Meet the Winemakers: Julie Schreiber

Consulting winemaker, Napa, Sonoma, and Livermore Valley. Recorded October 30, 2026.

I'm a member at Corison, and when a shipment comes I think about the vineyard and the woman who made the wine. Until this Friday afternoon I had never once thought about the building. In the fall of 1999, Cathy Corison was putting up her winery in St. Helena with the harvest already going on inside it. There were no walls yet. The crew installing the fire sprinklers worked overhead and looked down at the cellar hands climbing in and out of the tanks, and each group decided the other had lost its mind. One of those cellar hands was Julie Schreiber, a former chef working her first vintage, and when she needed water to rehydrate the yeast, she walked over to the house next door to get it.

A finished winery hides its own beginnings well. The tasting room is swept and the glasses are polished, and nothing on the label mentions the men on the ceiling or the walk next door for water. Most of what goes into a bottle happens where no guest will ever stand, and the people who do that work rarely get asked about it.

Julie came to that cellar the long way around. She cooked professionally for fourteen years after the Culinary Institute of America, decided she wanted something else, and went back to school to take the chemistry she needed for UC Davis, where she wrote her master's thesis on stuck fermentations. After Corison came Gallo of Sonoma, Sterling, Flowers out on the coast, and a turn as interim winemaker at Dry Creek Vineyard, where a bee stung her on the inside of the lip during her first lunch on the job. She quit counting wineries at fourteen. These days she consults from Healdsburg for clients in Napa, Sonoma, and the Livermore Valley, and on some days this harvest she drove 110 miles between four wineries just to taste what was in her fermenters.

The cook in her never left. She hears a balanced wine as a major chord, with the acid on top, the tannin underneath, and the fruit in the middle, and she would rather hand a nervous guest something to eat than a list of descriptors. When I asked what the work takes from her that nobody sees, she talked about a harvest that began July 30 and will run into November, six and seven days a week, and about wanting people to know there are hands behind every bottle. I thought about that walk to the house next door.

These are her answers to the twenty questions every winemaker in this series is asked, plus one more.

1. Who taught you?

I started out thinking I wanted to be a chef. My bachelor's degree is in hotel and restaurant management, and then I went to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. After cooking for fourteen years, I decided I wanted to go back to school and do something else, so I studied all the science to get into Davis. That was very humbling. I survived taking chemistry, and I got my master's degree in enology at UC Davis.

As far as who taught me, it's hard to pinpoint. At the beginning I did harvest internships that were super helpful. I worked at Schramsberg and for Cathy Corison, back-to-back in the same vintage, and I spent some time at Yering Station in Australia. Those were the jobs where I was hauling hoses, doing pump-overs, and digging out tanks. Then I worked for Gallo for four years and for Sterling for four years, and for a company called Prospect Brands, where sometimes I made wine for people and sometimes we made private-label wines for specific venues across the United States. I stopped counting at around fourteen wineries. Every one, big or small, gave me a little more of a skill set: another vintage, another grape variety, another vineyard, another piece of equipment. So, it's hard to say it was just one place.

2. Who have you taught, and where are they now?

I was president of CERA, the California Enological Research Association, and I've been a board member or forum chair for WineWomen, Women for WineSense, and the Napa Valley Wine Technical Group. All of that is a constant give and take of learning and teaching. I also consulted for what was originally the Tri-Valley Conservancy in Livermore and then for the Livermore Valley Winegrowers Association. Between them they have about fifty wineries, so I spent a lot of time educating people about making wine and how to do the best they possibly can with what they have. I can't name one person, but I've spent a lot of my career working with people I hope I taught a little, and I learned a little from them too.

Sometimes you're making wine in a beautiful stainless-steel tank with glycol jackets, and sometimes you're making wine in a macrobin with a punch-down tool.

3. Is there a vintage you date your life by?

The one I thought about most was 1999, because it was my first. I realize now it's been twenty-eight vintages, which I find kind of amazing. Each one has its own character. This year this happened, that year that happened, and there are plenty of times when you say, "Whoa, we've never seen anything quite like this."

