The Interview: The Challenges Black Wine Entrepreneurs Face, and How They Overcome Them

Thank you so much for this opportunity. My name is Monique Belle and I am joining from Fresno State in Fresno, California. I was born and raised in Rochester, New York. So I’ve been an East Coast woman, girl, all of my life prior to moving to Fresno back in 2013. I grew up in Rochester, New York, with Constellation Brands and the Finger Lakes Region close by but not really recognizing the importance of those wine industries right there in my own backyard.

From Rochester. I went to Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, and then lived and worked there for several years. And it’s a city that’s still really very close to my heart. I just love the state of Maryland. I decided to on a whim, not really on a whim but, you know, a calculated risk to leave my corporate job in marketing — my last position was at the Baltimore Sun in the marketing area — and go back to study for my Ph.D. in Philadelphia at Drexel University.

So, I spent five years, studying full-time, working full-time. Of course, lost the nice income that I had, and really had to pare down and become a student again, and thankfully graduated in 2013, and accepted the position that I’m currently in at Fresno State as a marketing professor.

I’m a mom of an 11-year-old who keeps me busy and I love. I love what I do. I love working with students. I love conducting research and I’m really excited about this particular project. It’s become a passion of mine, really unexpectedly. And it’s opened a whole new world for me. So I’m grateful for it.

The study was conducted in the fall of 2020. So just about a year ago. I conducted a survey and also wound up conducting more than 40 in-depth interviews with black wine entrepreneurs and so the report that’s just been released is all about the survey results since that’s kind of easier to analyze and digest versus, you know, to having to evaluate and code and analyze what was said during the interviews.

So the report that’s been released evaluates 70 or more Black wine entrepreneurs from across the United States as well as with some representation from Germany, Africa and elsewhere. That was kind of a bonus of our Zoom environment that I reached out and connected with folks who I might otherwise not have.

So the black wine entrepreneurs who participated in the study are not just limited to black-owned wineries, although that group does make up a big portion of the study, but there are also black wine writers, media consultants, distributors, retailers. All levels of the three-tier distribution system, of course, but also the writers, event coordinators, consultants. They’re there to a smaller degree of course, but I thought it was important to keep it pretty wide to get a variety of perspectives.

There were three key areas that kind of stood out to me. And the first is that there is no one story for these Black wine entrepreneurs. There’s a kind of diversity within the paths, the backgrounds, the motivations that led them to actually creating their business.

They come from different backgrounds. Many of them did, of course, have prior backgrounds in business. A big proportion of the subjects had over 10 years of business experience. So that’s good news that these entrepreneurs are coming into their enterprises with this background in business already.

Perhaps surprisingly or not, the majority of these entrepreneurs had two years or fewer experience in wine, which is a bit of a disconnect. Wine as the industry is already complex, highly regulated, expensive, and time-intensive. And so I think that there should definitely be some more emphasis on that wine education for any entrepreneur who’s trying to get into this industry.

This whole study was really, prompted by a visit to the Black Wines Festival in Oakland, California, back in 2017. That was my own personal “Aha!” moment that, you know, there are these large groups of black wine consumers, but more surprisingly and more impactful for me was that there were Black wine entrepreneurs.

It seemed incredible that they were actually people of color who owned a vineyard who were,going through the distribution channels, who were creating these family legacies through their businesses. And so once I had that experience and began to learn more about why, I said, this is something that I really want to dive into and learn more about and, thankfully, I was able to secure a sabbatical semester last fall to begin this study.

So the first thing I mentioned was that there are different paths. We do see some diversity in the backgrounds and the motivations for black women entrepreneurs, but I also was interested in the challenges that they faced and so I didn’t want to lead the subjects in any particular direction with the survey, but I did ask them about the level of racism. Was that a challenge for them? And how did they experience it?

One surprising thing was that most the majority of respondents — I think it’s about at the 70% level — thought that racism in the wine industry was worse than racism in other Industries for entrepreneurs. That really stood out to me. They believe that the wine industry had something unique about it in a negative way that racism was in fact more prominent, was more of a challenge for their business’s success thsn. if they had gone into another industry. So that was really a bit surprising to me. That was so highly mentioned.

