The Women in the Sherry Trade

From an interesting article in the Diario de Jerez

In what has always been a masculine world there have always been women, though never as many as there are now. In the past they were generally inheritors of bodegas when their husbands died, and continued to run them successfully despite the men.

Widows like Teresa Reizo, widow of Francisco Ramon Mendoza of Jerez who inherited in 1817. At about the same time there was the widow of the owner of Victoria e Hijos in El Puerto de Santa Maria. The widow of Richard Sheild; in Sanlucar there was  Josefa Colom, widow of Eduardo Hidalgo; and Aurora Ambrosy Lacave who ran bodegas Pedro Romero between 1911 and 1921.

But there were two outstanding women - Pilar Aranda Latorre and Pilar Pla Pechovierto, both with similar problems and needs. Pilar Aranda was a widow with great strength of character and resourcefulness who decided to take on the traditional formality of the trade to give her sons a future in the family almacenista business starting with the 500 butts of some of the finest and oldest wines in Jerez, which she had inherited from her father Fermin Aranda. The bodega managers cooperated fully, and along with good accounting from her cousin Guillermo Ferguson’s stepson, things went very well and she earned universal respect running the bodega for 50 years till her death in 1997. The wines were bottled and marketed by Emilio Lustau, until the bodega was sold to Alvaro Domecq in 1999.

Pilar Pla Pechovierto “the Sherry Lady” runs the bodega El Maestro Sierra, an all-woman firm along with her daughter Maria del Carmen Borrego Pla and the brilliant enologist Ana Cabestrero Ortega. The bodega began in 1830 when the cooper Jose Antonio Sierra of the Calle Merced filled a bodega with butts which he had made. He died with no heirs and the bodega was inherited by his niece Carmen Casal Soto who, when widowed, set up a company with her children Rosario, Josefa and Antonio to whom she entrusted the production of high quality wines by artisanal means. On Antonio’s death she and her daughters took over the running of the business, and it has prospered ever since. It is now one of the most highly regarded bodegas in Jerez.