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wineanddinosaur · 5 years

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Oakland’s Vibrant Wine Scene Features Bottles Made for and by Black Americans

Oakland’s appeal encompasses a cultural cornucopia of food, music, art, and activism. Wine lovers will feel right at home here, too, as a growing network of winemakers in Oakland and the Bay Area is establishing its own identity, apart from its well-established neighbors in Napa and Sonoma.

Along with Oakland’s Urban Wine Trail, which showcases tasting rooms in warehouses in the heart of the city, a subset of Oakland’s wine scene is flourishing in the city’s outskirts. Its sustainably sourced, award-winning wines are made for and by a historically underserved group of drinkers: black Americans.

Black Panthers to Black Vines

In 1966, the Black Panther Party formed in Oakland, Calif. Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the political organization’s goals included fighting police brutality against black Americans and establishing independence in black communities. The Black Panther Party officially dissolved in 1982, but it remains an integral part of the city’s legacy and identity.

Since then, Oakland has changed dramatically. The historically black city is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country, but gentrification from Silicon Valley spillover is creating a contrast to the city’s proudly black origins.

The annual Black Vines event showcases black-owned wineries from the Bay Area and beyond. Credit: Black Vines

“Oakland is kind of like the anti-Wakanda,” Shawn Taylor, co-founder of San Francisco’s Black Comix Arts Festival and the The Nerds of Color website, told KQED last year. In the “Black Panther” film, the Wakanda nation never faces imperial oppression and is a global technology leader. Locals say the opposite is true in Oakland. “Technology here is fueling gentrification and the displacement of Oakland’s historic black population,” Sandhya Dirks writes in KQED.

Oakland activists and community leaders are now reclaiming city spaces and celebrating their histories and futures in the city. The Black Joy Parade, which marked its second year on Feb. 24, 2019, is a “hyper-positive” community gathering of black artists, activists, and businesses. Black Vines, founded in 2010, is an organization that showcases black-owned winemakers in the Bay Area and beyond.

“It started as an idea to make the wine tasting experience more comfortable [for African-Americans],” Fern A. Shroud, founder, Black Vines, tells VinePair. It also serves as “a platform for black winemakers to showcase their wines.”

Shroud, herself a Silicon Valley executive, sees similarities between the wine and tech worlds. She hopes Black Vines can bridge “the gap between business, art, and community.”

One of Black Vines’ first participants was Mac MacDonald, founder of Vision Cellars and co-founder of the Association of African American Vintners. “My goal is to get more African-Americans enjoying wine and being knowledgeable,” McDonald told Rolling Out in 2011.

Each year, Black Vines features a 21-ounce commemorative glass. “Some people have long days,” Shroud says. Credit: Black Vines

Fueling the awareness of black-made wines are venues and organizations that showcase their work. “With events such as April Richmond’s Soul of the City and Fern Stroud’s Black Vines, the Oakland community can come out and meet black winemakers from around the Bay Area and country,” V. Sheree Williams, publisher and editor-in-chief of Cuisine Noir Magazine, tells VinePair. “These events are great for introducing the brands to many for the first time.”

“The Oakland urban wine scene is great,” Erik Trinidad, a travel and food writer based in Oakland, says. He likens Oakland’s wine scene to the city as a whole: “Diverse and unpretentious.”

“In my Oakland wine-drinking experience, I’ve been to a winery where Sonoma reds are produced by Brooklyn Jewish transplants [Brooklyn West Winery], and a wine bar with Zins produced by a Californian African-American family,” Trinidad says. “At alaMar, a Michelin-recommended bistro, said Zinfandel pairs well with oysters and ‘90s hip-hop. At Campovida, the neighborhood is gritty — it’s in an industrial park — but the rosé and Pinot Noir are refined.”

Despite the growth and enthusiasm, many believe Oakland has some work to do. “None of the black winemakers have a tasting room in Oakland,” Williams says. Meanwhile, black-owned wineries such as Brown Estate in Napa, Longevity Wines in Livermore, Corner 103 in Sonoma, and J. Moss in Napa have tasting rooms in their respective cities.