Among the other challenges, of course, they face is capital. In fact, the No. 1 challenge that these entrepreneurs mention was access to capital, that actual funding for their businesses. In the report, I also talked about how 88% of these entrepreneurs are self-funded, meaning that they are not using loans or grants. They’re simply relying upon their own personal savings, credit cards, family and friends.

So, think about that. If you’re investing your lifetime of savings, your lifetime of equity into your business, that is really from the subject’s perspective a really kind of challenging environment.

Thank you so much. I love that and that that brings about a wonderful point. I’m also a history buff. And so in conducting this study, I began reading Juliet Walker’s The History of Black Business in America. It’s kind of a post-civil war examination of black businesses and why they are perceived to be failing versus, you know, some of the really systemic and ingrained reasons why. And she really focused on the government, as being a big hand in why Black businesses are not as successful or supported as they could be.

I don’t go into detail on that in my report, but I think it’s bringing up some excellent and important points about how there are so many factors going against Black entrepreneurs not only in the wine space but more generally as entrepreneurs.

I’m sure that we’ve all seen kind of the example of a homeowner who wants to sell her home. She appears as she is a Black woman and gets one appraisal and then she has her white friend or colleague stand in her place and she gets an appraisal that’s $100,000 higher than she received. That’s just a small example, but, you know, these types of things are still going on. There’s bias. It may be unconscious, but there’s still bias.

So, when I say that these businesses are 88% self-funded, you have to know and realize and recognize that these are the kinds of things that are going on in the background. Perhaps when they see that the business owner is Black, that there’s a different decision about funding and about lending to them.

Not saying that it’s outright and explicit, but there’s bias, Joel, that’s been around for over a century. Several centuries. I’m sure. But I think that also having that history of adversity, really is a mechanism that allows Black wine entrepreneurs to persist.

Within the study I found that despite the many challenges  they mention, including funding, including racism as a barrier, including distribution challenges, despite all of those challenges about 90% said no matter what happens, they’re going to persist with their business. I think it’s really a testament to always having had adversity and having these challenges and just realizing that with this investment of their personal savings, their purpose, their family’s name, and credibility, a lot is on the line. And so, they are going to persist and make it happen.

And that just drives me to work even harder to get the word out about these businesses and to encourage consumers to support these winemakers and other wine businesses. So even if you don’t drink wine, perhaps you just want to learn more about it. There are wine educators you could support, there are media you can consume, there’s an event host that you can have for your next event.

So I would just highly encourage all of your viewers and listeners to support these Black entrepreneurs. And this is August which is National Black Business month, which I just learned about myself. So this is the perfect time to start engaging and learning more about black businesses and one resource that I’d love to share with your audience is to the Sip Consciously directory. That was really an outgrowth of my research.

As I was doing my research. I met another Morgan State Alumna, Angela McRae, who’s the founder of Uncorked&Cultured.com. We thought, you know, we’re both having the same challenge of trying to kind of find all of these black women entrepreneurs and have them in one place.

We’re trying to solve that problem by creating the Sip Consciously directory, which is a kind of a catalog nationally and globally of Black wine businesses within the three-tier distribution system. So there you can find what black wine producers again all over the country and all over the world with a big presence in South Africa.

You can find distributors, importers and exporters as well as retailers. So you can search by your location.  You’re in Maryland, Joel. I know that there’s Philosophy Wine there, which is a Black woman-owned winery. It’s a great resource. We’re constantly trying to build it and grow it. For National Black Business Month, we’re actually trying to add 100 more listings to that directory. So if you know of any Black wine centric, businesses, please, encourage them to visit Sip Consciously, which can be found at Uncorked&Cultured.com /sipconsciously,

We really want to make that a viable and really valuable tool, not only for consumers who are looking to support Black wine businesses but also for those businesses themselves. That’s another thing that I discovered through my research is that there was this lack of connection between the businesses. So, a black wine producer may want to, specifically, get a black wine distributor.  But how do you go about that? How do you connect them?  And so, this Sip Consciously resource really is there to help consumers as well as those within the industry as well?

