2027 Symposium Speakers

Education
Master of Science in Taxation, Golden Gate University, September 1993
Bachelor of Arts in Business Economics, UC Santa Barbara, June 1991

Experience
AWG Wine Advisors, Principal / Allen Wine Group LLP, Managing Partner, April 2009 – Present
Kuleto Estate Family Vineyards, President & CFO, Jan 2008 – Mar 2009
Rosenblum Cellars, Chief Financial Officer, Jan 2004 – Dec 2007
Arrowood Vineyards & Winery (Robert Mondavi), Director of Ops & Finance, Oct 2002 – Dec 2003
Sonoma-Cutrer Vineyards (Brown-Forman), Chief Financial Officer, Nov 1997 – Jun 2002
La Crema Winery (Kendall-Jackson), Controller, Apr 1996 – Oct 1997
Deloitte & Touche LLP, Senior Accountant, Audit & Tax, Jan 1992 – Mar 1996

Certifications & Teaching
Active California Certified Public Accountant, licensed July 1995
Adjunct Professor, Sonoma State University, Fall 2000 – Spring 2001
Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Advanced Certificate and Diploma Level 1 & 2 – December 2006
Founder, instructor and program developer, Wine Industry CPE, Jan 2020 – present

P.J. Alviso grew up in the Sierra Foothills within a family vineyard business, and joined The Duckhorn Portfolio in 2007. He has most recently served as Senior Vice President, Operations, transitioning into the Chief Operating Officer in February of 2027 where he will have responsibility for the vineyard, winemaking, winery operations, supply strategy, supply chain, engineering, and grower relations functions at Duckhorn. Through the growth of Duckhorn over the last 20 years, PJ has had the opportunity to participate first-hand in the conceptualization, execution, and successful growth of several leading brands, including Decoy, the #1 premium wine brand in the US.

Mr. Alviso holds a Master of Business Administration from Sonoma State University, and a Bachelor of Science in Viticulture from California Polytechnic State University.

Jeff Bitter is a lifelong resident of California. Born into a family vineyard operation, Jeff has always had a passion for agriculture and specifically grape growing. Jeff is the President of Allied Grape Growers (AGG), a 400-member statewide grape growers cooperative marketing association. AGG markets approximately $80,000,000 worth of grapes annually to wineries, shippers, packers and dehydrators. In addition to managing AGG, Jeff is a fourth-generation California grape grower, actively farming winegrapes in Madera County, where he resides.

Jeff earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Business from California State University, Fresno and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the same. Jeff is also a graduate of Class XXXII of the California Agricultural Leadership Program, a prestigious two-year fellowship program emphasizing leadership training and development for those involved in California agriculture.

Jeff participates on numerous industry boards, committees and task forces and spends his free time farming, traveling and enjoying time with family and friends. Jeff has one minor and three adult children, one of which is married and has provided Jeff with two grandsons.

Sessions:

State of the Industry

Leticia Chacón has served as Winemaker and Winery Manager at the University of California, Davis, since 2019, where her primary mission is to support teaching and research at the Department of Viticulture and Enology’s Teaching and Research Winery.

Originally from Mexico City, Leticia earned her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She began her career as a Production Assistant at Industrias Vinícolas Pedro Domecq in Mexico. Recognizing her passion for winemaking, she moved to Davis to pursue a master’s degree in food science with an emphasis in Enology at UC Davis.

Before returning to UC Davis in her current role, Leticia built extensive experience across California’s Central Valley, Central Coast, and North Coast, working with Safe Harbor Wine Storage, Treasury Wine Estates, E. & J. Gallo Winery, Golden State Vintners (now part of The Wine Group), and Delicato Vineyards. These diverse experiences shaped her technical expertise and her understanding of winemaking across a wide range of production environments.

Leticia is actively involved in the American Society for Enology and Viticulture (ASEV), a professional organization serving enologists, viticulturists, and other professionals in the wine industry. She is a past president of ASEV and currently serves as Second Vice President on its Board of Directors. She also serves on the Program Development Committee for the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, the largest wine and grape industry trade show in the United States.

