Medicine & Malbec: The Double Life of Dr. Laura Catena

By Sandra Knispel

Born into a prestigious wine-making family, Dr. Laura Catena nevertheless followed her dream of becoming a doctor. . .and then decided to return to her roots without giving up her day job.

For some, a career is a one-way road. For Dr. Laura Catena it’s a multi-lane highway. By training, the Argentine-born, Harvard magna cum laude, and Stanford Medical School grad is an emergency medicine physician, working in the emergency department at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and in the pediatric ED at California Pacific Medical Center. “I wanted to help people,” she says simply, explaining why she went into medicine. “That was equally important to me as any intellectual fulfillment I might have from my profession. And I really like science," she adds.

As to her choice of emergency medicine, that, she says, has to do with her temperament. “I’m very active and can’t sit still—my grandfather used to call me ‘la lauchita,’ which means ‘the little mouse’ because I was always running around as a child. When I stepped into the emergency department as a medical student at Stanford and worked my first shift, I knew immediately that this is what I wanted to do,” she says. “Also, the patients in the ER are so scared and helpless that I feel that I can make a great impact through kindness, love, and respect towards them—this is the most personally rewarding part of my job.”

She admits to loving the Sherlock Holmes aspect of her job, too. “I’ve been an avid reader of mystery novels since childhood, and figuring out a patient’s diagnosis is like being a detective." 

Helping people, practicing science, being active, solving mysteries, and showing kindness—“medicine combines it all,” she says.

Well, maybe not all.

Medicine is only half of Dr. Catena’s professional life. She was born into the fourth-generation of an Argentine wine-making family, and on her own she’s become a successful vintner who manages her family’s large winery, Bodega Catena Zapata, founded in 1902, and her own, smaller, Luca Winery, both in Mendoza, Argentina. She has given lectures on wine for the American Society of Wine Educators, Stanford Business School, and the Smithsonian Institution; just this past summer she gave a Google Talk. She’s also blogged about wine for the Huffington Post, and been written up in The New York Times Magazine and O, The Oprah Magazine.

The author of Vino Argentino, An Insider’s Guide to the Wines and Wine Country of Argentina (Chronicle Books 2010), Dr. Catena has been called the “face” of Argentine wine, tirelessly promoting the Mendoza wine region and putting Argentine Malbec on the international map.

Dr. Catena somehow manages a full personal life, too. She is married to fellow ER physician, 48-year-old Daniel McDermott, whom she met while they were both orthopedics residents at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. “We bonded over trying to cheer up our patients who were often in a lot of pain and discomfort,” she says. “One Valentine’s Day we were the only ones doing rounds, and we brought Hershey’s Kisses to all of our patients and sat with them as long as they wanted, talking about how they felt and life in general. It was very romantic!” The couple has three children together: sons Luca, 16 and Dante, 13; and daughter Nicola, 9.

Dr. Catena manages her multiple roles without any apparent confusion of identity. Raised in Argentina and based in San Francisco, she holds dual citizenship —Italian (thanks to great-grandparents who emigrated from Italy to Argentina in 1898) and Argentine—along with carrying a U.S. Green Card. She speaks English, Spanish, Italian, and French fluently. In one concession to her professional life, she admits that while Spanish is her mother tongue, her medical vocabulary is much greater in English.

Juggling it All 
Seven or eight days each month, Dr. Catena works in the emergency room, spending much of the remaining time directing the wine business via Skype and phone from her home in San Francisco. She even does her wine lab meetings via Skype, sipping the same samples as her winemakers on another continent, on the other side of the screen. 

For three months each year—February, March, and August—Dr. Catena lives almost entirely in Mendoza, Argentina. The first two are the harvest months, and August is when the blending of the wines takes place. Usually, she packs up her two younger kids and takes them with her to her parents’ home, where the children attend the Italian school in Mendoza. Her oldest son, Luca, the namesake of Dr. Catena’s own winery, now prefers to stay behind in California.

Dr. Catena is often asked how she manages life in the fast lane, or in her case, lanes. “I won’t say it’s easy or that I don’t get stressed out somewhat frequently,” Dr. Catena admits. “But I do have a method.” 

She calls her method “Accepting a B+”—a title she is currently considering for a new book. To help herself stay on track, she’s devised a system of mentally assigning school grades to indicate the priority of things that need to get done. “If I’m in the hospital taking care of my patients, that’s an A+ activity,” she explains. “I can’t ever be distracted by something that’s going on at the winery or even something that’s going on with my children.” 

While taking care of her children is obviously high on her list of priorities, she applies the same grading principle to parenting tasks. “Is an A+ taking lunch to school when [the kids] forget it? No, that’s an F,” she says. “If they forget it, they need to learn to beg for lunch from some other kid.” And if they forget their soccer cleats, she adds, then they’ll just have to watch from the sidelines. “I’m not going to stop a meeting to take their soccer shoes to them.” 