The answer, probably, is no, they did not.  I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t think anybody who goes in business for themselves has any idea of what they’re just stepped into. I couldn’t get that much detail through the survey because as you know, it’s just kind of a rate your agreement with kind of more quantitative.

But in that series of 40 plus interviews that I did, I did get to really dig in deeper into those motivations. And so for the most part, the answer to your question is most did not know at all what they were getting into with starting a winery or wine business, and those who are actually winery owners. It’s an experience of a lifetime, probably both in a good and a bad way.

They shared with me, you know, just having to learn from scratch.  Many of them, as I said, are former business people, and then you take them to a vineyard they’re having to learn about soil, irrigation and seasons and dealing with fires. So there was a lot to learn and I learned a tremendous amount just understanding the investment that’s required to even purchase, plan and begin a winery. It’s, you know, out of the realm of for most average, people like like ourselves, but many were able to do that.

Also, they had to deal with the fact that, as a producer, you’re not going to be able to actually sell your product for a few years. So you’re just sitting, you know, losing money or sitting on money, making this investment hoping that it will pay off three to four to five years later. Then you have the whims of Mother Nature. What is she going to bring you each year, you know, is it going to be a good year? Or if you’re here in California, are you going to be facing continuous drought and water issues?

So many of them talked about, what a challenge it is, how risky it was. But I don’t think any of them would have gone back in time and changed it if they could. They all have this real passion either for buying the product itself or just for being entrepreneurs. That’s something else that came out of the study.

Whether they went into wine or they went into another industry, they were very internally motivated to have that autonomy that owning your own business gives you. Overwhelmingly these folks would have started something in some space whether it was wine or not. I think what particularly drove them to wine was that passion for the product, also the challenge of it, all of those factors that I just mentioned to you.

 It’s kind of like running or being involved in a triathlon. You just want to see can you do it and survive there? Is that a factor? Yeah. And again, it’s a beautiful product. I just got to visit Napa for the first time this past June and celebrate Juneteenth in Napa, which was a fantastic experience, and it’s beautiful. If you enjoy nature, if you enjoy friends and cuisine, it’s a great environment to be in.

And that’s really what I hope, eventually to focus on is having more young people, more young people of color, understand that this world exists and that they have a place in it. If they so choose, which is a good thing.

Yes, in the interviews, which I’ll have a report coming out hopefully later this year with those responses.  But really it’s just you know, savings that they had acquired. It. really, I think, falls into two groups. One group was the retirees. They had had their career. They had saved. They had an outstanding bonus. So they have this available cash that they can use. t that again was mostly the retirees. The older folks had several decades of experience working in business or as attorneys or other areas like that — you know, high-income areas.

On the other hand, the younger folks seem to be really scrappy.  They had just like savings that they were able to accumulate inviting friends and family. We’re seeing a lot of crowdsourcing being used to start funding these ventures, so I didn’t really hear too much about the more traditional paths of seeking out a loan and grants things like that, which is very interesting to me.

Of course, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Perhaps, they did go down that route, but were not, you know, accepted for those loans, so i’s another area to research further,  What I know about small business finance is that the banks do not want to lend to you until you’ve got an established business up and running, and with several years worth of revenue coming in, so, you know, banks are not risk-takers at alt. They will talk a good game about “We are Risk Takers,” but it’s not true.

So it takes guts and part of the guts is either putting your retirement in or starting and not knowing how you’re going to pull it off. But just sort of taking the lead.  It’s amazing the people who take the leap off and do just fine. Black wine entrepreneurs, particularly those who are starting wineries and being producers are competing with other wineries, non-Black wineries, that may have been passed down for generations.

There is this big pot of wealth that these other entrepreneurs are sitting upon, not only financially, but the social capital that they have the intellectual and business acumen that they have because their family has been in this for several generations.  So they’ve been able to really find their sweet spot, whereas these incoming entrepreneurs, first-generation entrepreneurs, are really having a tough hill to climb because they don’t have that kind of expertise, that financial cushion.

So it’s really an uphill battle and I really commend them for being trailblazers in such an industry that would challenge really anyone. But then you add on the layer of Black and then you know all that comes with that. I just really salute that I’m so proud and so thankful that they share their time and insights with me.