Outside the winery, Leticia enjoys spending time with her husband and watching her two sons grow and explore their interests. Together, they enjoy hiking, biking, cooking, listening to music ranging from classical and jazz to folkloric traditions, watching movies, and appreciating the little things that make life special.

Sessions:

Tradición e Innovación para Impulsar la Excelencia (Presentada en español), Tradition with Innovation to Drive Excellence (Presented in Spanish)

Christopher Chen is the UCCE Integrated Vineyard Systems Advisor for the North Coast region of California. His work through the North Coast Viticulture program focuses on stress-adaptive viticulture practices to help address the concerns related to changing biotic and abiotic stressors in vineyards and brings actionable research to the grape growing communities of Northern California. In 2021, Dr. Chen received his doctorate from University of California Davis, focusing on physiological stress response research in grapevines; he continues to focus his efforts on these adaptation objectives in vineyards.

Raised on Central Coast ranches, Audra Cooper combines a lifelong connection to the land with a clear-eyed grasp of the California winegrape and bulk wine markets. As Vice President and Director of Sales at Turrentine Brokerage, she bridges hands-on agricultural reality with high-level supply strategy, helping growers and wineries navigate complex market cycles across the state.

Audra’s career at Turrentine spans two decades of continuous leadership and high value dealmaking. Joining the firm in 2006, she advanced from sales support to lead grape brokerage roles in the North Coast and Central Coast, earning a reputation as one of the industry’s most creative deal architects.

Today, as Vice President and Director of Sales, Audra oversees sales operations across both the Grape and Bulk Wine departments while guiding broader executive strategy for the firm. Backed by a degree in Agricultural Economics from California State University, Fresno, her analytical approach allows her to evaluate supply trends, regional crop conditions, and market shifts with exceptional clarity.

Known for her grounded, pragmatic style, Audra is a trusted voice across the industry. She frequently speaks at statewide and regional conferences, serving as a reliable partner to clients and a respected contributor to regional agricultural organizations.

Tony Correia is widely recognized as a leading authority on the valuation of vineyards and wineries, and other agricultural and rural properties. He has been an instructor of valuation courses and seminars throughout North America and is a frequent speaker on agricultural properties; valuation, taxation, and estate planning issues; water rights, and the wine industry and vineyard and winery markets. Tony has also qualified as an Expert Witness in many local, State and Federal courts in California, Arizona, Nevada and Illinois. Tony was also recognized as one of four top leaders in the wine industry at a gathering of the Top 50 Leaders in the Wine Business in Napa, California.

Tony is currently Principal and Owner of The Correia Company. After undergraduate work at Saint Mary’s College of California and Syracuse University, Tony graduated from California State University, Fresno with a major and post-graduate work in English and a second major in Russian. Prior pursuits include former lives as a grape grower, partner in a large commercial real estate brokerage, and various government positions including a tour as an IRS examiner, and as a military intelligence analyst, cryptanalyst, and linguist. He now lives in San Juan Bautista with his wife Stephanie and enjoys travel, photography, great literature and music, fast cars, slow cooking, gardening, the study of wine, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Dana DiTomaso is the Principal & Founder of Kick Point, a full-service marketing agency where she helps organizations make better decisions through strategy, analytics, and SEO. After two decades of watching clients struggle with data that didn’t answer their real questions, Dana founded Analytics Playbook — a learning platform focused on practical, accessible analytics education. Through Analytics Playbook, she teaches marketers and agencies how to set up, track, and actually understand Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio, and the metrics that matter to their business.

Dana is a sought-after speaker on analytics, SEO, and digital strategy at conferences worldwide. She’s also the weekly technology columnist on CBC Edmonton AM, teaches digital analytics at the University of Alberta, and has reached over 200,000 learners through her LinkedIn Learning courses. In her spare time, she enjoys yelling at football players and collecting hobbies.

