Carrie Gurule reflects on her path to Gruet's first woman head winemaker

After more than a decade as a nuclear medicine technologist, Carrie Gurule couldn’t shake the notion that it was time for a change.

For one, it was pretty heavy work, particularly when it came to delivering bad news to patients.

“I was specializing in cardiology and oncology, and so sometimes on the oncology side of things I was the first person that individual saw after they’d just been diagnosed with colon cancer or breast cancer,” Gurule said. “I guess for me, it started to wear on me a bit … I feel a lot, and it was really hard because you just wanted to take their pain and their worry and their fear away — and I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that I was getting frustrated. I was just getting a bit tired.”

There was also the gravitational pull of the Land of Enchantment. Gurule, a Los Alamos native and a University of New Mexico graduate, wanted to return home after managing multiple imaging labs in Seattle. With her future in limbo, she moved back to spend some time with her parents, who had begun a vineyard and winery as a retirement project.

It was during that time, Gurule had an epiphany: She wanted to trade isotopes for grapes.

“I caught the bug,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Wow, this is fascinating seeing these little sticks — literally little sticks — that just grow up into this beautiful grapevine.’ Then you cultivate that and you harvest that. All that hard labor ends up in this bottle. People enjoy this over dinners, birthdays, celebrations, anything.

“It’s a pretty amazing thing how it all brings people together and the stories that they have and the people that I’ve met along the way. It was time to try something different, and I’m grateful that I did.”

Things have progressed significantly since then. A little more than a year ago, Gurule was appointed as head winemaker at Gruet Winery, making her the first woman in the position. Gurule began in quality assurance and gradually worked her way up, learning from past head winemakers Laurent Gruet and Cyril Tanazacq along the way. Gurule’s rise to unprecedented heights was powered by her intense desire for knowledge.

“The challenge that I would encounter from time to time would be folks getting frustrated with all the questions that I had,” she said. “Then I would ask the same question because I was struggling with understanding a certain process. So I would ask that same question the next day and then the next day until I understood it.”

Gruet is renowned for its production of high quality Méthode Champenoise sparkling wines. The first Gruet vineyards were founded in France in 1952, but the family moved to New Mexico in 1984 and opened a facility on their own property in 1993. After a year on the job as head winemaker, Gurule is proud to help carry on the Gruet legacy, making sure the attention to grape sourcing and yeast culture is the same as it was when the company started. She’s also quick to point out that it’s a team effort at the winery.

“This team, they have a hunger inside to understand what we’re doing here, and I love sharing with them how this whole thing works — from the math to counting the yeast culture,” Gurule said. “Sharing the experience is just very exciting.”

The Gruet motto is “French roots and American dreams.” The New Mexican ties are integral to that philosophy, not only for the winery, but for Gurule herself.

“There’s no other place I really want to be to do this,” she said. “We have everything here. I work with some amazing people, so why would I need to be anywhere else?”

Carrie Gurule reflects on her path to Gruet's first woman head winemaker