That was a major challenge. I think it was the No. 3 challenge for Black wine entrepreneurs, again with financing the No. 1, racism No. 2, and then distribution as you said that is really a conundrum and I don’t think that anyone really had a good response for that. That’s somewhere where I think it’s really going to take the industry being proactive and giving more attention to these.these wine Brands.

Yes. Absolutely. That is a great way to go, if you can manage all the regulations and legalities. Absolutely, a great fantastic way to go into build scale, nationally and even globally. If possible particularly when you talk about younger consumers, we are used to getting everything, you know, shipped directly to us. So, it kind of just falls in line with that behavior of, you know, having things ordered, and delivered online just going through that process.

Another area that is growing is subscription services. The typical wine club membership where you’re working directly with the winery to have their wine sent to you directly every month or every quarter. But the subscription boxes are kind of like curated boxes of wine that are delivered to you monthly or quarterly. So you get to have that variation. It’s not just one particular brand, one particular winery and we’re seeing these grow based on lots of different characteristics.

So one is supporting Black-owned wineries,  we’re seeing a few different subscription boxes or services that will curate them and send them to you and kind of give you the story behind these lines, and I’m sure we’re going to see that continue to grow for other care categories or characteristics as well. That’s something that’s really exciting to see it kind of takes the hassle out of it for you as a consumer. You can just rely upon these subscription services to curate for you and deliver your surprise to you each month or each quarter.

Yes, that was an area that was really intriguing to me, as you would expect, in the interviews. I learned and somewhat to a degree in the survey as well that is the big gap for these wine entrepreneurs. You can imagine all of the challenges that I just spoke about day-to-day operation, of managing these wine businesses. Then you want them to be marketing, experts. It’s not going to happen. So, it was clearly a deficiency and a gap that I saw.

I don’t have comparative data. So I don’t know if it was more or less than other types of entrepreneurs, but that was clearly a gap. There was definitely a self-awareness that they were limited in their marketing capabilities. So, you know, that, you know, can also be a huge impact on their success. So my recommendation to them is collectively partner with other Black wineries within your same state or region and you know, try to identify some marketing support for your businesses because that was clearly a gap for them.

I think the younger entrants are little bit more savvy when it comes to social media and really building a brand and building brand awareness.  But perhaps, for some of, the more mature brands, it’s kind of a struggle to navigate that. Well, how do I do direct to consumer? Why do I need to build this online persona and relationship with my consumers or potential consumers. Should I be doing an email newsletter? You know, all of these types of things that we take for granted. They really are a gap for a for many of these businesses either because they don’t have the knowledge or they don’t have the time or they don’t have the fundingto invest in that.

Absolutely. And through my course, we really had a great experience. As I’m beginning, my learn my journey. I’m bringing my students along with me. So this past spring semester for my promotions course, we always have, whether it’s an actual client or, you know, an aspirational client for whom we are creating a promotions plan and even some creative assets as well, some artifacts to be a part of their campaign.

This year, we worked with a start-up wine brand out of Atlanta, even though we’re in Fresno, again, kind of one of the benefits of the Zoom environment. We were able to really partner with that black-owned, woman-owned wine startup in Atlanta and develop several feasible and viable promotions plans for her business.

And she was so excited about the work that the students did and the talent that they brought to their campaigns that she wound up awarding the winning team a $500 dollar prize, that was, you know, not even a part of our original plans. So, engage students, engage your local marketing professor who is able to give you some support at an extremely no cost or the only, the cost is the investment of your time to share your story with the students.

 Yes. That’s a great point. I did not ask that question in the survey.  But through the interviews. I did learn a little bit more about that. And I would anecdotally just say that the majority are contracting their bottling. Even when I visited Napa in June and met with J Moss, who is the only Black-owned Winery in Napa proper, he mentioned that they use mobile a mobile bottling facility.  I had heard about it before, but it’s just really intriguing that a trailer will pull up to your business and bottle your wine for you.