Gerardo Espinosa spent much of his career designing buildings and creating spaces. As a project manager with WMB Architects in Stockton, he needed imagination, creativity, and talent to turn inspiration into art. Fulfilling and challenging as his career was, Espinosa always was drawn to his heritage – the grandson of Mexican immigrants who came to California in the 1940s, worked the fields, saved their money, purchased the property, and on it, his uncles planted wine grapevines. Inspired by his family’s agricultural roots.

Espinosa started making wine with his family’s fruit and in 2008 launched his own brand, Vinedos Aurora. In 2015, he and business partner Mark Nureddine, owner of Bull Outdoor Products, opened Lodi Crush, a custom winemaking facility on Pine Street in Lodi. For years, Espinosa lived a double life in demanding fields. Eventually, he hung up his scale ruler and drafting board to build Lodi Crush, devoting his full-time attention, imagination, creativity, and talent to turning inspiration into the art of winemaking.

In April 2020, Espinosa moved Lodi Crush into larger digs, on 21 East Elm Street in downtown Lodi. There, Espinosa crafts wines for his new label, Anaya Vineyards, and for clients in Lodi, Napa Valley, and Contra Costa County, about 10,000 cases total. So as not to completely abandon his architectural bent, Espinosa has designed to transform the existing tasting room space into a wine bar, where he offers flights of Anaya Vineyards and his clients.

Jen Evans is the Chief Financial Officer of The Wine Group. She has over 25 years of finance, strategy, and commercial experience in the alcoholic beverage and consumer goods industries.

Previously, Jen served as CFO for KEEN Footwear as well as spent over 11 years at Constellation Brands in various finance leadership positions, including revenue growth management, commercial finance, international sales, strategy, venture capital, and CFO of the Wine & Spirits division. Prior to Constellation, Jen worked in strategy consulting, where she specialized in advising retail, hospitality, and consumer packaged goods companies. She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

Marshall Graves is a Managing Director at First Citizens Bank’s Wine Division (formerly known as Silicon Valley Bank) and manages a team that supports Napa Valley wineries and grape growers with their financial needs, including winery and vineyard acquisition, winery construction, vineyard development, and working capital lines of credit. While his primary focus is now Napa Valley, he has also had the privilege of working with wineries in Oregon, Washington, Sonoma, Paso Robles, and Santa Barbara – bringing a broad perspective to each client relationship. Marshall holds a certificate from the Wine Executive Program at UC Davis and earned an Executive MBA in Wine Business from Sonoma State University.

Lulie Halstead is a globally recognised leader in wine business strategy.

As founder and CEO of Wine Intelligence for 20 years, she transformed how the drinks industry understands consumers, using research and data to tell the human stories behind every glass. Following a private equity–backed exit, Wine Intelligence became part of the IWSR Group, where Lulie later served as a Non-Executive Director.

A keynote speaker at more than 100 international conferences, she is known for blending academic rigour with commercial insight to explain how and why people drink what they do. She has taught strategy and marketing on wine business master’s programmes worldwide for over two decades, from Bordeaux to Adelaide.

Today, through Intellima, Lulie advises leading wine businesses on growth and market strategy, and invests in and mentors founders across drinks and hospitality. She co-hosts the podcast A Question of Drinks, chairs English whisky bottler The Heart Cut, and is a Trustee of WSET and a board member of Drinks United.

Charlie Hamilton is the Vineyard & Operations Manager at KG Vineyard Management, where he oversees all vineyard operations, including development, budgeting, pest management, and sustainability programs across Districts 5, 11, and 17 in Northern California. His work spans conventional, sustainable, and organic farming systems, with a strong focus on soil health, water efficiency, and long-term economic viability for growers.

In addition to his role at KG Vineyard Management, Charlie is the co-owner of Pressley Vineyards, which he operates alongside his wife, Brittany. Together, they craft small-lot wines with a focus on sustainable winegrape growing and responsible land stewardship. Charlie is actively involved in industry leadership and sustainability initiatives, including LODI RULES certification and organic transition planning.