One activity that has fallen victim to her busy schedule is cooking. Dr. Catena remembers somewhat ruefully how she was once a tolerably good cook. But lack of time has turned anything culinary into an F activity.

Besides using her grading system for triage, she also tries to maximize her efficiency by not multitasking. “Do one thing at a time,” is her credo, backed up by medical and psychiatric literature. “Multitasking is not conducive to excellence,” she says. 

While leading a life with multiple commitments in many different directions may be possible only with a highly-honed time-management system, even the best system can’t protect against stress when there are this many roles involved. Sometimes, Dr. Catena says, staying sane means taking a step back to look at the big picture. “I ask myself that question when I start getting stressed out about something the kids missed or something that I missed. I say, ‘Is it life or death?’ And if it’s not–just move on.”

Wine in her Veins
In the early 1980s, when Dr. Catena was growing up, her father, Nicolás Catena, an economist and passionate vintner, moved the family from Argentina to Berkeley for a position as visiting professor of economics at the University of California. The move coincided with Napa Valley’s emergence as a serious wine region that could reasonably challenge the winemaking supremacy of France, Italy, and Spain.

Soon, Dr. Catena’s father was sold on the idea that technology and careful research could yield world-class wines. Upon the family’s return to Argentina, he revolutionized the family’s winemaking business. He sold his table wine company, keeping only the fine wine branch of the family business. He started experimenting with planting wine stocks at high altitudes. In 1994, he was the first to plant a Malbec vineyard at almost 5,000 foot elevation in the foothills of the Andes, and developed the distinctive Argentine Malbec. 

He’s been widely credited with turning the Argentine wine business from run-of-the-mill plonk, which was largely consumed domestically, into world-class fine wine exports. 

Originally called “completamente loco” by his peers, Nicolás ended up as one of Argentina’s most celebrated wine makers, directly and indirectly responsible for creating thousands of well-paid jobs in the region. Today, the Mendoza region is the leading producer of wine in Argentina. Being the economic motor for the region is a responsibility that his daughter, now in charge of the family winery, takes very seriously. “Through these wines, we have changed the lives of thousands and thousands of people in Mendoza,” she says with pride. “Those areas were very poor.”

Following in her Father’s Footsteps
Originally, Dr. Catena had no plans to follow in her famous father’s footsteps. Her father, she says, felt strongly that children should be allowed to make their own decisions when it comes to choosing a profession. While she had learned a good bit about wine by playing translator for her father on his wine reconnaissance trips to France, it never dawned on her that she would one day run the family business.

Her change of heart came by happenstance. In 1995, the Catena Winery was the first Argentine winery invited to the prestigious Wine Spectator’s annual New York Wine Experience, a three-day tasting extravaganza where connoisseurs, estate owners, winemakers, and buyers mingle, sip, and greet.

Her father decided to send Dr. Catena, who had just finished her residency, in his stead to represent the family business because her English was much better than his. “Little did he know that people loved handsome, new winemakers with Spanish accents,” she recalls with a laugh. But things didn’t quite go as planned. At her family’s wine-tasting stand, she watched helplessly as lines of keen samplers formed elsewhere. “I was very surprised to see the long lines for the California wineries, the French wineries, the Italian wineries. But nobody was coming to our stand because nobody knew Argentina made wine. They would look up, see the name, and continue walking."

That was Dr. Catena’s wake-up call. Suddenly, the famous father she had grown up idolizing was in need of help. “You see your father as this sort of mentor, this protector. And all of a sudden I thought, ‘Wow, he needs my help. He’s changing history, and it’s not going to be easy to change the perception of Argentine wine.’ ” It was a desire to help her father and her country, the latter battered by chronic hyperinflation and political instability, that made her decide to take the leap and join the family business.

Learning by Fermentation  
When she first started, Dr. Catena knew little about viticulture. An avid learner and trained skeptic, she applied the scientific approach she was used to from her medical training to winemaking. “The first thing that really fascinated me was the vineyard research. How do you decide where to plant a vineyard? How do you make the best wine?”

For Dr. Catena, that process involved questioning long-held beliefs, as the scientist in her preferred testing and rigorous research to traditional methods and old wives’ tales. She commissioned studies on soil and climate, sustainable viticulture, and high altitude winemaking before planting vineyards in areas that had never before been cultivated.

 Sometimes that meant stepping on the toes of people who had made wine for generations. “I may be tactless sometimes without noticing, although I really try,” she laughs with a self-deprecating shrug.

“In the wine world there is a lot of what I call ‘blabla,’ ” she says. “You know, people say the wines are better when the roots dig deeper. Other people say the wines are better when you have limestone soil.” But most of these claims have never been borne out by science. Dr. Catena says. “In winemaking there are a lot of snake-oil doctors.” 

But for Dr. Catena, trying to make wine of a high caliber in a region that had never been known for its vineyards, skepticism proved useful. “I’m not somebody who worries too much about who likes me and who doesn’t. I may not even notice,” she says matter-of-factly, without a trace of arrogance.

