The Fizz #15: Gabriela Fontanesi is a passionate driver of farm labor activism in the wine industry, and we all need to listen.
For this issue, I spoke with an up and coming wine industry activist, Gabriela Fontanesi, about farmworkers' labor rights, changing our wine narrative, and more.
Gabriela Fontanesi is a vineyard worker, activist, wine lover, and organizer. Today, she works in the vineyard at Napa Valley’s Matthiasson Wines, worked with students at University of California at Davis around vineyard management, and participates in discussions around diversity in the wine industry, as well as conversations that inject workers’ rights into our understanding of equity and sustainability. She’s twenty three years old, and speaking with her for this interview gave me such hope and joy.
When we talk about all that needs to happen for the wine industry to move forward—environmental health and sustainability, the prevalence of harassment in our industry, fighting white supremacy in the industry, workers’ rights—it’s possible to become jaded and overwhelmed and look to the younger generation to hold the weight of that work. It’s crucial that this work falls on everyone’s shoulders, not just the next generation’s—it’s our responsibility to listen to new voices, learn from them, and work hand in hand with them. Gabriela’s deep passion for effecting change and giving visibility to issues in the wine world is inspiring, and I hope it moves you to take action in your own community.
Margot: Can you tell me about how you got into wine?
Gabriela: I got into wine through doing my undergrad in viticulture and enology at U.C. Davis. It was a combination of being dyslexic—I struggle immensely with writing and anything literature-based—and of wanting to work with my hands. That pushed me to pursue the science of winemaking for a college degree. My father is a contractor, so I grew up working in construction. Through my experience there, I realized how joy filled your life can be when you work in a trade. When you’re able to see what you’ve created, that’s special. I saw that beauty from him.
M: Was wine a part of your upbringing?
G: Largely, no. Most of my community was inner-city Hispanic. It wasn’t a big wine community, but that background has informed my social justice perspective within wine. I’ve been privileged, though, in that I grew up between communities—my grandfather on my father’s side was a lot more well off, so through him, I was exposed to wine. He had a small collection.
M: How did you get involved with the folks at Matthiasson? Where did that connection start?
G: My senior year, I was selected as one of two Green Fellows. That fellowship was started by a community of Davis alumni who realized that when they went to school, they were able to participate in advocacy. Something I found out through the fellowship was that Davis had been one of the first institutions that protested against the South African apartheid. Davis was a leader in those conversations, sit-outs, and protests.
I had been working on the student farm—I’d been doing a mentor/mentee program, I was a mentee the first year and I mentored the following year. The great thing about that program is that what you learn is then given back. There’s a sustainability to that two year cycle. I was really interested in finding a way to stay on in that program, and I was inspired to apply to the Green Fellowship. I had gone to a community meeting earlier that year and a student named Samuel led a conversation around social justice in the student farm. I realized that I could implement some of that vision through this scholarship. Not only was I able to stay on the student farm as a vineyard manager, weeding, mulching, hoeing, organizing and teaching. I was also able to create a paid position that aligned with Samuel’s recognition that not everyone can afford working an unpaid position.
Slowly over that evolution, I started to realize that the conversation was much larger than paid internships. In the student farm vineyard space, there weren’t that many students who were descendants of farm workers, although Davis is a school that has folks from that community. Creating space for representation of this community at the farm was essential, and recognizing that they deserve to be paid for their experience was the first step. If you’ve been working in the field for several years, why would you apply for an unpaid position? That paid internship quickly evolved to target descendants of farm workers.
I started to recognize that there isn’t a lot of upward mobility for farmworkers in agriculture, and there’s not in the wine industry either, if you start in the vineyard. For many who start their career in working in the field they often end their career in the same position they started in. That seems to be different for folks like me who graduated from college and are in the vineyard for an internship, but if you just moved here from Mexico—most of my colleagues in the vineyard are from Mexico—there aren’t many places to move up to. To me that has always been problematic, considering there’s such a huge discrepancy within our industry as to how you’re paid for your work in the vineyard vs management or tasting, etc. It’d be one thing if they’re being compensated equitably, it’s another thing to be in a position that isn’t being valued economically and there’s not a way to rise into more valued positions. These things need to change.
