From its fourth‑generation family leaders to award‑winning winemaker Cate Looney, Brown Brothers Family Wine Group shows how even a 130‑year‑old winery can hard‑wire gender equity into the cellar, the boardroom and the vineyard.
Legend has it that when John Brown told his mother, Patricia, they wanted to name a range of wines after her, his mother stood still, then a tear started to rise. ‘Well, boys, it better be bloody good,’ she said
Pat, slight in stature but formidable in everything else, had spent 60 years running the unofficial operations of Brown Brothers’ King Valley estate. The mail, the banking, even the fresh flowers in the office every week. She died in 2004 at 89, but not before her signature was scrawled across every bottle of the Patricia collection, and not before she’d established something her all-male third generation probably didn’t even clock at the time: a culture where women weren’t decorative but structural.
Two decades on, Brown Brothers (founded in 1889, a member of Australia’s First Families of Wine) has once again been named on the 2026 Best Workplaces for Women Australia list.
The Women Winemakers Behind Brown Brothers’ Wines
Cate Looney started at Brown Brothers as a winemaker around 20 years ago, and now she leads a team at the iconic Milawa winery and has been named Winemaker of the Year at the Australian Women in Wine Awards. Her Patricia Brut Pinot Noir Chardonnay took out 2025 Sparkling Wine of the Year in the Halliday Wine Companion Awards.
“I’ve had amazing opportunities,” Cate says. “I started as a winemaker here, then moved to the senior winemaker role, and now I’m looking after teams that are really male dominated. But I’ve never wanted gender to be a part of my progression and I don’t believe it has been.”
Looney describes a genuine absence of friction for her rise at Brown Brothers, which in the Australian wine industry is a pretty remarkable thing. Wine Australia shows that men and women graduate from oenology degrees in almost equal numbers, but only 16.7 per cent of winemaking roles are held by women, and ATO data indicates the gender pay gap for winemakers has doubled in under a decade to about $14,000 a year.
How Brown Brothers’ Redefines Gender Equity
Looney credits the family structure as a genuine differentiator. “I think if you look at it from a history point of view, the company is 130-something years old, and even from the start there has been strong female leadership,” she says. “That generational view could set us apart from a shareholder-style business. They want this to be a long-lasting family business. They want to invest in people, and they put a lot into leadership development, like they’ve done with me.”
“The fourth generation working actively in the business are nearly entirely women,” says Looney. “And we’ve got the top wines named Patricia after the matriarch, because she was so heavily involved in shaping the culture when the business was growing.”
Katherine Brown, Patricia’s granddaughter and the first female winemaker in the family, works alongside her sisters Caroline, who leads corporate communications, and Emma, Head of Innovation. Their cousins Eliza and Cynthia sit on the Brown Family Wine Group board, helping shepherd the business into its next era.
There’s a wonderful circularity to the fact that the Patricia wines are released every March, not for International Women’s Day, though the timing is convenient, but for Patricia Brown’s birthday on March 17.
Brown Brothers’ Great Place To Work survey scores show high engagement all across the board, but Looney notes something telling: “We probably see slightly higher engagement and commentary from our female employees. I think that data shows a strong alignment between female experiences in fairness, opportunity, and trust in leadership.”
That alignment happened in the only way it ever tends to, through granular, operational changes that actually shift cultures. Flexibility, for one. Looney’s own team includes a member who has flexible arrangements so his wife could return to her career, an acknowledgment that gender equity isn’t only a women’s-hours problem.
“When I first started here 20 years ago, the cellar team was all males,” she says. “Now it’s almost completely balanced. And that’s not through quotas. It’s by giving women a chance to come into the cellar, work hard, and thrive.”
Gender Equity Green Flags To Look For In The Industry
Looney is pragmatic about the tricky parts of the industry that still remain. Vintage season and motherhood make for logistically tricky bedfellows, physically demanding roles tend to create some barriers, and the subtler stuff persists. “There are still many friction points in the industry, and sometimes they show up quite subtly,” she says. “But we try to stay focused.”
She points to wine show judging as one area of tangible change. As a committee member herself, she says the push for balanced panels has moved well past tokenism. “Some of the top national wine shows around Australia are led by fantastic, talented female judges.”
She also credits a broader support network across the industry, organisations like Australian Women in Wine, and the mentorship structures that have developed over the past decade.
Perhaps the most useful thing Looney offers is advice for women evaluating potential employers, a due diligence checklist that bypasses the marketing gloss.
“When it comes to younger women starting out, I would tell them to look for the visible female leaders in the business,” she says. “Google them, see how their careers have been able to grow. Are they still there after five, 10, 20 years? Who sits on their board? These are things you can easily find, and they give you a really good indication of what the company culture would be like.”
At Brown Brothers, a Google search will show you a company whose flagship wines are named after its matriarch, whose granddaughters run strategy and communications and innovation, and whose head winemaker has been there for two decades and never once felt her gender was a factor in her rise.
Pat Brown would probably say that’s bloody good.
