Toasting Black Wine Professionals

One of the joys of Black History Month is discovering fascinating Black people you otherwise might not know about. As honored as I was to be included in Fabulous California’s article Fab People: Black Leaders in the California Wine Industry, I was equally delighted to be featured alongside some Black wine industry professionals I had not heard of, a sign that doors continue to open to people of color in the wine industry. We’re making strides but there is still so very far to go.

I applaud Tiffany Ezinwa Onyejiaka for her educational piece in Wine Enthusiast titled What It’s Really Like to Be a Black Wine Professional that includes a historical look at Blacks in wine in the United States. I learned so much! As Maya Angelou said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” Speaking of going, during Black History Month, the New York Times ran a travel piece, Exploring South Africa’s Black Wine Scene, that brought back memories of when I traveled to South Africa in 2007 and interviewed Chicago native Ron Gault for a feature in Black Enterprise. The former managing director of JPMorgan’s first South Africa office became a producer/exporter of South African wines, and he and his wife, civil rights activist and award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, started a South African wine label, Passages, in the early 2000’s.

Getting back to the Fabulous California article, read what I have to say about the biggest reward and challenge of working in the wine industry (Surprise, they are connected!), what the future of the industry looks like to me, how I ended up in Napa, what inspired my career jump from journalism to wine and what Alpha Omega winery specializes in.

Thank you Wine Unify, The Hue Society, The Roots Fund, Association of African American Vintners and other organizations for helping open doors to education, jobs, ownership and more in yet another industry that has lacked diversity and representation for way too long.