Steve and Jill [Matthiasson] were original donors to the Green Fellowship, and I reached out to Steve to talk about some of the realities I was noticing in the industry. I partnered with Steve to make an organic vineyard management series at U.C. Davis. We got together and opened up a class on organic farming within vineyard spaces through the student farm. We did a session on pruning, and we were scheduling a canopy management, suckering, and cluster management course, but those all were derailed by the pandemic. These sessions would be open to anyone at U.C. Davis. I was hoping to offer it to a larger space than just the viticulture and enology department—there’s not really many descendants of farm workers within the viticulture and enology major, but I noticed there were a number of students from that background in other majors.
A lot of the student farm branding speaks to folks who have never farmed before and want to learn. It was an amazing opportunity to get to work on the student farm as someone who had never worked in agriculture, but we need to also create equitable opportunity for those who have worked in agriculture. We need these students to be in this space because we benefit from having folks who have generational knowledge and life experience in the field. That would also start to break down some of the boundaries in these spaces.
M: What kinds of conversations should we be having in the wine industry right now?
G: We need to have conversations around why farmers are paid less than folks in the tasting room or the cellar. My degree is science based, but that doesn’t stop me from asking these questions. Us not talking about where our food comes from or the vineyard workers, is how we allow consumers to not realize that our farm workers are exempt from the Fair Labor Act, for example. It’s one of the biggest insecurities for farm workers, but we don’t talk about that. In the tasting room, I can create space within the narrative so consumers are aware and ready to listen to folks who are proposing solutions to these issues.
It’s about to be Cesar Chavez Day tomorrow—did you know about his work with the grape industry? Not knowing means that it’s a lot harder for farmworkers to advocate for themselves. Chavez brought the information to consumers. Whether it’s table grapes or wine grapes, we’re the privileged community in agriculture. It’s our responsibility to make space for farmers to advocate themselves. We’re a narrative-based industry—we’re the perfect industry to open doors for those conversations.
There are conversations we need to have around the environment as well. There are 1.3B tons of plastics expected to be in the environment by 2040—that’s twenty years away! We can’t leave that to the political advocates to talk about. It’s something that all of us as industry leads have to address, and there’s no better industry to address it than the wine industry. We talk about terroir, which is just a fancy word for environment, who our winemaker is, what yeast is used. We need to talk about people as well. When you talk about our vineyard workers, you create space to connect to other farmworker communities as well.
M: Where do you think the wine industry can do actionable work?
G: It’s difficult for me to have educated answers here, because I’m 23 and I know that my answers will be different in a few days, months, years. From where I stand today, there are many opportunities to have more crossover between vineyard workers and other industry workers. A lot of tasting room employees, for example, have never experienced the vineyard, much less consumers. Often, wineries have separate break rooms for the vineyard, tasting room, and cellar teams. A friend of mine spoke to someone recently who said “thank god we have separate break rooms, they smell so bad”. The sanitized nature of how we present wine translates to this type of thinking. Do you know the joy of that smell? It’s the vineyard! It smells like the outdoors, and the foundation of our industry!
Creating space for that kind of awareness can be not having separate break rooms, really knowing the vineyard workers as people. Anytime you’re the steward of the narrative, you need to take that responsibility just as seriously as the stewards of the land and be intentional about how you’re talking about wine. The language around wine has been so European-focused. For me, as a young consumer, that type of marketing is not interesting. I have no interest in talking about wine as if I were a 50 year old white dude. For all of the people even more disenfranchised than I am, it’s not engaging. We’re leaving people out. Talk about the people just as much as you talk about, say, biodynamics. For wineries, is this biodynamic label doing this to elevate their price point? If so, how much of that is going back to the vineyard workers, to the employees?
M: Can you talk about what you do on-site at Matthiasson? What’s important to you in working there?
