(Munchies.vice) - Heidi Peterson Barrett is a very busy person. When she pulls up to meet me at Jericho Canyon Vineyard, where she rents winemaking space here in the sunny foothills outside Calistoga, CA, I can hear her talking over a speakerphone in her little European car, going over her schedule for the rest of the day. As the winemaker at over half a dozen different wineries in the Napa Valley and one of the most prominent female winemakers in the region, her early autumn days are filled with visits to several different tucked away places like this, where she glides confidently in and out of cellars and caves, tools in hand, silver mermaid pendant dangling around her neck, focused on the wellbeing of her newborn wines.

She greets me with a warm smile and leads me into the winery, where a bunch of workers are already tending to the newly harvested grapes. Her arrival is met with a buzz of energy from the staff, and I can’t help thinking that this is what it must be like inside a beehive when the Queen shows up.

Everyone doubles down on their task at hand, and we move to a quiet corner of the cool, stone room to talk. I am immediately struck by the confidence she exudes. She seems to me like a person who is used to making the right decisions, and I am eager to talk with her about her hall-of-fame career, her illustrious winemaking family, and the reasons why The Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker anointed her “the first lady of wine.”

MUNCHIES: You’ve been a winemaker here in the Napa Valley for over 30 years now—and actually your father was somewhat of a pioneer in the California wine industry, which made me wonder if you remembered the first time you ever tasted wine.
Heidi Barrett: Not specifically, no. Not like the exact moment, because I really just grew up with it. I was probably two when I first tried it, and who can remember anything when they’re two.

Especially if that two-year-old has been drinking.
Ha—no, no, just sips, just sips. But yeah, it was always shared as a part of the whole family experience. I remember my sister and I had our own little wine glasses at the table, so we could cheers along with the family. And of course I did the same with my daughters—actually, I still have their little beginning baby wine glasses, but it’s like in Europe, where from a young age, all the kids drink this thing that’s half wine and half water. Except we always just got the straight stuff. Because it just doesn’t taste all that great when you’re drinking something that’s half water, as opposed to something awesome.

Is there like some secret family winemaking knowledge that gets passed down through the generations? Or is it just that culture of drinking and thinking about wine every night?
I don’t know, maybe? Maybe just a natural tendency or something, I don’t know—I mean, people say wine is the combination of science and art, and my father was an agricultural chemist Ph.D. and my mother was an artist all her life, so yeah, maybe I’m just genetically born to do this—who knows? But I think the main thing is just practice. The Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours thing. If you do something for thirty years, day in, day out, you get pretty good at it. Even if you have an average set of taste buds, you can learn to become a winemaker just by paying attention and doing it—tasting over and over again and learning from people who know what they’re talking about. It’s the same as food. It’s just flavors. If you like the way something tastes, it’s good. If you don’t, it isn’t. It’s really as simple as that.

What were the lessons you took away from your education at UC Davis?
Davis was really foundational. I mean, my professors were literally the people who wrote the books on winemaking, so it was really just the fundamentals and how everything works. How all wine is just biology doing chemistry. That’s what biochemistry is. And people freak out when you talk about it like it’s so complicated, but it’s just these little biological creatures performing this particular kind of chemistry—yeast eating sugar [and] making alcohol. That’s all it is, that’s biochemistry, that’s fermentation on a very simple level—and that’s wine. Those are the fundamentals of life in action, and that was very interesting to me. And then there’s the whole farming aspect, which is such an attractive idea—just taking something from the earth and then creating this end product that enhances life. You can’t beat that.