When Fern Stroud was growing up, she would tag along with her father as he drove a tour bus taking visitors from their hometown of Berkeley, California, to Napa valley’s wine country. She would notice how happy people were after a couple hours into the trip, and think: “I can’t wait until I’m 21.”
However, Stroud’s first visit to wine country as an adult was anything but pleasant. The name of the winery has faded from her memory, but Stroud, who’s now 45 and identifies as LGBTQ, remembers the feeling and her unhealthy efforts to belong. “I would go into that space with my braids, just being me and be ignored,” she says. “I didn’t feel very welcomed. I would overdo it, spending way too much money to prove to them that I can be in that space. … I was like, that’s BS. Why can’t I just be treated like anyone else?”
Stroud turned that frustration into action, creating and curating Black Vines, a community of Black vintners who pour their wines for people in the Bay Area who look like them.
Starting with a small event at an art gallery in 2012, Black Vines now holds a yearly event that’s become a social highlight for Black wine connoisseurs in the Bay Area, including being named one of the best wine festivals in Alameda county by USA Today. It organizes other live events and has a membership program and has grown into a powerful economic engine for Black-owned wine businesses, connecting them with consumers who have largely been ignored by the mainstream wine industry.
“It’s about building a Black economic ecosystem through wine,” says Freda Statom-Greene, a non-profit executive who helps Stroud produce events. “Fern is all about connecting people and creating community.”
These days, Black Vines’ annual event in February – during Black History Month – draws nearly 1,000 people. Women with flowing braids and locs in fashionable clothing and blingy nails sip wines ranging from central coast pinot noir by Indigené Cellars to Ayaba’s peach sparkling wine named after the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. Most wineries pouring are emerging brands, but wine stars come out, too. Earl Stevens, also known as the rapper E-40, attended the event this year, with his eponymous label.
“Fern is a connector and passionate about Black wine and how it’s experienced,” says Robin McBride, co-founder of McBride Sisters Wine Co, one of the largest Black-owned wine brands in the US. “Anyone who’s ever met Fern knows that everything she does comes from a place of love and respect.”