Elizabeth Kester has been making wine with Wente Family Estates since 2010, when she started as an intern before working her way up to her current role as Director of Winemaking. A proven leader in her field, Elizabeth drives innovation in the winery and implements the latest technologies to collaborate with the viticulture team to bring in the highest quality grapes, crafting world class wines.

A native of Northridge, California, Elizabeth fell in love with the wine industry as a child while visiting her aunt and uncle in Napa Valley. Though too young to imbibe, she was enchanted by wine country culture, deciding right then that she wanted to be immersed in it as a career. She attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to pursue its distinguished wine program. Her concentration was Wine Business, but she yearned to work more directly with the grapes. A 2009 harvest internship with Edna Valley Vineyards under her first mentor, Matt Brain, confirmed that instinct. Working in the cellar and lab established her love of getting dirty and having constant purple hands – she knew she was destined for production from that moment on.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Wine and Viticulture and a concentration in Wine Business, she decided to develop her palate a bit more as a Wine Specialist for BevMo. Working under the legendary Wilfred Wong, her role enabled her to travel and taste wines from all over the world, which provided her with a deeper understanding of how to cultivate, identify and appreciate true terroir. She couldn’t wait to go back to the cellar and guide that sense of place with her own hands, and subsequently accepted an internship at Wente Vineyards.

There, Elizabeth immediately clicked with the people, the wines and the estate, and was thrilled to stay on full time as a lab tech when the opportunity arose. From there, she was a sponge, finding indelible mentorship in the estate’s forward-thinking winemakers, Karl Wente and Sergio Traverso. She snuck into every important decision-making room to be a fly on a wall and learned to ask for the opportunities she sought. She worked her way all the way up to Enologist, then Winemaker, before ultimately being named Director of Winemaking in 2021. Elizabeth’s goal is to create delicious, elegantly balanced wines that express true varietal typicity and honor the sense of place where the grapes are grown. After multiple travels to Bordeaux, the Rhône and Burgundy in France, she has been inspired by the singular terroir she now gets to work with in the Livermore Valley and Arroyo Seco.

When she isn’t in the cellar, Elizabeth loves being outside, golfing with her husband Mike, playing with their Longhaired Dachshund (Franqlin), camping in her family’s Westfalia or occasionally taking Eric Wente’s horses out for a ride through the vineyards.