Zelma Long

Zelma R. Long (born c. 1945) is an American enologist and vintner. She is considered to be one of the female pioneers of wine production in the U.S. state of California, and was the first woman to assume senior management of a Californian winery, Simi Winery, of which she was president from 1989 to 1996. Long founded and was the first president of the American Vineyard Foundation to help finance research in enology and viticulture and also founded the American Viticulture and Enology Research Network (AVERN). She is the co-owner of Long Vineyards in St. Helena, California, and the Vilafonte Wine Estate in South Africa. Long has particularly been active in research into viticulture in Washington state.

Long graduated from the Oregon State University in 1965 and had an internship at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, followed by a brief career as a dietician. In 1966, her family purchased a hillside vineyard in the Napa Valley and her love of viticulture was born. She then pursued a master's degree in Enology and Viticulture at the University of California, Davis in 1968 but left there in 1970 before completing her degree to work a harvest at Robert Mondavi Winery in the Napa Valley, ultimately being promoted to chief enologist during the boom of the 1970s, between 1973 and 1979.Robert Mondavi considered her departure from the company in 1979 as one of his biggest losses. She became Vice President of Simi Winery in the Alexander Valley in 1979, and after enrolling at Stanford University, became President and CEO from 1989 to 1996. She is credited with breathing new life into Simi and modernizing it, introducing new winemaking techniques and establishing new vineyards. She then served as Executive Vice President at Chandon Estates until 1999 when she committed herself to running Long Vineyards, which she established with her then-husband Bob Long in St. Helena, California in 1977.

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