Black Winemaking, Present and Future

At the eighth annual Black Vines “mini-festival” on Feb. 23, 2019, there were more than a dozen winemaker participants. Attendees included Paula Harrell of P. Harrell Wines, Theopolis Vineyards founder Theodora Lee, fondly known as “Theo-patra,” and Wachira Wines, an urban winery that offers “Urban Wine Safari” tours and tastings. There were also local artists, jazz musicians, and “culinary artists,” Shroud says. “It sold out completely.”

Its 2019 non-profit partner was BlackFemaleProject, an organization that prepares black women for “the various ‘isms’ in the workplace,” Shroud says.

Word of mouth has fueled Black Vines’ growth. “Every year I hear the same two things: One, ‘I never knew there were black winemakers.’ And two, ‘this is an amazing event, and I want to tell all my friends about it,’” Shroud says. Attendees “come in not knowing what to expect, and leave feeling whole,” she says.

Last year, Black Vines started its partnership with the Black Joy Parade. “It’s all about the ability to provide wine education,” Shroud says. And, she adds, those who skip the parade are “missing a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s a celebration of culture, of pride, of joy, and ultimately, of black future. It’s a wonderful end to Black History Month.”

5 Bottles From Black-Owned Oakland Wineries to Try

McBride Sisters

McBride Sisters Wine (formerly Truvée) was founded in 2010 by Andrea and Robin McBride, half-sisters who met in their 20s after learning they shared a father. Their wines are made with sustainably farmed grapes from both California and New Zealand, where each sister grew up. Look for their New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and New Zealand Sparkling Brut Rosé; Central Coast California Chardonnay and Central Coast California Red Blend; and Black Girl Magic Riesling. The sisters plan to open a tasting room in Oakland in 2019.

P. Harrell Wines

P. Harrell Wines sources its grapes from Sonoma County and creates wines as “a tribute to my family’s legacy,” founder Paula Harrell writes. Current offerings include a 2018 Haight Street Dry Riesling, a Gold Medal winner in the 2019 San Francisco Chronicle International Wine Competition; 2017 Three Fifteen Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel; and the 2017 P.J. Rosé.

Theopolis Vineyards

Lawyer-by-day Theodora “Theo-patra” Lee, Esq., wasn’t expecting to launch Theopolis Vineyards in Yorkville, Calif. The brand began when, after a rainy season, the vineyard’s grapes were no longer viable to sell to clients. So, Lee decided to make her own wine and has produced several award-winning brands ever since.

The 2013 Theopolis Vineyards Estate Grown Petite Sirah won three golds – in the 2017 Orange County Commercial Wine Competition, 2016 San Francisco International Wine Competition, and 2016 Sunset Magazine International Wine Competition.

Free Range Flower Winery

“Wine made from flowers — not grapes” sums up the mission of this organic, sustainable, local Oakland winery. RoseHybiscus, a ruby-red wine made from rose and hibiscus flowers, is its bestseller. “But the lavender sparkling is also amazing,” Shroud says.

Vision Cellars

This award-winning winery established in 1995 specializes in Pinot Noir from Ms. Lil’s Vineyard in the Russian River Valley. According to a 2011 interview, the wines have even been served at the White House. Look for founder Mac McDonald, who also co-founded the Association of African American Vintners, at wine dinners around the city and country — next stop, Alabama.

5 of the Best Black-Owned Oakland Restaurants

alaMar Kitchen and Bar

This Michelin-recommended bistro where guests are encouraged to eat with their hands is “a studied blend of high and low,” East Bay Express wrote in 2014. It melds a nautical theme with classy seafood boils, along with wines made by local black vintners. Location.

Brown Sugar Kitchen

The beloved soul food brunch spot helmed by Chef Tonya Holland of “Top Chef” fame recently relocated to a new location uptown. In the new, 4,000-square-foot space, Holland serves Southern-inspired staples like fried chicken and waffles, gumbo, and shrimp and grits, SFist reports. Another Brown Sugar Kitchen location is debuting at Oakland Airport. Location.