Charlie regularly speaks on the practical implementation of vineyard technology, regenerative practices, and the economic realities facing California grape growers, bringing a hands-on, operations-driven perspective to industry discussions.

Sessions:

Back to the Vineyard: Weed Management, Technology in Vineyard Operations: Practical Use and Real-World Challenges

Bart Haycraft
Vice President of Farming, South Coast
Jackson Family Wines

Bart Haycraft serves as Vice President of Farming for the South Coast region at Jackson Family Wines, where he oversees vineyard operations, farming strategy, and the stewardship of premium wine grape assets across the region. With extensive experience in viticulture and agricultural leadership, Bart is responsible for driving sustainable farming practices, vineyard performance, and operational excellence while supporting the production of world-class wines.

Sessions:

Technology in Vineyard Operations: Practical Use and Real-World Challenges

Justin Leigon became a partner at Piña Vineyard Management in 2022 after serving as Head Viticulturist, a natural fit for the husband and father of three within the family-founded company. He oversees all facets of high-end winegrape farming and vineyard development, drawing on a career that began in wine production and a B.S. in Viticulture and Enology from UC Davis. After time abroad in Australia and cellar work throughout Napa Valley, Justin refined a style centered on minimal inputs and precise grape development. He remains committed to community outreach and advocating for agricultural education.

Julie Lumgair is an award-winning consulting and hands-on winemaker. Her wines span twenty two vintages and 27 varietals from Napa Valley, Sonoma County and Italy. She has served in many combined estate winemaking and winegrowing roles with a keen eye on agricultural and cellar practices to significantly elevate sustainability, wine quality and sales.

Her calling cards are consistently producing acclaimed wines in good and challenging vintages that reflect their place, plus excellence in winery operations, substantial innovation and trial programs feasible for artisan wineries’ scale, a passionate attention to customer delight and long-lasting relationships.

Julie is a 5th generation Tennessee family farmer, who honed her sensory science, new product development, team building and executive leadership in her first career at Procter & Gamble and other noted Fortune 100 firms for 15 years. That experience, along with her “roll up the sleeves” work ethic, plus technical and analytical skills learned on the job from many mentors in the vineyards and cellars have been supplemented by years of rigorous independent technical study.

She has made exceptional wines including Art Nouveau, a new artisan Napa winery launched in 2025, J. Moss, Ideology Cellars, Valley of the Moon / Lake Sonoma, Castello di Montegiove, Windsor Oaks Vineyards and other private clients. Julie’s ongoing wine trials and experiments have been featured in industry press and conferences. Over 100 of her wines have consistently achieved 90+ scores and been noted by several leading critics including a Wine Spectator “Producer to Watch,” Wine & Spirits varietal “Top Ten” and “Year’s Best” lists.

Julie deeply enjoys volunteering, mentoring and building community. She is one of thirty industry leaders on the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium Program Committee and serves as President of Women for WineSense Napa / Sonoma and prior long-time Chair of their Winemaking & Viticultural Roundtable. She is a contributing technical writer and wine judge for wine industry trade and consumer publications, frequent winemaker panelist for Napa Valley Vintner’s top trade and media conferences and VIP immersions and masterclass developer / instructor at Napa Valley Wine Academy. She is a past board member for Napa Valley Wine Technical Group and IQ (Innovation + Quality) Conference for luxury winemaking advances. She received a 2023 NorCal Public Media Wine & Food Award for “Makers & Heroes that Give Back.”

For more information, please connect via LinkedIn or reach out directly to Julie.lumgair@gmail.com or 415-786-3415

Sessions:

Love It or List It? Wine Edition: Mergers, Acquisitions and Exit

Originally from Mendoza, Argentina, Luciana Moreno Turkovich is a fourth-generation member of a winemaking family. She studied enology at Don Bosco University in Mendoza, where she developed her deep passion for the world of wine.

After completing her studies, she began her international career in Australia’s renowned McLaren Vale. She later moved to Napa Valley, California, where she worked for four years with the Duncan family at Silver Oak, one of the region’s most respected wineries.

