Wine is an ancient beverage. Throughout its history, opinions on whether drinking wine is beneficial or detrimental to our health have been changeable and contentious. Today, viral health trends, powerful interest groups, and the wine industry all vie for influence--making it harder than ever to separate fact from fiction. Savor brings together a winemaker and medical doctor, scientists, and a cultural historian to explore the emerging research and discuss longstanding ideas about what’s in your wine glass.

Registration:

The event will be presented in person at the Sensory Theatre, Robert Mondavi Institute, UC Davis Campus.

• Tickets are $25 per person, $15 for students.
• Includes a welcome reception, a hosted bar with wine and non-alcoholic drinks, and appetizers.
• Limited seats are available. Parking details are below.
• A pop-up exhibit from the UC Davis Library Archives and Special Collections will be displayed in the lobby.

Speaker Biographies:

Dr. Laura Catena is a Harvard and Stanford-trained biologist and physician, author, fourth-generation vintner, and founder of the Catena Institute of Wine. Dr. Catena was a practicing Emergency Physician in California for 27 years while also working for her family winery, Catena Zapata and starting her own wine projects, Luca, La Posta and Domaine Nico, in Mendoza, Argentina. In 2023, Dr. Catena, a leader in sustainability, was named Old Vine Hero by the Old Vines Conference for her work in preserving Argentina’s ungrafted, massale, genetically diverse old vines. She recently led her family winery, Catena Zapata to be voted #1 World’s Best Vineyard 2023, and #1 Most Admired Wine Brand by Drinks International in 2025. Doctor Catena’s advocacy for wine in moderation as part of a healthy lifestyle is featured in her website www.indefenseofwine.com. 

Lisa Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of history at UC Santa Barbara. She is a cultural historian of the late 19th and 20th-century United States with wide-ranging interests in the histories of consumer culture, food and alcoholic beverages, capitalism and the senses, and childhood, gender, and the family. Her research focuses on cultural reinvention. Her new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition, asks a deceptively simple question: how did the alcoholic beverages, previously banned under Prohibition, shed their stigmatized pasts and become widely accepted as ordinary, respectable pleasures? Focusing on the Great Depression and World War II, the book shows how alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the importance of pleasure in modern American life. 

Sean Adams, M.S, Ph.D., serves as the scientific director for the UC Davis Center for Alimentary and Metabolic Science (CAMS). The mission of CAMS is to conduct research that spans from the molecule to the bedside, expanding fundamental knowledge with relevance to improving health and thwarting disease. Dr. Adams is a research professor who collaborates closely with clinical colleagues in surgery and other departments to investigate the origins of metabolic diseases and identify factors that promote metabolic health. He has special expertise in nutrition and metabolism. In a recent review, A Multiomics Framework to Unlock the Relationships between Wine, Food, and Gut Health, Dr. Adams and colleagues explore how advancements in multiomics technologies can be leveraged to characterize wine’s “dark matter” and to consider interactions of wine components with complex food matrices to influence gut health. This framework holds potential to enhance our understanding of how moderate consumption of wine influences health and to inform the development of functional food innovations derived from wine’s molecular components.

Moderator Andrew Waterhouse, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of Enology at UC Davis. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame in 1977. Having completed his Ph.D. and a postdoctoral research appointment at UC Berkeley, he joined the chemistry department at Tulane University in 1986. In 1991, he joined the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis, where his research program has explored various aspects of phenolics. He has won the Medical Friends of Wine Research Award, a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow award, holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Bordeaux, and has been named one of the most highly cited researchers in agriculture by ISI. In addition to his research and teaching, Professor Waterhouse served as director of the Robert Mondavi Institute and as Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, and has chaired numerous national and international symposia.