In 1999 I worked at Schramsberg in the vineyard and then in the cellar, and when the sparkling was done, I went to work for Cathy Corison, so I did sparkling and Cabernet in one vintage. That was the year she built the winery. The people putting in the fire-prevention plumbing were climbing around on the ceiling above us, looking down at us crawling in the tanks, and they thought we were crazy, and we thought they were. We didn't even have walls yet. I had to go to the house next door to get water to rehydrate the yeast. Quite a time.

4. What's changed in the trade since you started that someone new would walk right past?

Technology. The first thing that comes to mind is automated sorting. Now you destem and then go through the different stages of the sorting table until you get individual berries at the end. Back in the day we destemmed, and that was it. The other is the databases and how we track everything. It went from a notepad, writing down what we were doing that day, to work orders, and now InnoVint, where you can do everything on an iPad. Before, everything was handwritten and completely soaking wet because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

5. Walk me through a typical harvest day at the peak.

This year I crushed for clients at four locations, in Healdsburg, Windsor, Sonoma, and St. Helena. Some days I drive up to 110 miles, and that doesn't include going to a vineyard. That's just going from winery to winery to taste the fermenters. So a big part of my day is deciding which direction to go first, south or east. I wake up in the morning and ask, what's the most critical thing I need to get done today? Some days I'm sampling vineyards and deciding when we'll pick. Some days I'm going from location to location, tasting fermenters and making sure everybody's behaving. And some days I stay home. It depends on what's happening that day.

6. What decision do you make that you can't fully explain to someone else?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the wine speaking to me. It's standing in front of the tank or the bin, getting my hands on it, feeling the temperature, tasting it. Does it smell right? Does it taste right? How's the temperature looking? Some of it you can predict. Here's the chemistry, here are the additions that need to be made, and I do the math. That happens a lot as well. But I think it's allowing the wine to speak to you and deciding what's the most important thing to do today. Maybe it doesn't need anything. Maybe it needs an aerative pump-over because it's getting a little stinky, or maybe there are nutrient challenges. Every day there's something different.

This year I worked with a new clone, Clone 35, and that Cabernet has some pretty good-sized tannins. Tasting it, I thought, maybe this one needs more days on the skins to get where I want it, compared with other clones. Each hint gives you an idea of what it needs and what it wants.

I always describe wine to people as a major chord in music. The acid is the high note, the tannin is the low note, and the fruit is in the middle. There are times when a wine is super awkward and other times when it all comes back into balance. You don't want to overdo it, but you do want to know whether it's moving in the right direction. Tasting regularly, and knowing how things taste, is super important.

7. Tell me about a harvest that went wrong.

When I started as interim winemaker at Dry Creek Vineyard many years ago, on my first day I was pressing, I think, Sauvignon Blanc, and the moment I sat down to eat my sandwich a bee decided it wanted a bite too. It stung me on the inside of my lip on the first day of the job. Not a great day.

At that same winery, a guy with a cart was sampling the tanks, and we'd just crushed into one of them, a twenty-ton ferment, I'd say. For whatever reason the door didn't stay closed, and all of a sudden all the fruit was outside the tank and on the ground. That's usually when people are calmest on the radio calling for help, when the moment is the worst. We called it a very large saignée and put the fruit back in the tank.

Another was at Flowers, out on the coast, before they moved into Healdsburg. Somebody hit an electrical pole near the winery, and we had no electricity. The fruit had already been picked and was sitting in the winery, and we couldn't process it. That beautiful Pinot Noir had to sit for twenty-four hours before we could do anything with it. Every time you have a moment like that, it brings you a lesson. Those moments give you big lessons.

8. Who's the legend around the winery?

Three names came to mind. I worked for Cathy Corison in 1999. I was at Diageo, working at Sterling, when Tom Rinaldi was at Provenance. And when I was at Gallo, I worked with Marcello Monticelli. I could probably rattle off another half dozen.