I thought that was a really Innovative approach and kind of lessens the need for you as a winery to invest in that type of equipment and infrastructure. So, yeah, far and away. I’d say that these brands for the most part, almost there in that top, top tier are using contractual services for that. And that makes a lot of a sense because they don’t have that huge capital not to get over, you know, especially if their production is small enough that they don’t have tanks of juice, sitting out there waiting bottle, you know,

Gallo has tanks. But yeah, the small guy starting out with maybe 2.500 cases a year can’t afford to have a whole bottling line set up. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I really love that mobile idea. So cool.

Most of the wineries we interviewed were in California, and they did discuss how horrific it can be how, life-changing it can be, to experience thatnot only from a business perspective, but just from a  human life perspective that you within seconds, within minutes, you, your family, your home life, that could all be wiped away.

That’s another reality, I think, undiscussed risk. A part of the business as well is that fire danger that we’re seeing, increasingly here in California.

As I mentioned. I’ve been an East Coast girl my entire life until moving here to Fresno. And I felt pretty buffered being here in Fresno, because we’re in a valley. And typically, we don’t have to deal with earthquakes or fire danger, or any of that.

Well, let me tell you, in the last year. I have experienced earthquakes and I’ve been sitting at home and getting and gotten alerts on my phone that if you’re within a 30-mile radius of a certain location that you need to evacuate immediately. Now, that doesn’t mean that I was in that 30-mile radius.  But if it’s within, you know, an hour’s Drive of you is something that really gives you a mind shift and gives you a lot of gratitude.

Oh, wow, you have been terrific. I’m just taking a look at some notes Here. Yeah, I guess on the funding side going again. This survey and interviews happened in the late 2020s. So these entrepreneurs, all of us had just experienced the ravages of the pandemic,  the loss of George Floyd. And then the uprisings that resulted from that.

So that was a really unintended research area that I was able to include. And on the pandemic side, only a third of folks who had applied for some type of Covid relief, some aid for their business, got it. Thirty-six percent of those who had applied did not receive any funding.

So, you know, that was kind of someplace that I wanted to dig a little bit deeper. Well, why didn’t they get the funding? Did they do everything they were supposed to do, you know, you know what’s going on behind the scenes with that.

That was an interesting area. With the Black Lives Matter uprisings and movement there were some conflicted feelings about that in that they were happy and grateful to have this new attention as being Black-owned businesses, but the sentiment really was if they could bring George Floyd back, if they could live in an equitable world where his life did not have to end, they would give all of the funds back, all of the awareness, all of the attention back in a heartbeat.

That really was a double-edged sword for some of them. But to leave things hopefully on a more positive note, there is some cautious optimism among the Black wine entrepreneurs. About 58% are either neutral or disagree that the wine industry is taking meaningful actions. So there’s work to be done there for the industry as a whole by engaging with these entrepreneurs and truly really trying to understand how they could be better supported and included in the industry.

But on the positive side, overwhelmingly, these businesses say that they feel a greater sense of belonging in the wine industry than they did a year ago and they’re more optimistic about the future of their business than they were a year prior. So that’s kind of on the happier side. That, although they might not, you know, perceive the industry’s actions to be as meaningful as they could be, they personally do feel a sense of greater sense of belonging and more optimism about their future in the industry. So I think we just need to keep driving that home and working toward those goals.

I could think of one thing some industry members could do with the Black wineries, which is they could just offer to mentor one of them. Yes, just one-on-one mentoring.

With a brand or business that could be considered your competitor and that was strongly happening among the Black wine entrepreneurs. I think if we could just extend that and you know, have those types of mentorship opportunities and engagement,  that one-on-one direct intensive. Attention is really going to be what helps to to change things and it’s not easy. It’s not something that you can just write a check and you’re done like your hands.

And this is something that you would have to be engaged in and it’s one-to-one, it’s intensive, but I think you’re right, that that can really make a powerful impact.

So I, I really hope that kind of ride this wave for the rest of my career because it’s something that I’m personally passionate about. So intriguing, really a dynamic area. So what’s coming up next? I want to move from the entrepreneurs to taking a look at those industry professionals. So those who are working in the industry, but do not own their own enterprise, and just get their sentiments.

And then what’s  probably going to be my favorite area is really exploring black wine consumers and other under-represented groups of consumers in the wine industry. So all of that is coming as soon as I can get through evaluating the interviews that I did of the entrepreneurs.