Dr Laura Catena has built an unusual career across medicine and wine. A trained emergency physician, she spent decades working in California while helping lead Catena, her family’s Argentine wine business. She officially took charge in 2012, bringing a collaborative style to a company her father had run more hierarchically.
Catena says she values teamwork, but also believes in clear authority. The aim, shared with her father, is to make Argentina’s wines among the world’s best—and to see them represented in wine collections everywhere. She believes the quality is there, but the country’s wines still need greater recognition.
A family shaped by ambition
The Catena family’s story began in 1898, when Laura’s great-grandfather Nicola left Italy for Argentina. His son Domingo expanded the family’s vineyards, while Domingo’s wife, María Angélica Zapata, taught at a local school. Laura’s father, Nicolás, later developed the business into a major wine brand.
Nicolás studied economics in the United States and returned to Argentina to apply his knowledge to the family business and the wider economy. Political upheaval eventually took the family back to California. Laura grew up there, studied biology at Harvard, and attended medical school at Stanford.
Medicine was her first career. She specialized in emergency-room work for 25 years, drawn to its pace and the chance to help people. Her involvement in the winery grew gradually, beginning in 1995, when her English skills and California base made her a natural choice to help with exports. Wine eventually became her central responsibility, though she continued practicing medicine until shortly before the Covid pandemic, later shifting to volunteer work to make more time for the winery.
For years, she travelled between California and Argentina, balancing hospital shifts with work at Catena. She describes the two careers as impossible to separate: when she was doing both, she would tell people not to ask her to choose.
Building Argentina’s reputation
Catena’s early international appearances made clear how little many wine drinkers knew about Argentina. When the winery attended the New York Wine Experience in 1995, it was the only South American producer there. Laura initially doubted that Argentine wines could compete with established European regions, but agreed to help—and soon took charge of exports.
She saw an opportunity to challenge assumptions about Malbec and high-altitude vineyards. The family established the Catena Institute of Wine to investigate questions that local producers could not yet answer through existing research. Laura’s scientific training, she says, helped her approach winemaking through careful study and experimentation.
Her father eventually handed her leadership of the company. The two still work closely together, though she is now his superior in the organization. They share the same broad philosophy, and Laura says she continues to learn from his strategic thinking.
Her siblings have followed their own paths. Adrianna, a historian, developed wine projects with Catena winemaker Alejandro Vigil, including El Enemigo. Laura and Adrianna also created Luca Wines, which works with small growers and old vineyards. Their brother Ernesto has his own Mendoza winery, Ernesto Catena Vineyards.
Protecting old vines
Preserving old vineyards is central to Laura’s work. She argues that old vines carry genetic material that cannot simply be recreated, and that growers should be given reasons to keep them rather than sell their land for development. Through Luca Wines, the sisters work with fruit from older, often small vineyard plots. Catena also preserves cuttings and offers them to family members who can show a connection to the original vines.
Laura sees this work as part of a broader responsibility to the community. She spends time with employees across the company, from vineyard workers to cellar staff, and values hearing directly from the people doing the work. Her medical background, she says, taught her the importance of collaboration.
She also regards wine production as a service, though one with a different timescale from medicine. A doctor may see the effect of treatment quickly; in a vineyard, it can take years to know whether a decision was right. Both fields require acting under uncertainty, and both can be stressful.
Laura is also candid about the tension between wine and health. She welcomes the decline in excessive consumption and says greater awareness of health is positive, even as she regrets that some vineyards are being uprooted.
The family’s next generation includes eight grandchildren, though Laura’s son Dante is currently the only one working in wine. He has started a low-alcohol project.
And then there are the berets: Laura owns about 25, in different colors, and wears them as her signature. She says they are practical as well as distinctive—her hair is difficult to manage, and she likes to be ready in minutes. They are not, she notes, French in origin, but connected to gaucho and Basque traditions.
For Laura, the balancing act between medicine and wine has never been a simple choice. Both careers draw on her appetite for hard work, her commitment to people, and her ability to act amid uncertainty.