black owned winery Archives

Kaleigh Swift

Kaleigh has been working with the France 44 events team since January 2023. She received her WSET 1-3 certifications through France 44. Kaleigh also works in communications at the University of Minnesota. In her free time, she enjoys playing and watching volleyball, spending time with her cats, and working on house projects. Kaleigh is an avid vermouth fan and never misses an opportunity to introduce someone to Spanish-style sweet vermouths!

If you read part 1 of this blog post duo, you’ll know a bit more about the early history of fermented alcoholic beverages in pre-colonial Africa, along with some mentions of the first Black viticulturists and vinters in the United States.

Now, we can look more at the “why” behind that history, to help make sense of how we got to today, where Black presence in wine is becoming more visible. This post will look more closely at false stereotypes, Black perceptions of wine, and on my own personal experiences as a consumer and professional in the industry.

While researching the origin of the stereotypes I mentioned last week, which assert that Black people don’t like fuller-bodied, complex wines, I ran into quite a few interesting finds. Several articles that re-affirmed these stereotypes with less than impressive lines of reasoning, some blog posts pushing back, and even a few published research papers.

Quite a few modern pieces hypothesized an explanation for these stereotypes that I think is logical. Racism and white supremacy is a socialization process and system of power that dehumanizes Black and indigenous people, erases their cultures and histories through colonialism, and insists that they are fundamentally incapable of producing complex and “civilized” societies. Through the normalization of these beliefs, especially in America, harmful stereotypes have emerged, rooted in the assertion that Black (and indigenous) people are too uncivilized to understand, participate in, or comprehend the complexities of society.

Black people, almost by default, get excluded from, or written out of wine history because acknowledging our ancestors and their contributions also forces society to reconcile with the fact that, as I mentioned last week, “undoubtedly, where grapes were grown and wine was produced in the new world, slave labor was being used to do so”. Black history and the history of wine are intertwined. We, in fact, are fully capable of understanding wine, having complex palates, and knowledgeably producing quality products.

Articles seeking to broaden the discourse on the Black experience in the wine industry often begin with personal narratives of authors encountering assumptions about their presence at industry events or being directed towards budget and sweeter products. These anecdotes underscore the persistent challenges of racism in the field.

And in my research for this blog, I started to question whether or not this stereotype I’ve been researching, the preference for sweeter wines like moscato among Black wine drinkers, actually existed, or whether it had in some way been manufactured by the industry insisting and marketing folks into believing that was the case.

On the one hand, let’s acknowledge that moscato is an easy drinking wine that is a great intro for folks who are new to wine, or just looking for something a little sweeter. On the other hand, that is the case for all people, not just Black people. And our ability to enjoy wine doesn’t stop at moscato alone, as evidenced by Mother Vines: A History of Black Women and Wine, a research project explaining over 400 years of documented history of Black women’s relationships to wine and exploring this intersectionality between race, class, and gender.

My own experiences of wine have included very little moscato that I can recall. Even prior to studying wine, I purchased primarily Pinot Noirs or Sauvignon Blancs. I was always willing to try new things and found wine to be utterly fascinating.

Some years ago, I started visiting my uncle regularly in the Bay Area, and one of our favorite things to do was go up to Napa wineries. It was during these visits that my journey to becoming a wine professional started. Not because I was in awe of the folks presenting us wines in Napa, but often because I felt like I wanted to know more and my inquisitiveness was often met with derision and hasty answers, lacking depth.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be nurtured by the wine professionals at France 44 who saw my interest as a positive quality and happily answered my questions throughout WSET (a wine certification program administered by France 44), and beyond. I am excited and proud to be Black in wine, and have found a lot of joy in this journey. Unfortunately, this is not the experience of many. We have a long way to go before people who have historically been written out of wine are able to be fully recognized and appreciated for their value and contribution to the industry.

