The Team
The Team
Jill Osur (She/Her)
Founder and CEO, Teneral Cellars
A former UC Berkeley softball player, Jill Osur still draws on her athletic background to hone her leadership style and overcome obstacles. Deeply moved to elevate women and inspire meaningful change, her values have guided her career—first as a savvy political fundraiser, then in marketing with Special Olympics Northern California & Nevada, and now, as an entrepreneur. Jill has helped launch numerous consumer product companies and ventures focused on “doing well by doing good.” Jill purchased a vineyard property in the wine AVA of Fair Play in El Dorado County in 2017 and has called this her home since then. She founded a digital winery, Teneral Cellars, in 2020 after leaving another Sierra Foothill winery she was an owner in.
Jill is a captivating public speaker who helps female executives and entrepreneurs learn how to strengthen their leadership by tapping into the “head, heart, and gut.” As said by one attendee, Jill “puts a firecracker in the room” with her energizing, moving presence. A champion of female power, Jill coaches audiences and clients to embrace their brilliance, leverage full capacity thinking, and show up in alignment with their authentic selves.
Jill is a member of the Governor’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Mobility Taskforce, Women Presidents’ Organization, C-Sweet, was a founding board member of the John F. Kennedy University Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership and is a current advisory board member for Enterprising Women, Women Business Collaborative, and board member of Hilinski’s Hope Foundation, which provides integrative mental wellness programs for student athletes. Jill was the 2021 Winner of the Women President’s Organization Adrienne Hall Award for Breaking Down Barriers. She was the 2022 Winner of a Stevie Award for Women in Business for Best Female Entrepreneur – Consumer Products, the 2022 recipient of the Corporate Leader Award from Leadership California, 2023 Winner, NAWBO Sacramento OWL Awards – Woman Innovator, and 2023 Honoree as one of the 100 Women to KNOW in America.
Lisa Orrell
Partner & Chief Marketing Officer
Lisa Orrell is an award-winning Marketing & Branding professional with 30-years of experience. She started her career by earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Advertising with a Minor in Marketing from San Jose State University. She then founded her first Marketing Agency when she was just 25 years-old and continued to run her agency for over 20-years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
During that time, Lisa’s clients ranged from VC-funded start-ups to global corporations, such as: Sony, SanDisk, and Logitech. And her company received over 75 prestigious national & international awards for Branding, Marketing, and Strategic excellence.
In addition to those accolades, for seven consecutive years Lisa was voted one of the “Top 15 Most Influential Branding Gurus in the World” (voted on by over 22,000 industry professionals each year). Lisa is also an in-demand keynote speaker and was recently named “World’s Top 30 Leadership Speakers in 2024”. Her popular presentations include topics such as Leadership and Personal Branding. As such, she has spoken for many well-known brands, including Pepsi, Pfizer, Wells Fargo, eBay, Johnson & Johnson, Adobe, and Salesforce.
In addition to speaking, she is an acclaimed author of FOUR business books available on Amazon (and other online book retailers).
It is based on this vast experience that Lisa has been interviewed by, or written articles for, countless media including (partial list): ABC, MSNBC, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, TIME, USA Today, Cosmo, U.S. News & World Report, AdWeek, AdAge, Essence, and Entrepreneur Magazine. KIRA BALLOTTA
WINEMAKER
Kira Ballotta grew up in Sacramento and enjoyed sneaky sips of her parent’s wines from Amador County beginning in her teenage years. She always enjoyed wine, but earned a finance degree from the University of Washington in 2008 and only began working in wine on the weekends in 2010.
In that year Kira was working at an investment bank in San Francisco mainly valuing mines. She got the opportunity to value several wineries as her boss had figured out a unique way to value the AVA (American Viticulture Area) intangible asset on vineyard land. Driven to learn more about the “going-ons” behind her spreadsheets, she came out to meet a winemaker in Napa and refers to herself as the “guest that never left”.
After a brief stint in wine pricing business analytics at Constellation, she moved into wine production full-time in 2013. She studied winemaking and has worked in the lab, cellar and vineyards across multiple properties in Napa and Australia before landing her full-time job with Alpha Omega in 2015. She worked her way up from Production Assistant to Enology Research Manager, coordinating all winemaking trails, many of which were under the umbrella of tannin analysis. She helped the team earn their 100 point score from Robert Parker on the 2018 vintage before taking over as winemaker for Olivia Brion in 2019.
In 2016 she began making her own commercial wine under the Olivia Brion label, a Pinot Noir focused brand that features trailblazing women from history. In 2019 the founder of Olivia Brion retired and she assumed all winemaking and financial interests. In 2021 she launched Cantadora wines to incorporate women today, who inspire her, into her wine projects.
In January Kira was honored by Imbibe Magazine as an Imbibe 75 Person who will shape Food & Drinks in 2024. Wine Business Monthly awarded Cantadora their “Hot Brand” honor for 2023.
Kira is a fifth-generation Northern Californian dedicated to making site-expressive wines using sustainable practices and organic farming She believes we should not be entitled to pollute our air and soil in the pursuit of making a luxury beverage. She strives to make wines that are driven by balance, tension and ultimately an age-worthiness that is distinctly Californian. As a mother of two little boys, she wants to see California and its beautiful wine thrive for the next generations.