By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Spring 2017

Susie Selby, MBA ’85, tells a good story about the early days of her DIY indie Sonoma County winery and her late cat, Bob.

Since those days, she’s had her wine served at the White House through three presidential administrations—Clinton, Bush (W.) and Obama—and at the Sundance Film Festival, developing a modest acquaintance with Robert Redford in the process. But before all that, around the time she supported herself by working at another winery while building her own and sleeping only when time and ambition allowed, Selby was an upstart 30-something woman in yet another male-dominated industry.

Enter Bob, Selby Winery general manager, 1994-2013.

“I was doing a sales meeting about five years ago, and it was a distributor in Arizona whom I had been with forever,” Selby says. “I said, ‘Do you have any questions?’ And he said, ‘Well, how’s Bob?’ And I had a cat named Bob. He was this 26-pound Maine coon. He’s no longer with me, but he was then. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, that is so sweet that you care about Bob.’ And he said, ‘Is he still your general manager?’ And I started laughing.”

Wait, it gets better.

“In the old days,” Selby continues, “they’d say we need to get a discount in order to sell your Chardonnay, and I’d say, ‘Well, let me talk to Bob and get back to you,’” Selby says. “And I’d come home and go, ‘Do I want to give them a discount?’ or whatever, and I’d call them back and say, ‘You know, I’m really sorry, but Bob said absolutely not.’ And so I had this pretend GM named Bob, who was my cat.”

[laughing]

“My problem in a male-dominated industry is I really don’t have typical male characteristics,” Selby says. “I’m nonconfrontational. I’m emotional. I just have [traditionally] strong female characteristics. I always have. And it doesn’t make me the greatest businessperson in the world—it probably makes me a better winemaker. Once my dad passed away, there’s never been male involvement because I’ve avoided partners and investors. So all I’ve ever had as a partner is my poor deceased cat, Bob, but he ruled with an iron fist.”

Paw. Iron paw. Whatever. Anyway.

Selby founded Selby Winery in 1994 with her father, David, a noted spine surgeon and lifetime wine buff who left as patrimony, among other things, a love of wine.

When her father died in 1997, it forced Selby to scramble. At this point, Selby had no tasting room and sold no wine directly to consumers. She relied on wine festivals and increasingly effusive reviews from publications like Wine Spectator to get national distribution while making and storing her wine in a gloomy, rented warehouse that felt haunted. A man allegedly died there in the 1970s, and Selby says she and her employees heard footsteps and doors slamming while working there late at night.

But Selby Winery remained on tenuous financial footing, and its proprietor, driven by self-preservation, continued to work her second job at Rabbit Ridge Winery. There, over five years, Selby learned the wine business and clambered up the Rabbit Ridge depth chart from tasting room manager to warehouse manager to cellar master and, finally, assistant winemaker.

Selby had no formal winemaking education, and working at Rabbit Ridge compensated for that as she built cachet, drudging in the cellars and putting away her MBA to lift wine casks and drive a forklift.

“I could manage a group of guys—and they were all guys—because I had a [crucial] job, and you can’t effectively manage people if you’re not a key player and if you can’t do all the jobs,” Selby says. “So I was the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave at night. I would help them fill barrels, crush grapes, rack and clean tanks, whatever we were doing.”

She was the only woman there.

“The owner was very, very good to me,” Selby says. “... He wasn’t sexist at all, and you still don’t see that many women on a forklift or women doing that type of manual work in wine country.”

Rabbit Ridge, in a very direct way, also is the reason her Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs went to Washington. One day in 1999, a guy who happened to be the White House’s director of food and beverage walked in for a tasting. Selby emceed the usher’s wine flight and answered his questions before going above and beyond and giving him a personal cellar tour. During that hour and a half, Selby tactfully, if not a bit opportunistically, plugged the wine she made at her then-fledgling haunted warehouse winery.

“I didn’t realize who he was, and he came into the tasting room and was just a wonderful man,” Selby says. “He was interested in learning, and I asked him to come back so I could teach him more about wine since he just had this new dream job. And when I got a call from the White House, I had no idea why they were ordering it.”

The phone call came within six months or so, and since then, Selby wine has been poured for foreign leaders—including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair—as well as at Obama’s 49th birthday party.

Selby says the Clintons and Bushes liked the Chardonnay, while the Obamas favored the Sauvignon Blanc. Years later, Selby went on a White House tour with that usher, Daniel Shanks, and she asked why he picked her wine.

“I said, ‘Do you always do this for your winemakers?’” Selby says. “And he said, ‘No… you spent an hour and a half teaching me about wine, and it just was a big unsolicited act of kindness I’m happy I could repay some day.’”

In 2000, Selby quit Rabbit Ridge to go full time at her winery. A few years later, she opened a new tasting room in a little box of a house she bought in downtown Healdsburg, Calif.—with a new, un-haunted production house just a few blocks down the road.

At its high point, Selby Winery produced 28,000 cases of wine a year, but now successful, Selby has scaled back to 13,000 cases a year and picked up golf. Four summers in and she’s yet to break 100, but she’s never sold out her indie soul, eschewing all would-be business partners after her father, except, of course, for Bob.

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