Resources:

https://vinepair.com/articles/stop-telling-me-to-drink-sweet-wine-just-because-im-a-woman-of-color/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhuyghe/2018/09/10/its-like-mansplaining-but-for-race-what-the-wine-industry-can-learn-about-black-consumers/?sh=108d7ed514e2

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=htmpubs

https://thesip.com/blogs/blog/yes-black-people-have-a-palate-too

https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-industry-black-consumers-marketing/

https://vinepair.com/articles/the-catch-22-of-drinking-while-black/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theworldwineguys/2020/06/08/does-the-wine-industry-have-a-racism-problem/?sh=60b21ea553c7

Kaleigh Swift

The key to understanding Black people’s historical and modern relationship to wine–grape growing, winemaking, selling, and consumption–is to look at Black people’s relationship to this land, this society, and our ancestors.

We are well overdue for a confrontation of the harmful stereotypes around Black people’s “preferences” of sweeter wines and assumptions that we have no interest in more complex, robust, full bodied beverages as writer Kimberly Marie Ousley details in her 2017 article “Stop Telling Me to Drink Sweet Wine Just Because I’m a Woman of Color.”

We won’t get through the entirety of this conversation in this one blog post, but I hope to at least direct you towards some good sources, and of course some good wines! We’ll focus on some broad topics that will help to sketch a more nuanced picture of how we got to today, where less than 1% of the US’s more than 11,000 wineries are Black-owned, and it’s commonly assumed that Black people have had no place in winemaking history.

The intentional fermentation of grape juice into an alcoholic beverage is thought to date back to the early neolithic era with earliest evidence dating back to 6000 BCE from the Gadachrili Gora settlement in Georgia. (Did you make it to our Ancient wines pop up? So cool!) By 2700 BCE, a winemaking industry was well established in ancient Egypt, a civilization that was also actively trading with others in the Mediterranean, North Africa, West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Near East.

The wine industry in Egypt was likely brought by experts from the Levant. And while grapes and wine didn’t feature prominently in Africa until the time of the Egyptian dynasties, the fermentation of fruit and grain juices was far from uncommon across the entire continent of Africa (and across the whole world).

Early alcoholic beverages were likely early forms of mead, as honey was a product cultivated as early as 40,000 years ago. Palm wine, a popular beverage made from the sap of certain types of palm trees in west Africa, has also long been important to cultural and social traditions.

In the “modern era” (meaning settler colonialism onward), wine’s importance to Western European culture and ritual necessitated its export to the places they colonized.

And undoubtedly, where grapes were grown and wine was produced in the new world, slave labor was being used to do so, though written documentation is scarce. The estate of Thomas Jefferson confirmed that enslaved laborers were in fact responsible for cultivating the 193 acres Jefferson had designated for producing wine grapes. The earliest written record of a Black person making wine comes in 1888 when in Orra Langhorne’s book Southern Sketches of Virginia, she recounts a visit to the Charlottesville, VA estate of Robert Scott, a Black man, where she enjoyed, “…an excellent glass of wine made from his own grapes.”

Much of Black people’s historical relationship to wine remains obscure, though anecdotally many families’ histories speak of their ancestors making “jug wine” for consumption by their own families or communities. Sound familiar? This is how much of the wine of the world is produced–locally and at small scales. This method of production undoubtedly made wine more accessible and cost effective for Black people.

However, over the course of the 20th century, Black land theft likely made any small production that was in existence virtually impossible. The longstanding socio-economic disparities caused by systemic racism, particularly around access to land ownership and capital, has played an outsized role in the lack of diversity in the industry.

Less obscure is Black peoples’ historical relationship to liquor production, including famous brands such as Jack Daniels. The crops used to produce many types of liquor were more readily available and actively grown in the US for food–unlike grapes–leading to continuous production of liquors even during prohibition.

We got the first Black-owned winery in 1940 in Clarksville, VA, where John June Lewis Sr. opened a small commercial winery that successfully produced a dry red wine and a dessert wine made from dried (raisin) grapes. In the decades leading up to the 21st century we have a small handful of trailblazing Black wine professionals making splashes in the industry, such as Deneen, David and Coral Brown of Brown Estates in Napa, Mac McDonald of Vision Cellars in sonoma, and Iris Rideau of Rideau Vineyards outside of Solvang. These wineries still exist today! In recent years, the presence of Black viticulturists, winemakers with vineyards and estates, and even négociants is actively increasing and becoming more reflective of consumers.

The conversation continues in part 2 HERE!

We’re highlighting some of the work of fantastic producers this Black History Month. You can learn more about and purchase some select products below!