G: I work both in the vineyard and the tasting room. Yesterday, I dug about 100 holes for new vines, for example. Picking up plastic, pruning, digging, all the beautiful, the ugly, the dirty, the in between. One of my favorite things about working in the vineyards, is honestly my breaks. Not because it’s a respite, but because we all sit and eat together, this delicious Mexican food that my coworkers bring. We sit on the ground and they bring a plancha to heat up tortillas, and they’ll generously share with me tacos made with their warm tortillas and their thermoses full of mix-ins. It’s beautiful and joyous—my favorite thing of this year has been those moments of sharing in community.
If I had the opportunity to talk to folks who don’t know where their food is coming from, one of the first things I’d point out is that when you work in the field, you have very few facilities. At best you have a port-a-potty, a water jug, and some shade. You don’t have a microwave or a stove, let alone A/C or heat—you are completely exposed to the elements. This is important in terms of realizing the privileges you have within your workspace. This becomes really stark when you’re working in a vineyard surrounding a $100M home, which is a vacation home that no-one lives in, but there’s no designated spaces for farm workers, gardeners, cleaners, all those folks moving through this space. It’s something to point out in terms of the spaces that we build and who they are for.
M: You’re young in the field, what’s exciting for your future?
G: Wine is one of the few industries that is positioned between humanity and the environment—textiles, food production, those are there as well, but we are narrative-based. That’s the reason I’m here. I chose the viticulture and enology program because that was the best education I could get. Everyone came to wine from every direction. Steve was a philosophy undergrad! Sophia, our production manager, studied English. I had no true intention of staying in the wine industry when I first chose that major—I stuck around because wine positions you between some of the most important conversations around social justice. It’s intersectional—environment, sustainability, climate change, labor. When you’re having conversations about these topics around wine, it’s meaningful and tactile. People can understand the urgency when it’s told through wine. Relating climate change to the way wine tastes over time, for example. It becomes real.
Pre-2020, wine was a dying industry. We were going down in volume and demand. We’re doing something wrong. We blame millennials for not drinking wine as much, but eventually you’re going to start blaming Gen Z. It’s not the consumer, it’s the professional who is not adapting and moving beyond language that was beneficial to a limited culture, to a very small group. We have the resources to raise awareness—people show up for social justice, for environmental sustainability, for different causes. As an industry, we’re so privileged just by our position of opportunity. That’s my passion.
I might want to go back to school for my PhD, but more likely I might pursue a public policy degree and MBA, so I can have the foundation to be a leader in conversations around economics and social justice. If I were to do a passion project winery, it’d be one where I could pay my vineyard workers what I pay my tasting room employees. I’d try to give as much mobility as possible. Folks I’ve been speaking to just say it’s impossible. I’m not willing to give up on that.
M: People will go to long lengths to justify the status quo.
G: Right. There might be wineries out there doing this, I don’t know! There’s opportunity here. We have to say how can we do this, not that it’s not possible. I was endorsed by U.C. Davis in 2019 to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship, and I’d like to try that again. Given that opportunity I would go for an MBA and MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation from Oxford. It’ll align with the Rhodes Scholarship’s dream of finding global leaders, and there aren’t many folks talking about agriculture. I’d put money down that none of those folks are talking about the wine industry. I’d like to leverage both my education and my knowledge of the industry to have these meaningful conversations. I’d like to use my privilege to benefit not only the wine industry, but also our larger food systems. It’s not sustainable to maintain our status quo.
M: I’m so excited to see where you go. Your passion is evident, and I can’t wait to support you. Thanks for taking the time.
—————
You can follow along Gabriela’s journey by following her on Instagram.
Non-profit pairing: Gabriela supports The Farmworker Project, which is committed to improving the lives of farmworkers through technology and education. Learn more about, and donate to, their programs here. She also supports @FlowerInSpanish.
Wine News: This Sunday, I’m joined by winemaker Tracey Brandt from Donkey and Goat for a wine class and Q&A. Grab a bottle of D&G and join us. For next week’s paid subscriber Fizz, I’ll be drinking the Early Mountain Chardonnay, a cheers to my past interview with Lee Campbell.
Also: I’m opening a wine shop this summer! American Fizz will focus on wines and ciders made locally. I’d love your support—you can read more about my mission on my GoFundMe.