Ellison Wofford

Ellison Wofford is a South Carolina native and an alumna of the College of Charleston, where she began working at a wine and cheese shop called Goat.Sheep.Cow.^[1],[2]

Her entry into the wine trade came through Silicon Valley Bank's Wine Division, founded by Rob McMillan, where she completed a summer internship in Napa in 2013. Sources differ on when she relocated: Beaune Imports places her move to Napa in 2013, by way of the Silicon Valley Bank Wine Division, while a March 2026 report dates the move to 2014.^[1],[2]

In 2017 she became the first General Manager of RAEN Winery, a role she held until 2024. That year she became the first Director of Business Development for historic Bella Oaks in Rutherford. Susurrus Sparkling Teas describes the sequence as commercial lender, then General Manager of RAEN Winery, and most recently Director of Business Development, Trade Sales at Bella Oaks. Across these posts she accumulated roughly a decade of wine industry experience and is described as a Napa wine industry veteran.^{[2],[3],[4],[5],[6],[7]}

Wofford is the founder of Susurrus Sparkling Teas, a Napa, California producer of inherently non-alcoholic, single-origin sparkling teas. Her decade in the wine industry is credited as the impetus for the project, conceived as a companion non-alcoholic beverage. Susurrus additionally attributes the founding to her recognition of synergies between tea and wellness and of analogies between the worlds of wine and tea.^[6]

She launched the label with its first bottling in mid-December 2025, just over a month before a late-January 2026 forum post announcing it. The range comprises two bottlings, Magnolia Oolong and Osmanthus Golden Tip.