Black wine experts demand to be seen
TJ Douglas and his wife, Hadley, own Urban Grape, a thriving wine shop in the South End neighborhood of Boston. Before the pandemic, a regular internet customer with whom Douglas had had many discussions online about wine, walked into the shop for the first time.
The customer, who was white, had come specifically to meet Douglas, whom he did not know was Black.
“He looked at me and walked right past me to an older white man who worked for me, and thanked him for all he had done,” Douglas recalled. “The employee pointed toward me, and the gentleman turned around and looked shocked. He had never thought of buying wine from a Black person before. He also looked extremely embarrassed.
“I had to go above and beyond to make him feel comfortable for the way he was perceiving me.”
Douglas’ experience is typical. Talk to wine professionals who are Black in the overwhelmingly white industry, and you will hear similar stories of invisibility over and over, no matter how different their jobs, backgrounds or places of work.
I spoke with Black wine professionals, to listen, with the hope that their shared experiences might result in a deeper conversation and understanding among their peers in the wine world.
Julia Coney is a wine writer and educator based in Houston and Washington, D.C., who regularly leads tastings and teaches wine classes. Yet as a consumer, she said, white servers or merchants are always ready to instruct her, to show her how to hold a glass and to explain to her why she ought to swirl it.
In restaurants, they steer her to cheaper wines or sweeter choices that fit their stereotype of what she might enjoy.
“They dumb things down for me,” she said.
“I’ve seen both innate prejudice and innate assumptions about who has the power and the discernment. I’ve been told I look like the help.”
She has grown tired of the tokenism, of being the only Black person invited to a tasting or on a sponsored trip to a wine region. She is sick of seeing the wine industry toss money only to white social-media influencers.
So she has created a database, Black Wine Professionals, in hopes that white gatekeepers who say they want to diversify will use this tool. And if they won’t take action, she said, she will.
“They keep regurgitating the same person, and new people never get a chance,” Coney said. “People might ask me on a trip, and I’m going to look at the racial breakdown. And I’ll offer my spot to someone else.”
Stephen Satterfield calls himself a “recovering sommelier.” He says wine is still one of his great loves, but he has left the business twice because of what he termed “a sense of cultural isolation.” Satterfield, who is based in Atlanta, now publishes a quarterly food magazine, Whetstone.
“I found people had the range to talk about nothing but wine,” he said of life as a sommelier. “I found that especially problematic as a Black person because I felt I could never be fully seen or understood in the industry beyond my ability to adapt to standards of decorum, language and posture.”
This feeling, he said, was especially apparent in trade tastings, essential events in which producers, wine buyers and other gatekeepers socialize, taste wine and form essential business relationships.
“Imagine if you were the only white person in that same environment full of Black people,” Satterfield said. “Trying to taste wine in that kind of head space, it was an exhausting sort of emotional labor that white people wouldn’t even notice. In trade tastings, you see the invisibility.”
Tammie Teclemariam, a freelance food and drinks writer in Brooklyn, calls herself a “wine unprofessional” to set herself apart from what she sees as an exclusionary industry.
“Just the nature of what wine is makes it really hard to separate it from racism,” said Teclemariam, whose recent tweet of a photo of Bon Appétit’s editor-inchief helped spur his resignation and a reckoning over institutional racism at the magazine.
“In order to trust a wine person, you have to respect their humanity as someone who can physically enjoy and understand an experience as well, or even in a more nuanced way than you. That’s the whole humility of wine appreciation, and I think it’s hard for some people to relate to me equally even on a sensual level.”
Rampant class and generational issues play a part as well in what she sees as wine’s old-boy network and bro culture. Adding racism to the mix creates an impregnable wall, she said.
“The fact is in order to really be a trusted voice in wine, most Black people have to be co-signed by a white person or celebrity alliance, or else be in constant recitation of their work history,” she said.
As a young man, Carlton McCoy Jr. received a scholarship to culinary school. His grandmother told him he would need to change the way he spoke, cut his hair and wear new clothes, he recounted in a recent Facebook post.
“It crushed her to say it,” said McCoy, who grew up in southeastern Washington, D.C. “She told me that ‘they’ would never accept me that way.”
Years later, McCoy is a master sommelier and the president and chief executive of Heitz Cellar, a historic Napa Valley wine producer. But he still knows he is an outsider, with life experiences unlike those of most of the people he encounters professionally.
“They don’t know what it means to walk into a restaurant and be asked if you’re in the right place,” he said. “You are the only one in the room. You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable.
“The fact that I’m in that room, that I’m at the head of the table, I’m proud of that. We should wear it like a badge of honor, being the only one, and create another seat for somebody else.”