In 2009, Luciana and her husband Chris founded Turkovich Family Wines, a family-run winery located in the Winters Highlands AVA in California. The project reflects a fusion of Argentine winemaking heritage with California innovation and terroir. Making Farm to Glass wine.

In 2021, she launched a consulting company with her father, a renowned sparkling wine consultant. Together, they advise wineries in Mexico’s Valle de Guadalupe and central wine regions, specializing in the development of high-quality sparkling wines.

Luciana is also the teaching the Sparkling Wine Program at CETYS University in Ensenada, Baja California, where she mentors and trains the next generation of winemakers.

Sessions:

Tradición e Innovación para Impulsar la Excelencia (Presentada en español), Tradition with Innovation to Drive Excellence (Presented in Spanish)

Bourcard Nesin is VP of Research covering beverages at Rabobank. He is a co-host of Liquid Assets, a podcast described as “unmissable” by Spirits Business. A few of his recent reports and recordings include:

• Best Athlete: The strategy upending US alcohol distribution
• The real reasons Gen Z is drinking less alcohol
• Will beer distributors become the only kind of distributor? (audio – Liquid Assets)
• Why are so many young men quitting alcohol? (audio – Liquid Assets)
• Will the US wine industry ever recover from the current glut? (audio – Liquid Assets)

Devin Parr is a leading personality in the wine industry. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Devin Parr & Associates, a PR, marketing, and content agency in the beverage, travel and tourism space. She holds her Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) Diploma as well as a certification in wine expertise from the Apicius International School of Hospitality in Florence, Italy, and a B.A. in political science and economics from UC San Diego. In 2017, she was named one of Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 Tastemakers.

A passionate storyteller, Devin regularly contributes to wine and lifestyle publications, including VinePair, WineCountry.com, NapaValley.com, Sonoma.com, and The Gourmet Insider, and her own blog on DevinParr.com, where she covers the business of wine. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Vintner Project, and co-founder of online wine community Grapeloop. When she’s not traveling the world in search of memorable wines, she moonlights as an aspiring ninja, pursuing her black belt in Shorin Ryu karate.

Devin is based in Temecula, California with her husband, two sons, and two bossy Shih Tzus. Follow her wine, parenting, and martial arts adventures at @thesocalwinegal.

Sessions:

Pitch Perfectly: Building Better Bridges Between Public Relations and Wine Media

Norm Peters
Director of Vineyard Operations
Silver Oak

Norm Peters is Director of Vineyard Operations at Silver Oak Wine Cellars, where he oversees estate farming for the portfolio—Silver Oak, Twomey, OVID Napa Valley, and Timeless Napa Valley in California, plus Prince Hill Vineyards in Oregon. Never far from a pair of dusty boots, Norm’s experience spans 24 harvests, and he’s devoted to the art and science of growing exceptional wine grapes.

He entered the wine industry on an unconventional path, leaving a career as a vice principal and educator on assignment to run a former boss’s 100-acre vineyard and winery. He went on to serve as Winemaker and then Director of Winemaking at California Cellars. At The Wine Group, he worked as a Grower Representative, purchasing fruit and managing vineyard quality across Lodi, Clarksburg, Sonoma, and Livermore while collaborating with more than 60 growers. Drawn back to the pressures and rewards of full-time farming, he became Director of Central Valley Vineyard Operations at Trinchero Family Estates (Sutter Home) for four harvests before finding his home at Silver Oak.

Norm holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts and an M.A. in Educational Leadership from Saint Mary’s College of California.

Sessions:

Pause or Proceed – Evaluating the Future of Your Vineyard

Information to come.

Camilla Sartori is a Food Scientist and Sensory Manager at Oregon State University, specializing in wine descriptive analysis. She leads sensory research in Dr. Elizabeth Tomasino’s lab and works with the Oregon Wine Research Institute on projects involving aroma perception, descriptive analysis, and consumer testing. Camilla develops sensory protocols, manages trained and consumer panels, and oversees lab operations and data quality.