There are so many aspects to working with these people, but the biggest thing is they don't think of themselves as legends. They think that we have a task at hand, and we want to make the best wine we possibly can. You can learn something from all of them. Four or five years ago I went on a trip to Barolo and Barbaresco, and Cathy was on it, so we got to relearn who each of us was twenty-some years later.

When you're young you think, I'll work somewhere, I'll know those people, I'll move on, and they won't remember me and I won't remember them. Then you realize that's not true. These people come back into your life in a lot of different ways. I'm working at a custom crush in St. Helena, and Marcello was there the other day. I hadn't seen him in a really long time, and he's still as passionate about making wine at eighty as he was when I worked with him. I was at Gallo from 2001 to 2004. It's nice to know those people remember you and that you can keep learning from them years later.

9. Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year?

It was most obvious to me at Sterling, because we made so much wine there, but there's a seasonality to the grape varieties. Sauvignon Blanc usually comes first, then Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and by the end you're at Cabernet. There are also the virused vines, the unhealthy vines, the blenders. You wouldn't stand up and call them a vineyard designate, but they fill in the gaps where needed. Those wines aren't nearly as exciting as the first few tanks of the vintage. So there's an evolution of grape varieties over the harvest, and there's also the moment of, oh, now I have to work with that virused vineyard again. You have your ups and downs. Some days everything tastes great and this vintage is awesome, and some days this one's just okay. The end of harvest is usually when you're tired and the vineyard is tired, but you're still making wine.

10. What do people outside the trade always get wrong?

Besides making wine and consulting, I also work as a wine judge. When I'm judging, I'm tasting between 130 and 150 wines a day, which is a lot, but I'm not drinking all of that. People need to know that just because we taste wine all the time doesn't mean we drink all the time. That's probably the biggest one.

Sparkling water is really helpful. It cleanses your palate well so you can keep tasting and your palate isn’t fatigued.

11. What's the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?

Work orders. It's important to write the math out, because everybody gets tired and everybody has a challenging day. So, it's always, here's what I'm adding, here's the rate, and here's the math. I love it when somebody checks my math, especially when you're converting back and forth between pounds and grams. It's helpful to have somebody say, "Hey, your math is wrong," but much more often they'll say, "I'm just checking. Did you really mean to add this much?" I think that's awesome. So, thank you to everybody who checks my math. I check math for people as well.

12. What do you still do the way you were taught, even though there's a faster way?

I'll go back to technology. It's a constant push and pull. The sorting table takes out all the raisins and green berries and leaves, all the material other than grapes, and at some level that makes sense. But think of it as a sine curve. The beginning and the end are the green berries and the raisins, and then there's the center of the curve. When you sort, you take everything off both ends, and I think the wine is not nearly as interesting. Part of me likes the sorting, taking away all those imperfections, and another part of me likes it when I don't use all that technology and allow a little more of what the vineyard shows to come through. I go back and forth on that quite a bit.

13. What were you taught that you've since stopped doing?

My master's thesis was on stuck fermentation, so I spent a fair bit of time thinking about healthy fermentation and nutrient additions, the timing of those, and which nutrients to add. The science behind that has kept evolving. I still like to add half the nutrients the day after inoculation and half at about 15 Brix, but which nutrients, out of the million products available now, is another matter. DAP is a good example. Do I like it or not? Adding it is like giving someone junk food, as opposed to a more complex nutrient addition. I'm still working that one out.

Yeast selection may have gotten simpler over time. When I was at Gallo, I think we used probably forty different yeasts. If you're a Cabernet and after fermentation you're going to be in barrel for two or three years, how much does the yeast you selected matter? I'm not sure it does. Every year I have these philosophical questions with myself about which additions I make, which ones I don't, and how much. It's constantly evolving.

14. Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?

If I stayed in one place, maybe. When I was at Flowers we got concrete eggs, and we named them all. They had names like Benedict, because it was an egg. But because I'm not in the same place every day with the same people and the same equipment, I haven't named anything.

