For the last nine years Katie has run pricing and business intelligence embedded in portfolio strategy — one function where the industry keeps three.

Owning price architecture across every state and channel, the data platform beneath it, and the analysis that determines where the company invests. She established pricing there as a defined discipline and rebuilt the systems beneath it.

This is a pattern rather than an exception. At C. Mondavi & Family she established the business intelligence department, and the practices she created are still in use today. At TradePulse she developed business intelligence reporting for the wine industry and took over a platform migration that had stalled, recovering the schedule and delivering it. VIP, which compiles the depletion data most of the US industry runs on, acquired the company in 2017.

Technology fails in wine more often than it works. Usually the people building it have never done the work and do not understand why it is done the way it is. Katie has done the work and built the tools. She knows how the systems function, why the business runs the way it does, and what actually works.

Arriving in Sonoma with no job and no contacts, she worked at Domaine Carneros while designing her own economics major in wine econometrics at Sonoma State. She published empirical research on the Australian wine category before she graduated, and was recruited into Foster's Wine Estates, now Treasury Wine Estates, to run the Nielsen database across fifty-five brands.

She founded The Cru Collective in 2026.

Wine and beverage alcohol are in the middle of a reordering — shifting consumption, distributor consolidation, channels realigning. Change itself is not what makes this difficult. Not being able to see is: your price in the market, the margin leaving through trade spend, the real shape of your portfolio. Clarity is the work.