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The Hero of Her Own Story - Karen MacNeil April 2026
She thought she’d stay in France. After Château Haut-Brion, why think of being anyplace else? Wine, she felt, was in her core.
From the age of 14, she knew she wanted to be a winemaker. She could not not make wine. And interning at a First Growth château in Bordeaux? Not bad for a young woman from South America who, when she showed up at an agricultural school in France, couldn’t even speak French.
But Bibiana González Rave is not your typical winemaker. Born and raised in Colombia by parents who never drank wine, she initially studied chemical engineering. France, however, was where the winemaking action was. Along with Château Haut-Brion, La Mission Haut-Brion, and La Dominique in Bordeaux, she worked in Côte-Rôtie at Michel & Stéphane Ogier and Domaine Clusel-Roch, and in Burgundy at Domaine du Devevey.
Bibiana eventually moved to California (where the new action was). She worked at Au Bon Climat in the Santa Maria Valley, and then eventually became the head winemaker at Lynmar (Russian River Valley) and at Wayfarer on the Sonoma Coast. In between all this, she met her husband Jeff Pisoni (of Pisoni Wines in the Santa Lucia Highlands), himself an accomplished winemaker.
I first came to know Bibiana, not in person, but through her pure, rich Sonoma Coast Pinot Noirs under her own label Cattleya (cat LAY ah), named for the national flower of Columbia, an orchid. The first of her Pinots I drank was called The Belly of the Whale. Who names a wine for the belly of a whale, I thought? As it turns out, “belly of the whale,” is an allegory created by the late scholar and writer Joseph Campbell. The phrase refers to a hero’s death and rebirth, the point when one is separated from an old self and transformed as a changed person, and ready to continue their journey as someone “new.”
It made sense, that name. In some ways, it mirrored her own journey. Besides Cattleya, she also has another wine brand—Shared Notes—which she co-owns with her husband and with whom she now, finally, shares (wine) notes. Winemakers can be notoriously secretive.
Both the Cattleya wines (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Syrah) and the Shared Notes wines (Sauvignon Blanc) have incredible purity.
When I think about purity and precision in wine, I always think about sound as a metaphor for flavor. If flavor WAS a sound, then pure, precise wines are like the sound of church bells in the mountains. Nothing diffuse. No static. Everything exact. Every molecule lined up on the same trajectory of intensity.
-Karen MacNeil
July 2, 2026