15. When someone who knows nothing about wine walks in, what do they already know that you can build on?

Probably because of my chef background, what I work with most is pairings, tasting wine with a meal and what works and what doesn't. People assume they just don't know, so they want all the information from you. But once you say, eat this, taste that, try one before the other, like having the cheese first or the wine first, they get an immediate response. Yum. Both things taste better having been consumed together. People get that really quickly. Other times, eating an artichoke with a glass of wine is probably not a good idea. I've tried it. Or a salad with a vinaigrette. People assume there's something they don't know, but they should listen to themselves, because in a lot of ways they know what tastes good together.

16. When someone pours your wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn't in the tasting notes?

One question people frequently have is about value. It shouldn't be that the reserve, the $200 or $500 bottle, is the best wine and the $8 bottle isn't. What they should know is that they can trust themselves. If you like it, it's a good wine. You don't need to be told by a reviewer or a critic or a judge like me. Wine is something you can enjoy and share with friends and family, and I want to take away a lot of the stigma around it. If this is the wine you like, great. We're making something and giving a piece of ourselves, so you just have to figure out which one you like. It shouldn't be what I like. Pick something you like and drink it.

17. What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?

One time I brought a friend along when I was going from winery to winery. I think we were doing a rack and return, or racking out of barrel for blending, and I wanted to smell and taste every barrel before it went into the blend. She had never seen me do that part of winemaking. Every barrel must be evaluated to make sure the end product is the best we can make. There's attention to detail. People say, "Oh, you do that during harvest," and it's no, we do that all year round. It's the selection of barrels that go into that particular tank, and into that particular bottle. There's a lot there that people just don't know.

18. What's your favorite wine that you don't make?

That's a hard question, because I make a lot of different wines. At the moment I really like things like Grüner Veltliner. They're almost mouthwatering, with nice acidity, and they go so well with different foods. A lot of the aromatic whites, I guess: Chenin, Riesling, Grüner Veltliner, all those wines that are slightly herbaceous, clean and crisp, with nice acidity. They're fun to make, too, because they give you such immediate gratification. I'm making Sauvignon Blanc, but none of those other varieties right now.

19. When you make a great one, do you know right away?

A lot of times you know the really great ones from the get-go. I taste the fruit on the vine, I taste the fermenter every day, I taste the wines as they age in barrel. The really good ones make you excited and happy, and you think, we've got to show that one to somebody. The great ones talk to you. Then all I have to do, which is very complicated, is control the chaos until it gets all the way from the vineyard into your glass. That's a million different decisions along the way. If I can figure out how to hold on to everything that's great about that wine and make sure it makes it all the way to you, that's the key. It's not as simple as it sounds.

20. One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?

One of my pet peeves is walking into a tasting room and being given a whole bunch of descriptors before I taste. With my clients, when we're putting blends together, I'll taste, they'll taste, and then we have a conversation: I got this, I got that, and here's the story of this wine. Each one has a personality, and I'm trying to enhance whatever that is. If I'm making wine for a client, I'm making the wine they want, not what I want. I give them options, we can go left or right, and the critical thing is whether I'm making it the best it can be for them.

As for what a consumer needs to know, I just try to let them have the experience first. After that I can guide them: here's what I'm getting, do you get that? But I don't want to do that at the start. I want them to experience it on their own first, because it's so easy to persuade somebody into my point of view.

One more: What has the job taken out of you that the public doesn't see?

This time of year, coming out of harvest, I work six or seven days a week. This year harvest started July 30, and we're almost finished with malolactic fermentation, so it'll run probably a few more weeks into November. That's a good chunk of life where I'm 100 percent dedicated to wine, and I think people probably don't appreciate what it takes to get the wine where it needs to go. It's a craft. It's basically handmade. I hope people understand there are people behind that bottle or that brand, trying to make the wine the best they possibly can. Especially now, when people aren't drinking nearly as much wine as they used to, I'd like them to know we're trying to make something exceptional, and hopefully they agree.

Julie Schreiber answered the twenty questions, plus one more, in a recorded conversation on October 30, 2026. Her answers are edited lightly for length and clarity.