Female winemakers starting to make their marks in California HELENA, Calif. - In 1978, the first year that Cathy Corison made wine, she could count on one hand the number of women she knew of doing the same kind of work in Napa Valley. Without using all her fingers. Nearly 35 years later, winemaking remains primarily a man's world, but research by Santa Clara University professors Lucia Albino Gilbert and John Gilbert found that nearly 10% of California wineries now have women as the main or lead winemaker. Their second finding: Female winemakers tend to be more highly acclaimed than their male counterparts. "I think women winemakers had to be really determined and really passionate and still do," said Corison, named 2011 winemaker of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. The Gilberts' study found that 9.8% of winemakers are female. That figure was lower than they expected. Are there differences between female and male winemakers? Corison, owner of Corison Winery in St. Helena, Calif., used to resist that idea "with everything I had. Because differences have always been against women. But after years of working in the field, she said that there may be two differences. There's pretty good evidence that women have perhaps better sensory abilities. So that's one issue," Corison said. And, I believe that winemaking is all about details. So perhaps if there's a difference in attention to details? I don't know. I don't feel strongly about that. Corison, who grew up in Southern California, took a roundabout path to winemaking. She studied biology, but "fell in love with wine when I was a sophomore." She was smitten by "all the usual reasons, it's delicious, you share it with friends, it makes food taste better and vice versa. On another level, I fell in love with the fact that it's a whole series of living systems. I'm a biologist and I'm still studying biology. That's what tunes me in to winemaking, the fact that it's alive. There've always been challenges, but I think there have been advantages too. I think that we sort of stuck out like sore thumbs, so for better or worse people noticed what we did," Corison said of women in her field.