Oeste

A bar and cafe in Old Oakland, Oeste offers dishes and drinks made with fresh, organic, sustainably farmed California ingredients. The women-owned establishment merges Latino and Southern recipes from the families of owners Sandra Davis, Lea Redmond, and Anna Villalobos. The beverage list includes beers from trendy San Francisco outfit Fort Point and wines from Oakland winemaker P. Harrell. It also features a rooftop bar, complete with a green wall nourished with a greywater system. Location.

Souley Vegan

Southern flavors meet fresh herbs and house-mixed spices at vegan soul food spot Souley Vegan. Go for the “zingy” smothered potatoes and tofu scramble, and stay for a local beer or a custom cocktail made with fresh lemons, limes, and berries. Location.

Kingston 11

A favorite of Cuisine Noir’s V. Sheree Williams, this friendly Jamaican joint offers classics like jerk chicken and curried goat paired with signature cocktails, housemade ginger beer, Jamaican sorrel, and limeade. The menu also includes vegan, vegetarian, nut-free, and gluten-free options. The Fern Gully rum bar features the largest rum selection in Oakland, and its cocktail rotation has featured standouts like the Wakanda Punch made with pea flower served during Oakland Cocktail Week in September. Location.

Where to Stay

At press time, Oakland’s city center mainly has chain hotels including several Hilton and Marriott properties. In 2019, the Homage Hotel Group, a company dedicated to black travelers, will debut its Town Hotel.

“When I first had the idea [to open up a hotel], Oakland was at the top of the list,” Damon Lawrence, founder of the Homage Hotel Group, told Essence last year. “There wasn’t a brand that spoke to what Oakland is about and told the story well.” The Homage Hotel Group opened The Moor, a hotel focused on black culture, in New Orleans in 2018.

The Town will have bathrooms stocked with Shea Moisture and black soap, and “everything that caters to your unique black needs,” Essence writes. It will also include a rooftop bar and lounge, and a partnership with alaMar, which will reportedly open a new location inside the hotel.

The post Oakland’s Vibrant Wine Scene Features Bottles Made for and by Black Americans appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/oakland-urban-wine-black-vines/

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funnythingshere0-blog · 6 years

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Keep it simple, stupid: towards cleaner wine label design

New Post has been published on https://funnythingshere.xyz/keep-it-simple-stupid-towards-cleaner-wine-label-design/

Keep it simple, stupid: towards cleaner wine label design

Thursday September 20, 2018

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Philip White thinks there’s a welcome move back to honesty and simplicity in the designs and texts some winemakers are wrapping around their bottles.

The label design of Wynns Coonawarra Estate bottles has remained constant. Photo: Philip White

Awoken last night by my mates Valmai Hankel, the great librarian, historian, desert traveller, writer and book expert, and her carer, the illustrator George Grainger Aldridge, talking wine literature to ABC Adelaide announcer Peter Goers, I’m sure I heard the latter complain that he thought my reference once to a wine smelling like lignite was pushing my descriptors too far.

This usage seems to have annoyed dear Goers for years.

Grape skins, from whence the winemaker takes colour and flavour, are composed largely of lignin. The oak of barrels is made from lignin – it’s the scaffolding that holds plants up.

Toast the barrels toward the point that Bourbon makers call “gatorback” and you oxidise that lignin. Add a dash of the yeast brettanomyces, which lives on sugar in the wood, leaving mainly oxidised lignin aromas, and you shouldn’t be surprised if the eventual drink smells a bit like lignite, which is brown coal, which is oxidised lignin, no?

As a little kid growing up in the mountains overlooking the La Trobe Valley, I learned very young that aroma of the coal trains scurrying along the valley floor, carting coal and briquettes from Yallourn to Melbourne. It seemed an opposite aroma to the freshness and bountiful growth of rainy Gippsland.

While this slight whinge about usage came amid some very kind praise, thank you, it reminded me of the current state of wine labels and the mess of mangled grammar that finds its way onto many back labels. I wouldn’t expect notable levels of English descriptive literacy from a winemaker any more than I’d expect it of an accomplished potato farmer or lab chemist, but jeez, some of it leaves a fair bit to be desired.

