Wine & Spirits - October 2020 - 37

Rising Black Voices in Wine

Growing &
Making Wine
TRAILBL A ZER S

Krista
Scruggs

Mac
McDonald

Brenae
Royal

Krista Scruggs left
her native California
to produce natural
wine in Vermont.
At Zafa Wines, she
works primarily
with hybrid varieties such as frontenac and la crescent.
And at CO Cellars, a
collaborative space
she co-founded
with Shacksbury
Cider in 2018, she
co-ferments grapes
and foraged apples.
Sommelier Bianca
Sanon remembers
meeting Scruggs at
the Raw Wine Fair.
"It was an important moment, seeing
a Black woman on
the other side of the
table," says Sanon.
Scruggs is part of the
1.3 percent of farmers in the US who
are Black, having
acquired land via
the Vermont Land
Trust to plant her
own vineyard. -S.L.

Mac McDonald grew
up in East Texas, far
from any wine country. He likes to say
that visitors used
to come drink his
father's corn whiskey, and one day
one of them offered
him some Burgundy
wine in trade, which
Mac took sips of-
at age 12. Years
later, he moved to
California and was
taken under wing
by Charlie Wagner,
who gave him space
at Caymus to make
wine for Vision Cellars. Vision is a pinot
noir house, with
wines from Mendocino, Sonoma
and the Santa Lucia
Highlands. Tuanni
Price, of Zuri Wines
of LA and South
Africa, counts Mac
as one of her mentors; so does André
Mack of Maison
Noir in Oregon.
-P.J.C.

After graduating
from CSU Chico
with a degree in horticultural science in
2013, Brenae Royal
interned with E&J
Gallo. Mentored by
winemaker Deborah
Juergenson, within
two years she was
vineyard manager
for Gallo's Monte
Rosso Vineyard, a
250-acre site planted
in Sonoma Valley
in 1886. "She's less
interested in talking about herself
and more about the
projects she's working on to help get
more [people of
color] into viticulture and winemaking," says Alisha
Sommer, the director of marketing at
Ruby Hill Winery,
who recently visited Royal at Monte
Rosso. Royal is paving the way for other
Black and female
vineyard managers,
a field where there
have been virtually
none. -S.L.

RI S I N G VO I C E

CHRISTOPHER
Renfro
Founder & Grower, The Two-Eighty Project, San Francisco, CA
Inspired by agricultural scientist George Washington Carver,
Christopher Renfro studied horticulture before going on to work in
design and restaurants-he was the assistant wine director at San
Francisco's Liholiho Yacht Club before the pandemic. Three years
ago, he visited Ted Lemon at Littorai in the Sonoma Coast. "I noticed
that I was the only person of color in the vineyard, besides the people
doing manual labor," he says. Renfro asked Lemon for a pinot noir
cutting, which he planted on his front porch as a marker of that day.
Renfro has always been on the search for land, having watched his
family slowly lose the land his ancestors had purchased in Louisiana
as freed slaves. In SF, an overgrown pinot noir vineyard caught his
attention, and he asked the farm manager if he could revive it. Renfro sought out advice from winegrowers like Steve Matthiasson, who
showed him how to sucker vines via a Zoom call. He calls it the TwoEighty Project, after the local 280 Freeway and its neighboring housing project. "I'm using the site to learn viticulture," Renfro says, and
is bringing in other people of color to learn with him, hoping to find
land where they can build a Black wine collective. -S.L.
WINE & SPIRITS

OCTOBER 2020

Wine & Spirits - October 2020

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