Sessions:

Clarity In the Smoke: Integrating Wine Sensory to Chemical Analysis and Predictive Modeling for Wildfire Smoke Events

Melaney Schmidt is the winemaker behind Landmass Wines in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge, where she challenges conventional ideas of Oregon winemaking through a focus on emerging regions, alternative varietals, and expressive, site-driven wines. Moving beyond the Willamette Valley’s traditional emphasis on Pinot Noir, Schmidt explores the diversity of Oregon’s growing regions and the potential of varieties that remain underrepresented in the Pacific Northwest. Her work includes an ambitious sparkling wine program spanning multiple grape varieties and production methods, reflecting her commitment to technical precision, experimentation, and expanding the possibilities of Oregon wine.

John Skupny is the Proprietor and Winemaker for Lang & Reed Napa Valley, a winery dedicated to crafting Cabernet Franc and Chenin blanc in California which he and his wife, Tracey, founded over thirty years ago. John has over 50 years of wine business experience, which includes executive positions at Caymus Vineyards, Clos du Val and Niebaum-Coppola [Inglenook].

John is also a past Chairman of the Napa Valley Vintners, past President of the Stag’s Leap District Winegrowers and founding Vice President of the Rutherford Dust Society. In addition to Lang & Reed, John is a wine industry consultant that has provided marketing, production and succession advice to over 25 wineries and breweries thought Vineyard Avenue Marketing.

John & Tracey have lived in St. Helena, in the Heart of Napa Valley since 1984, surrounded by their children and grandchildren.

Dr. Elizabeth Tomasino is a Professor of Enology at Oregon State University and a core member of the Oregon Wine Research Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Oenology from Lincoln University in New Zealand, incorporating microbiology, winemaking, sensory science, chemistry and food science. She also holds an M.S. in Food Science from Cornell University. A Wine Enthusiast 2022 Wine Star Awards winner, Tomasino was named “Innovator of the Year” for her research on grape smoke exposure and smoke taint in wine.

Tomasino was project director of a USDA-NIFA Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) grant on grape smoke exposure (2021–2026), working with colleagues at the University of California, Davis and Washington State University. Her team discovered thiophenols, a new class of compounds that contributes to the ashy flavor of smoke-tainted wine. They are developing sprayable coatings that protect grapes from smoke compounds in the vineyard, and they have established natural baseline levels of smoke markers in Oregon and California grapes and wines. Their consumer research showed there is a market among some wine drinkers for smoke-impacted wines. Her smoke research continues with funding from the USDA Agricultural Research Service. In 2025 she chaired the American Society for Enology and Viticulture (ASEV) Smoke Taint Symposium, and she serves on the ASEV Board of Directors.

Her research program sits at the interface of wine chemistry and sensory science, linking chemical compounds to how people perceive them. Her projects have examined the role of chiral terpenes in aromatic white wines and used fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to uncover the causes of fruity aromas. She has developed predictive models for tropical fruit aromas in white wine. Her group is also developing non-contact methods that selectively remove off flavors, such as reductive sulfur compounds, from wine.

She has worked on research projects with E & J Gallo, Yalumba Winery, Robert Mondavi Winery, Giesen Wine Estates and Pernod Ricard NZ, which fuels her interest in applied research. She brings her findings into her undergraduate and graduate teaching, and she speaks regularly to industry and international audiences. She is open to new ideas and collaborations and welcomes the chance to discuss and enjoy wine.

Riley Wathen Slack has been immersed in the wine industry her entire life, growing up walking through vineyards and climbing on barrels with her father, Bill Wathen, co-founder of Foxen Vineyard.

After getting her degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009, she excitedly joined the Santa Barbara County wine industry workforce. After taking some time away from wine working in the San Francisco tech industry, she returned to Foxen in 2019 where she is now the General Manager, working directly with the founders and additional second-generation family members on Foxen’s future success.

When Riley is away from Foxen, you can find her enjoying local culinary delights, hiking or having a beach day with her husband Chuck, swimming laps in a pool, or snuggling with her two cats while reading a book and sipping on a cold glass of Chenin blanc.