Black wine professionals in Sonoma County share their stories of grit and grace

In Sonoma County, among more than 400 wineries, only a handful have a Black vintner at the helm.

That singularity plays out across the U.S., where fewer than 60 wineries are operated by Blacks, according to Statista, an online platform specializing in market data.

According to Dan Glover, founder of Healdsburg’s L’Objet Wines, barriers exist that make it challenging for Black vintners to succeed.

“In the wine industry, there’s a ceiling because there is still a perception that Black folks don’t make high-end wine,” Glover said. “I think the ceiling is rising. Hopefully, with our efforts, someday there won’t be a ceiling.”

Other local Black vintners describe similar barriers and say breaking through them requires tenacity.

To mark Black History Month, we talked with several of them about their successes, as well as the challenges they faced. Glover; winemakers Mac McDonald and Theodora Lee, and internationally known wine writer Dorothy Gaiter shared their stories.

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Dan Glover, vintner of Healdsburg’s L’Objet Wines

Dan Glover initially worked in the music industry, penning and producing songs in Los Angeles from 1988 to 1992. But he was drawn to the artistry of winemaking and came to Sonoma County in 1996. He worked at Clos du Bois, Armida and Dutcher Crossing before creating his L’Objet label in 2008.

L’Objet is French for an object that’s admired. At a bar one day, a friend suggested the name. Glover decided it was perfect.

The vintner, 58, said his winemaking philosophy is simple. He looks for the best grapes, takes a hands-off approach and lets the wine tell its story. Today he produces 800 cases a year, including pinot noir, sauvignon blanc and a red blend.

In an industry with few Black winemakers, Glover credits Mac McDonald for showing him the way.

“I met Mac McDonald and saw how he and other Black men were making their own labels,” Glover said. “I thought, wait, I can do this.”

Glover said he pursued his dreams, overcoming self doubt instilled by prejudice. He recalled when he first experienced racism, as a 5-year-old playing in a neighbor’s yard in 1971, in a suburb of Rochester, New York.

“A man screamed out the window, ‘Get out of my yard,’ and he used the ‘N’ word,” Glover said. “I was crying. I went home and told my mother, and she ran out the door. But other neighbors held her back and she never made it to the man’s house.”

The vintner has a tattoo, a Taoist symbol for grace, on his right leg to remind himself to choose civility instead of anger when he encounters prejudice.

The teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. have been a lifelong guide, Glover said.

“He taught me where prejudice comes from and to try to teach people instead of getting mad,” Glover said.

But racial equality still has a ways to go in the U.S., he added. “That’s tough. It seems to me that we keep taking two steps forward, then one step back. So there’s progress.”

Mac McDonald, co-vintner of Windsor’s Vision Cellars

The vintner who inspired Glover and many other Black winemakers, guiding them to success, is Mac McDonald. On most winter days, you’ll find him in overalls with pruning shears in his back pocket.

“Most folks have a hard time believing I’m the winemaker and owner of Vision Cellars,” McDonald said. “I often get asked, ‘Who’s the owner and winemaker?’ I know why they’re asking.”

With his flagship pinot noir, McDonald cofounded Vision Cellars in Windsor in 1995 with his wife, Lil. The brand’s highest rating was in 2009 when it snagged 93 points from Wine Spectator for its Vision Cellars, 2007 Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley, Coster Vineyard. The brand also was served at the White House on a handful of occasions. One of its most high-profile pourings was as at a dinner in June 2005 to celebrate Black Music Month, when the Vision Cellars, 2003 Rosella’s Pinot Noir was paired with Angus steak.

McDonald provided an example for other Black wine professionals to follow, but who inspired him?

That person was Brian Duncan, co-founder of Bin 36 restaurants. The Chicago native was nominated four times for a James Beard Award in the Outstanding Wine Service category.

“Brian traveled to many countries to learn about wine,” McDonald said. “We’d get together on a regular basis and when we visited, we’d talk about his findings.”

Duncan encouraged McDonald to champion diversity in the wine industry by making a brand that turns heads.

“That’s how you fight for it,” McDonald said. “Hopefully, people will forget what color you are when you make a good product.”

He had his first experience with prejudice at age 4, as a kid in Texas.

“I was told we couldn’t come in the front door of a cafe in Fairfield, Texas,” McDonald said. “We’d have to go around the back. My uncle, who had served in World War II, took us to another cafe. He said, ‘Never spend your money if you can’t walk in the front door.’ I still believe this.”

Racism, McDonald said, is still a pervasive problem.

“I feel like we’re 50% of where we need to be,” McDonald said. “We can move forward by treating each other with respect. But I feel like there’s prejudice all around us, and we all need to take a good look at our own actions on an hourly and daily basis.”

