Interviews

Dr. Laura Catena is the Managing Director of Bodega Catena Zapata, the oldest family winery in Argentina that is still in family hands. She is also a physician, researcher, and author. In her interview, she reflects on the role of the three previous generations in growing the family business. Her great-grandfather Nicola Catena, an Italian vintner, planted their first vineyards in Mendoza in 1902. Dr. Catena remarks that the long-term investment of planting vineyards makes the wine industry suitable for family businesses: “I think they might not start that way, but they continue as such.” Her grandfather Domingo Catena expanded the venture by shipping their wines to Buenos Aires. Just as inflation was driving the company into bankruptcy, her father Nicolas Catena Zapata took over its operations. Dr. Catena explains that he saved the business by making difficult and bold decisions. While Argentina and Chile were successful producing inexpensive wines in the 1990s, her father, an economist, foresaw the financial crisis of 2001. Inspired by vintners in the Napa Valley, California, he was determined to make luxury wines that could compete with French products. He quickly gained knowhow by offering leading foreign winemakers free use of his winery in exchange for demonstrations of their techniques. Dr. Catena shares that her father’s great innovation was planting vineyards in cooler climates, starting with the Adrianna vineyard at 5,000 feet of elevation. This shift was quickly adopted by the rest of the region. Under his direction, the business received its first 100-point rating for one of their wines from leading wine critic Robert Parker Jr. Wine Spectator then invited the company to the New York Wine Experience in 1995, making Catena Zapata the first South American winery in attendance.

After completing her bachelor’s degree at Harvard College, Dr. Catena pursued a career in emergency medicine at Stanford Medical School. Dr. Catena explains that, at the time, she did not understand how doing business could help people. She started participating in the winery as a hobby. She ended up joining the business during her residency, seeking to improve the reputation of South American wine in the international market and, thereby, her family wine’s exportability. In doing so, she learned how business can help improve living conditions, including nutrition, education, and housing, in Argentina. Dr. Catena describes how being a doctor shaped her approach to working in the wine industry—from feeling confident in her authority as a businesswoman to being an empathetic negotiator. She shares the lessons she learned from her father about domestic and foreign markets, delivering quality, and diversification. Adding on to these, she points out the advantage of distributing family members across different export markets. Dr. Catena reveals moments where she had to advocate for herself to solidify her leadership position. Growing beyond her comfort zone as a researcher, she requested guidance and mentorship to master the company’s finances. Building on these teachings, Dr. Catena created biannual organizational project meetings to make operations sustainable for the company’s increasing size. She discusses the issue of succession and the opportunity for family businesses to open the field up to women by offering female and male family members an equal chance for promotion to directive roles.

Reflecting on her contributions to the family business, Dr. Catena shares her mission to use science to preserve nature and culture. Her first assignment upon joining Bodega Catena Zapata was founding the Catena Institute of Wine. Many of the company’s strategies to tackle irrigation problems have harnessed indigenous, traditional knowledge. Through its research, the Institute has identified a great range of genetic diversity of Malbec cuttings in the region, dismantling the idea among sommeliers that terroir – the extent to which the land where grapes are grown imparts a unique character to wine that is specific to that growing site – is a uniquely European phenomena. Now leading in terroir studies, the Institute is also expanding its research activities to investigate ageability. Dr. Catena hopes to use this data to demonstrate that Argentine wines can stand with the best wines of the world. She highlights the importance of engaging in research partnerships and sharing data, sustainability protocols, and study results, and emphasizes the cost-efficiency of conducting research in developing countries. Dr. Catena describes the creative efforts that have been made to strengthen the brand. As designed be her sister, Catena Zapata is the first company to tell its family history on a wine label. It was released with an original play, in which a woman recounts the history of Malbec. Dr. Catena has written several books about the history of wine and vineyards. Besides publishing her books in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, she published her latest book, “Gold in the Vineyards” in Chinese as an avenue into that market.

Dr. Catena concludes the interview by delving into the challenges she has faced throughout her career and how she has overcome them. Focusing on business in Argentina, she describes how companies navigate inflation and the consequent uncertainty of credit. Bodega Catena Zapata has gained financial stability through competitive pricing and by complementing its local business with international luxury wine exports. She analyzes the issue of finding workers, especially as more families move to cities. Her winery has sought to attract workers by providing competitive pay, housing, and internet access in remote vineyard areas. Regarding automation, she notes that the winery buys machines that reduce the physical demand on harvesters, saving manually intensive practices for small volumes of higher-end wines. She then discusses the particularities of North American, European, and Asian export markets, emphasizing the need for better trade agreements and methods to pay foreign employees. Finally, Dr. Catena contemplates how the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in recent trends in drinking moderation, remote work, virtual wine tastings, and greater investments in long-term sustainability projects.

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