I suppose it adds something folksy to the product, but they forget that what I want is copy in a face large enough to read, in colours chosen to assist the large number of folks who, like me, have rather challenging colour-blindness. I want to be able to easily see the alcohol level, in the hope the winemaker hasn’t taken too much advantage of the slack law that permits 1.5 per cent variation in the ethanol degree – either side of the claimed amount.

This means many wines that claim the standard 14.5 per cent level are actually closer to 16 per cent, a degree that puts your table wine closer to the realms of port strength than the polite amount you might expect to enjoy with your chook. Not that I haven’t enjoyed too many wines that were perhaps a bit too strong for me.

Now I see a return to some more classical labelling on front labels. We’ve had a few years where the shelves bulged with a great cacophonic mess of label art, amateurish, confusing and confounding. We got past that phase where Mum and Dad would sit down at the table with a biro and pad and design a label, and got to the point where it was young Pebble Brook and Fern Raintree, the kids, designing imagery that ranged from head comix and Mouse Studios’ Grateful Dead posters in style, to rather infantile drawings of fairies and glitter.

Often this matches the mood of the murky, naturally oxidising tinctures within; just as frequently it serves as a warning to this prospective buyer.

To avoid this confusion, it seems there is a return to providing some basic essential information about strength, grape type, source and age. This is good!

One of my mentors was that erudite wine man and art collector David Wynn, who wanted to be an architect or a sculptor more than a winemaker, even after his old dad, Sam, convinced him instead to follow the winemaking game upon his demobbing from the Air Force.

David was exceptional in the degree of fuss he put into his label design. Foremost is the example that survives to this day on Wynns Coonawarra Estate bottles. After I congratulated him on never changing it, and keeping it constant, he chuckled and showed me how, over the years, he’d made constant, almost imperceptible micro adjustments to his design, which was based around Richard Beck’s perfectly simple woodcut of John Riddoch’s 1890s winery and distillery.

David Wynn, Philip White, Howard Twelftree and Tomono Wynn in 2004.

David had commissioned Beck very early in the piece: it bravely announced a new direction for the region, and in the 50s, was alarming in its modernity. David claimed to be the first winemaker to use the word “Estate” in relation to his holding, and while he left Beck’s distinctive illo unchanged, he struggled and fiddled each vintage to ensure the words “Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate” and “Coonawarra” appeared as many times as possible on his bottle.

It was on the capsule (twice); it was on the cork. It was on the front label, prominently, and repeated in finer print at the bottom as the estate address. Turn the bottle around, there was a map showing Coonawarra, with, yep, Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate smack dab in the middle. It was repeated there again, in fine face, top and bottom; even in four point, up the side, as a code. Just to be sure.

“If you’re on Norwood Parade,” Wynn told me, “and there’s a bottle of my wine on a table on the other side of the road, I want you to recognise that bottle as Wynn’s.

“If you walk into a liquor barn, and there’s a bottle of my wine on the shelf right down the back, I want you to recognise that bottle, walk straight to it, pick it up and buy it with confidence and pride. Between the shelf and the till, I want you to read ‘Wynn’s’ and ‘Coonawarra Estate’ as many times as possible.”

Wynns’ range continues to feature Richard Beck’s woodcut of the original winery and distillery.

So if you study the bottles from Wynn’s era through several corporate takeovers to today’s ownership by Treasury, 70 years on, you’ll be alarmed at the repetition you’d never noticed before. That woodcut stays distinctive through all manner of adjustments and tweaks, even surviving brilliantly the inclusion of a black background and a bright red stripe.

To Wynn, that map on his back label (long gone, mind you) was much more important than any attempt to describe the contents beyond those basics: owner, source, type, strength and age. He had a new region to promote – nobody had heard of Coonawarra, or knew where it was. Wynn believed that if the brand was sufficiently distinctive to earn respect, the drinker would quite simply trust the contents without having to interpret some winemaking waffle about smells and flavours and whatnot.

With all that digested, I’m not here to say winemakers shouldn’t attempt to somehow describe the style of the drink they want you to buy. Get the biro out. Have a bit of a write. Get an editor to have a go at it. Designers are not editors.

But if your wine smells a bit like lignite, I wouldn’t be bragging of that on the back. I’d leave that evaluation to the critic to discover, hoping such a thing would never occur.

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