Dorothy Gaiter, senior editor for New York City-based Grape Collection

At 13, Dorothy Gaiter knew she wanted to be a journalist.

“I was convinced that words could change hearts and help America make good on the Declaration of Independence’s idea about equality and fairness,” she said.

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X voiced the aspirations of large segments of the Black community, Gaiter said. Those words kept her dream on course.

In the 1990s, Gaiter wrote for the Wall Street Journal and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on race. In 1998, she became a household name for wine lovers worldwide when she and her husband, John Brecher, began writing the wine column “Tastings.” They launched “Open That Bottle Night,” encouraging people to enjoy bottles they thought too precious to uncork. This tradition continues to be celebrated every year, on the last Saturday in February.

Today Gaiter, 71, writes wine columns for the online newsletter Grape Collective. And like Glover and others, she was inspired on her path by McDonald.

“I’ve interviewed him several times and have written about him maybe a half dozen times,” she said. “He’s done so much, not just for Black people in the wine world but for the wine world, period. He has worked hard to make wine more accessible to anyone who wonders what all the fuss is about. He has created lifelong wine lovers.”

Gaiter said she has faced subtle prejudice in the wine industry at trade gatherings.

“It’s that white men who formed a wall in front of the white men serving were deemed more worthy, apparently, of this attention,” Gaiter said. “This stung, especially when the wine was one we’d helped make famous in our ‘Tastings’ column.”

Growing up, Gaiter said, she had an easier go of it than many Blacks. Her father, Worrell G. Gaiter, taught vocational and mechanical arts at the historically Black Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee. She also spent part of her formative living in Jakarta, Indonesia, enrolled in an international school.

Once back on American turf in the 1960s, Gaiter said, she found racism was more pronounced. Once, when she was 11, she was on a bus heading to summer camp in Lake Placid, Florida. When they stopped for lunch, she said, she was told she had to eat in the kitchen while white people were welcomed into the restaurant. Another time, as a teenager in Tallahasse, Gaiter was hired over the phone for a restaurant job. When she arrived and her boss saw she was Black, she was fired.

Gaiter said there’s still so much work to be done for racial equality in education, health and housing.

“The only time I saw my father cry was when he was trying to explain why some Black people were sleeping on the sidewalks in New York City in the 1960s,” Gaiter said. “He would be appalled today.”

To break through any barriers, Gaiter said Black professionals should be decent and respectful but by no means timid.

“Go after what you want, and don’t stop until you get it.”

Theodora Lee, Vintner of Mendocino County’s Theopolis Vineyards

Theodora Lee said she’s not sure whether she’s trying to break through a glass ceiling of racism or sexism.

“I have a double-edged sword with systematic racism and sexism,” the vintner said. “I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a woman or I’m Black, but in the wine industry, it has been very difficult to find distributors and brokers to get my wines to high-end restaurants and bars.”

Despite a string of gold medals and 90-plus point ratings, Lee said, a broker recently said her brand was not a good fit for their portfolio.

But Lee, who is also a senior law partner and trial lawyer in San Francisco, said she has learned how to pivot. With the help of her legal contacts, she found her way into some high-end restaurants and resorts, sidestepping distributors.

Intending to simply be a grape farmer, Lee bought land in Mendocino County’s Yorkshire Highlands and planted a vineyard in 2003. But in 2012, an ill-timed rain during harvest forced her to change her plan. A winemaker rejected her grapes, so she decided to have her fruit custom crushed.

McDonald came to the rescue, she said. He agreed to make her wine, with grapes as his payment. And Lee’s 2012 Petite Sirah snagged a gold medal from Sunset magazine.

Today Lee, with her winemaking consultant Emiddio Justin Massa, produces 2,500 cases a year of pinot noir, petite sirah and a handful of other varietals.

Now 60, she said she learned early in life that success would be hard-fought. She was 4 years old when she first encountered prejudice. It was the 1960s, and she was traveling through Texas with her mother.

“When we stopped at a gas station and my mother asked if I could use the restroom, they said ‘The restroom isn’t available for colored.’”

To her surprise, her mother told her to relieve herself right on the concrete in front of everyone. She did.

“My mother taught me we have to rise above humiliating situations and keep moving forward,” Lee said.

That’s still her mantra today.

“As the granddaughter of Texas sharecroppers, my family has come a long way,” Lee said. “But land ownership is a real barrier. With few exceptions, most Black-owned wine brands don’t own their own vineyards.

But, she added, “I believe in hard work and grit. Never give up.”

You can reach Wine Writer Peg Melnik at peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5310.