Today Dr. Catena is personally in charge of tasting and approving all the wines the family business produces, the strategic planning for all vineyard and winery investments, and managing worldwide export sales and marketing. Under her stewardship, exports grew over an eight-year period from a modest 15 percent to the current, solid 50 percent. 

And success has brought renown. Wine Enthusiast magazine crowned Bodega Catena Zapata the New World Winery of the Year 2010, Wine Spectator magazine listed their wines six times among its Top 100 Wines, and the company made the Wine & Spirits Top 100 Wineries list nine times. 

“It’s important to me that people realize what fine wines we produce here,” Dr. Catena says passionately. Some of her family’s top wines, like the Nicolás Catena Zapata 1997, a Cabernet Sauvignon-Malbec blend and the country’s first high-priced wine, have placed either first or second in prestigious blind-tasting competitions against the world’s leading names like Château Latour. The accolades have helped the reputation of the region enormously. “It changed the perception of what my country can do.” 

Finding Balance  
Balance may be the key to a good wine, but it’s also necessary for a good life. The rigors of a public life lived between two professions can easily overwhelm one's private life. To maintain a healthy life-work equilibrium, Dr. Catena plays tennis with friends twice a week—once with Argentine and once with American friends, again finely balanced. She also has a standing walking date with another friend. “Sports in female company is the best relaxation for me,” Dr. Catena says. And while she’s constantly thinking of the next book she wants to write, she is not averse to much baser forms of entertainment like kicking back and enjoying TV series like Boardwalk Empire, Dexter, and Game of Thrones with her husband.  

Of course, she drinks wine with her meals. Forget, however, the romantic notion that winemaking—watching the grapes ripen in beautiful mountain settings at sunset—is one of her preferred decompression techniques. While she acknowledges that working as an ED physician is often stressful, she says that winemaking, with its slow growing and fermentation process, is much more so. “As a physician, you can fall back on your training or look up what you don’t know. In medicine, you follow a very specific pathway to diagnosis and treatment. There are safeguards against mistakes.” 

Wine-making, on the other hand, has no such safeguards. “When you deal with an agricultural product, you have complete uncertainty,” she says. “The weather may change. The wines may be good; then suddenly they can go through transformations.”

While in medicine the outcome is objective—either the patient gets better or not—in winemaking, subjectivity looms large. How, ultimately, do you know that your wine is good? “You send the wine to a magazine to be reviewed. One year they like it; another year they don’t.”

Dr. Catena admits that even she gets caught up in the illusion of objective quality, one day finding one of her wines terrific, only to feel disappointment a few days later at the same vintage. In medicine you need to know why something works, but viticulture "is more an art than a science," says Dr. Catena.

So which job does she prefer?

“My doctor job is almost a selfish job because it’s such immediate gratification,” she says. “As a doctor, you can always be the good guy. There, I don’t make decisions based on finances but on the best care for the patient.” Dr. Catena muses, “But when you are running a business, your business needs to survive. And sometimes you have to make difficult decisions, and that has been very hard for me.”

Asked how she’d like her obituary to read some day, the doctor-vintner-wife-mother barely blinks before answering: “I am proud of the work I have done to elevate Argentine wine, and to continue in my father’s path of making Argentine wine that can stand with the best of the world, because it affects the lives of so many people.”  

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I’ll Have What She’s Having!  Dr. Catena’s Tips for Buying and Enjoying Wine

While Catena is obviously a huge fan of her family’s wines, she’s a connoisseur of labels and vintages around the world. Try a few of her recommendations, and be sure to check out the wines from Bodega Catena Zapata and Luca wineries, too.

Dr. Catena’s first recommendation: Start experimenting. Don’t always buy the same old wine. Instead, get recommendations from your local wine store based on what kind of wines you like, and try the same wine from various regions and countries.

Dr. Catena herself tends to drink whites during the week and reds on weekends. “I never get tired of the very high-acid, lean French Chablis,” she says. Right now, she is also enjoying New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, as well as Sauv Blancs from Napa, Chile, France, and Argentina. No points for guessing that she loves Argentine high-altitude Chardonnay, something for which the family winery is famous. At 4,000-plus feet above sea level, high-altitude Chardonnay like the one grown in the Mendoza region tastes crisper than Chardonnays made at lower elevations, Dr. Catena explains.

“For reds, I like to drink Italian reds because they tend to be well balanced and not too alcoholic,” she explains. Of course, she drinks a lot of Argentine Malbec, although there are also many other red varieties that do well in Argentina, such as Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. She recommends trying red blends from Argentina, such as the CARO wine, which is her family’s wine produced in partnership with the famous French wine powerhouse Château Lafite Rothschild. The name is the merged acronym from both names, Catena and Rothschild. Her father-in-law’s favorite is a Cabernet Sauvignon-Malbec blend, called Amancaya, a label produced by that same partnership. Cheers!