Leading on and off the farm The leadership academy holds half-day sessions once or twice per month for which participants get paid time off to attend. So far, it has included workshops on financial literacy, conflict resolution, communications, disaster preparedness, winemaking and other skills. “All these guys work out on the farm growing the winegrapes, but not many of them get opportunities to go to a winery and see the process once the grapes have been picked,” says Dutton, who serves on the Sonoma County Farm Bureau board of directors. In the financial literacy workshop, “they got to hear about everything from filling out a rental application to starting a bank account, doing a child savings account, buying a car and sending money safely to Mexico,” says Karissa Kruse, CEO of Sonoma County Winegrowers, who is married to Dutton. “I learned a lot,” says José Ventura Vieyra García, a crew leader at Cornerstone Certified Vineyard. “They taught us about how to be leaders not just at work but also in the community and in our households.” Like many California vineyard workers, most or all of the academy participants migrated to the U.S. from Mexico, often with limited English and more years of farming experience than formal education. Vieyra García came to the U.S. six years ago from the Mexican state of Michoacán, where his family worked cultivating sorghum, wheat, chickpeas and other crops. Growers say employees such as Vieyra García have the skills to play more roles in vineyard management than many have in the past. “Anyone who runs a household knows about balancing a budget,” Pratt says. To apply their skills in a business context, he says, they just need training and opportunities. The future of California wine Participation in the leadership academy is paying off for workers as well as their employers. “The growers were really excited to be able to provide those opportunities and saw value in having more employees in their operation have those types of skills,” Kruse says. She says she hopes the program will help vineyard workers become a more visible part of the wine world. “We’re encouraging them to be a bigger voice in terms of representing our wine community and our ag community,” she says. In addition to rewarding the workers’ labor and expertise, there is optimism that programs such as the leadership academy may benefit the wine sector as a whole. “In the wine industry, consumption is flattening out and younger multicultural consumers are not necessarily adopting wine as much as we saw in the past,” says Liz Thach, professor of wine and wine management at Sonoma State University.
Clockwise from above, Vieyra García, Reyes Jiménez and Cervantes chat with Cornerstone Certified Vineyard owner Jim Pratt. Leadership academy graduate José Saldana of Jordan Vineyard & Winery interacts with Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, last year in Washington, D.C. Leadership academy graduates and Sonoma County winegrape growers visit the Washington Monument. Dutton Ranch crew leader Luis Guillermo Velasquez demonstrates leaf-pulling at a vineyard near Sebastopol.
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January/February 2024
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