In Miami, black wine professionals make the conscious-wine movement their own | Opinion

Is Miami’s natural-wine renaissance part of a bigger cultural shift?

“Art cannot be a monologue. We are on the high seas,” Albert Camus wrote in “L’artiste et son temps” — translated as “Create dangerously.” “The artist, like everyone else, must bend to his oar, without dying if possible.”

Socially, the old way of experiencing wine is dying. I see the natural-wine renaissance, a movement challenging the single-story-tasting-note losing its hierarchical charm and with it, I hope, the unnatural issues of racism and sexism that have kept wine culture from realizing its full artistic and socially progressive potential.

In the world of conscious winemaking, which includes sustainable, organic and biodynamic categories, natural winemaking is the highest form. That means it observes viticultural and vinification practices with the most human investment in the least human intervention.

But beyond the passionate conversations about moon-cycle-sensitive wines and spiritual farming, talk to some local, black wine professionals, and Miami’s natural-wine renaissance might represent an even more-powerful shift.

Black folks have been sipping dangerously for a while now. By danger, I mean many black wine lovers and professionals have been sipping through the burden of otherness.

“I’ve been at wine tastings where people get drunk, and it goes from the wine being the curiosity to me being the curiosity,” said Robert Dubois, 38, the founder of Noir Wine Tasting Group who worked at Total Wine & More as a salesperson for almost eight years.

After building a following of curious and informed black wine drinkers, he created the tasting group, so black wine lovers not only can share wine but feel comfortable and welcomed while doing so.

I share Dubois’ experience of feeling like a curiosity. During my stay in Bordeaux, my host, a white female enologist from the region repeatedly referred to me — though she meant no harm — as her “exotic friend,” and while driving through Sauternes in the teeming darkness, a co-host pointed to an area and said, “That’s where we kept our slaves.”

My career in the wine industry has spanned 19 years and while, generally speaking, many experiences have been amazing, these unnatural occurrences remind me that wine culture is still enslaved to the eerie social ills that extend from underpaid grape pickers of color to undervalued writers of color.

During a meeting with a local publisher, for example, she explained the difficulties she had pitching me to write a wine story because I was black.

“I do see a sharp contrast between the black folks I know who love wine and are self-educating and the opportunities they get, especially women, and then my white girlfriends that may not have education but might have a blog,” said freelance lifestyle writer Crystal Cooper, 32. “They tend to get offers to do influencer things and get paid, but I see black women just not getting those opportunities. People just don’t think to have you in the room and when you do get in the room, um, sometimes, you don’t always feel the most welcomed.”

But they are feeling more welcomed in natural-wine spaces.

“Working the RAW WINE event last year, the winemakers genuinely wanted you to feel their stories, feel their wine,” said Dubois who was a pourer at the fair — an event for conscious winemakers. “Everybody was in a good vibe. Everybody was really open. It didn’t give me that South Beach Food & Wine Festival-type vibes where everything seems so make-uppy and choreographed.”

There are no natural wines being featured at this year’s festival, but there are more natural-wine communities opening up in Miami — spaces where wine and diversity are as organic as the juice in the grape skin.

Lagniappe House, which opened in 2012 is one of Miami’s conscious wine renaissance frontrunners — a French Quarter-style, jazz-wine bar in Midtown offering a breezy, culturally and generationally diverse, wine community-experience.

Slightly north of Lagniappe in Little Haiti is Boia De, a tiny restaurant ensconced in a busy plaza that offers an unassuming, old-Harlem-boho vibe with a playlist boasting everything from Maze featuring Frankie Beverly to A Tribe Called Quest.

There, the Haitian-American sommelier and general manager Bianca Sanon curates an organic, biodynamic and natural wine list.

“People are surprised that I’m the somm. They make comments about how well-spoken I am,” said Sanon, 28. “Microaggressions can be backhanded compliments, but they are not malicious.”

In an article entitled “A Jamaican Michelle Obama,” Sanon writes about dealing with microaggressions in the hospitality industry.

“I’ve blocked out certain things. In conventional wine, you want a seat at the table, so you ignore the racism. In the natural-wine world, there are black people on the wine labels. Some conventional winemakers are very defensive when they talk about natural wine, so why wouldn’t they be defensive about more-sensitive topics?”

Sanon has also dealt with sexism and shared that while working as a floor manager at a French bistro in New York, Dirty French, a “difficult guest” who returned his food three times said to her: “By the way, nice legs.”

Like watching the legs of a hefty wine crawl slowly down the glass, the natural-wine renaissance will not end the social ills long fermenting in history’s barrels, but perhaps it is the beginning of the shift — the bud breaking on the vine and growing toward the sun, toward humanity.

Dinkinish O’Connor is a culture critic who teaches communications and humanities classes at St. Thomas University.