Author
Alexya Brown
Today, Love finds herself uncovering the history of Black winemaking in the United States, an integral part to America’s winemaking heritage that has been obscured in the popular narrative. She’s moving one question at a time, sorting through clues of the past to empower others to chart a more inclusive and expansive wine community in Virginia today. One trip from California to Virginia catalyzed that work.
Cue The Veraison Project’s Future Leaders Program. In 2023, grantees, including Love, participated in Oenoverse’s Oeno Camp, a multi-day immersive getaway for BIPOC wine professionals to live and breathe Charlottesville and Virginia wine country at no cost. “It was the ideal way to come and experience Virginia for the first time… to get a glimpse into what Virginia wine can be,” Love recounts.
Love joined a group of about a dozen other wine professionals from all across the country, traveling across the Monticello Wine Trail and adjacent regions, meeting winemakers and making personal connections to the wineries and the history of Virginia wine. I was caught off guard by the breathtaking landscapes,” Love recalls, “the diversity of wineries, grape varieties, and winemaking styles, and the number of French and Italian winemakers who had settled here, in Virginia, of all places.”
Through that trip, Love started her Virginia research and asked, for Black Americans like herself, “What are our origin stories in wine?”
Growing up, Love’s parents worked in wine, but it wasn’t until becoming a wine writer that she developed her own passion for it.
Through writing stories about Black wine professionals, like Christopher Renfro of the 280 Project, and Friday outings to UC Berkeley’s library to research American wine history, Love says she began to “wonder about the past and what stories haven’t been uncovered yet.”
For most of that history, Black Americans are pushed out of the pictures we paint about who built wine culture in the United States. The wine industry has struggled to welcome, recruit, and retain Black people—many of whom don’t see their own ancestors represented in the history of wine, and therefore don’t imagine their own involvement.
Much of Love’s initial research hinted to winemaking in 18th-century Virginia as the genesis. If she were to paint a fuller picture about Black Americans’ involvement in the country’s wine culture, Love realized that one place to start was Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
“[Jefferson] was a wine connoisseur. He spent five years in France and had a passion for horticulture,” says Love, setting the stage to search for potential evidence of Black Americans’ proximity to winemaking at Jefferson’s plantation (In the form of enslaved domestic servants and laborers tending to his vineyard, orchard, and wine cellar.)
In a recent research fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, Love spent two months reading through letters, plantation records, and other materials that placed enslaved people at the center of Monticello’s wine and beverage culture. They had the skills to produce lots of foods and beverages, including wine, and passed that knowledge to future generations.
It all confirmed Love’s hypothesis that Black Americans have a deep history in Virginia wine, or, as she beautifully put it: “Wine is also our inheritance... We’ve been making it for a very long time.”
After setting her feet on Virginia soil, Love has begun to see how the past and present are connected—and how BIPOC and their allies are putting wine back into their hands. When asked what she predicts the current efforts to diversify Charlottesville’s wine industry will catalyze, she said: “I hope that Virginia wineries can begin to do the work of reconciling their connection to the land they're on and the former Black and brown communities that inhabited them.”
Since 2022, Oenoverse and The Veraison Project have been teaming up to make Virginia wine more inclusive for BIPOC professionals and enthusiasts. “Initiatives like Oenoverse provide a pathway for Virginia wineries to positively engage with the next generation of leaders and wine drinkers,” Love says.
This fall, visitors to Charlottesville get a unique opportunity to experience that change in action at the highly-anticipated Two Up Wine Down festival on Saturday, November 3 at the Jefferson School City Center, put on by Oenoverse and The Veraison Project. It’s the third annual festival for the organizations where they select wine influencers and enthusiasts (called “curators”) to talk about their favorite things happening in Virginia wine and pour bottles for attendees amongst a backdrop of convivial fun and community vibes. By putting the bottles in the hands of BIPOC curators, Two Up Wine Down gives a platform to new voices telling new, diverse stories in Virginia wine.
“When you change who’s telling the story, you’re going to get a different story,” says Love.
That’s true. Through her storytelling (and the work of organizations like Oenoverse and The Veraison Project), which is far from the conclusion, we get to know a deeper legacy of Black Americans in winemaking that is often misunderstood or left out of discussions altogether.
Love recently moved to Charlottesville. She’s excited to continue documenting the local wine industry’s changing landscape.
You can stay up to date on Sydney Love’s research uncovering the stories of Black winemaking via her Substack newsletter, Red/Drink.