she still keeps in her study, worn and dog-eared. Today she sources from Soberanes Vineyard, right next door. She describes SLH Pinot Noir as having "that earthy, leathery, clove-y thing." This deep, brooding, and layered complexity ranks SLH Pinot Noir among California's most food-friendly wines.
Bruliam Wines is based in Windsor, Sonoma County, and sources from the Santa Lucia Highlands.
The Common Thread – Santa Lucia Highlands Wineries Run By Women
While these five women in wine work different corners of our world, what connects them is unmistakable: a willingness to build something new and to pour that conviction directly into the glass. They don’t all carry the title of winemaker, but an increasing number of women do. Discovering the best women winemakers in Monterey requires you to look beyond the county line. Some of the most exciting wines made from Santa Lucia Highlands grapes are touched not only by local women winemakers, such as Sabrine Rodems, Kerith Overstreet and Martha Kraftzeck at Scheid, but a growing number of elite women from Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino wine country, who drive anywhere from 175 to 275 miles to get their hands on SLH’s captivating clusters of grapes. They include Theodora Lee of Theopolis Vineyards, Bibiana González Rave of Catteleya Wines, Moret-Breaynn of her eponymous wine label, and Katy Carroll of Truckee River Winery near Lake Tahoe.
The Santa Lucia Highlands has always been shaped by people who believed in something others couldn't yet see. These women are carrying that tradition forward. If you haven't yet made the drive to our charmingly quaint Monterey wine trails to taste these delicious wines, now is the time.
