Books

From Grapes to the Glass

Only 25% of Blacks drink wine, as opposed to 34 percent of their white counterparts, according to Batya Ungar-Sargon, managing editor of VinePair. This may be the result of the way wine is marketed (or not) in the Black community. Although Blacks are “12% more likely to shop for wine online than their white counterparts, wine sellers and their marketers continue to refuse to reach out to the African American consumer,” Ungar-Sargon writes.

Published

4 years ago

October 15, 2022

Oakland Post

The Woburn Plantation Manor House Remains & Burwell Cemetery

By Tamara Shiloh

Winemaking is a centuries-old profession originating in Old World France. Socioeconomics, however, has played a role in the lack of Black connoisseurs and producers of wine in America. Fine wines have always been a staple in exclusive clubs and upscale restaurants; establishments traditionally filled with white patrons. Even today, little is revealed about the rapidly increasing growth of diversity in the industry. Despite their absence from the narrative, so-called anomalies within the Black community were growing plump grapes and distilling them into bottles — one being John June Lewis Sr. (1894–1974), owner and operator of Woburn Winery.

Lewis’ passion for winemaking developed while stationed in the European Rhine Valley during World War I. He came to love the land, the soil, and especially the grapes. After his tour, he returned home to his father’s Clarksville, Va., plantation where he worked in the lumber business until the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. After his father’s death, Lewis would inherit land. Still holding on to his passion, he planted 10 acres of labrusca grapes in the Ivy Hill area of Mecklenburg County. The cellar held 5,000 gallons, sold mostly to neighbors and friends. Later, in 1940, it would grow into Woburn Winery.

The Woburn Plantation Manor House Remains & Burwell Cemetery

Woburn is thought to have been the only Virginia winery by the early 1970s to manufacture wine solely from its own grapes, and the only Black-owned winery in the US. Dubbed, “the Virginia Carolina Brand,” Raisin Wine and Virginia Red Grape were the only two varieties Woburn produced.

“I’ve never seen any (wine) advertising or marketing directed at African Americans,” Tony Harris, vice president of an African American wine tasting group in the East Bay told SF Gate. “This is clearly a missed opportunity.”

Still, Black winemakers are navigating the maze of a tough and unwelcoming industry through vineyard ownership. Of the more than 11,000 wineries based in the US, less than 1% of those are Black-owned or have a Black winemaker.

Lewis made wine from labrusca and hybrid grapes for more than three decades until his death in 1974. The winery closed soon after. Today, Virginia is home to more than 300 wineries and wine brands but fewer than five are owned by African Americans.

Get advice on navigating wine lists, purchasing wine, and drinking more diverse and interesting selections at home from Brooklyn sommelier and winemaker André Mack in “99 Bottles: A Black Sheep’s Guide to Life-Changing Wines.”

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Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of June 17 – 23, 2026

Published

2 weeks ago

June 20, 2026

Oakland Post

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Books

Book Review: Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me

Though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

Published

2 weeks ago

June 17, 2026

bpusa-syndication

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Author: Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Simon & Schuster, SRP: $29.00, Page Count: 304 pages

Sticks and stones may break my bones.

You know the rest of that childhood rhyme, and you know it’s not true: words have meaning, and they can cut like a knife. And yet, though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

The college lecture was supposed to have been about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

It was supposed to be a lively discussion, but unintentionally it quickly veered off course. When a White student quoted a movie line featuring the “n-word,” the room went quiet, and Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor panicked.

She’d grown up hearing that word, and seeing it, and she’d experienced the painful feelings attached to it. She knew who wrote that movie line. It was her father, Richard Pryor.

In her first few years, Pryor spent most of her time in a White world, hearing her mother’s tales of her larger-than-life father, and trying to grasp meaning in her father’s albums, peppered as they were with a word that was off-limits to her.

When she was six, she met her father for the first time. She began to visit him regularly.

It was fun at her Dad’s house; though he was sometimes moody, he taught her to fish and play dominoes. She became close with her siblings, fearful of her great-grandmother, and confused about a word that her father’s uncles threw around like a beach ball. It was a forbidden word at her mother’s house, but her father used it. Differently. Often.

The word hurt. She knew first-hand that it did.

“The word became a degrading slur that shackled all Black people together into a single, inescapable tribe,” she says.

So why was it okay for certain people to say it?

Knowing that, in the years since Richard Pryor’s accident and his death from multiple sclerosis, he’s become somewhat of a legend. It is a very satisfying thing, isn’t it? So is reading about him, especially from the viewpoint of one of his seven children. But his is not the only story you get inside “Something We Said.”

Wrapped around the life of Richard Pryor is the life of a word that straddles a line between danger and provocation, a word that author Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor refuses to say or even print. As she tells readers about her father and her loving-but-difficult relationship with him, she warily circles that word, as if it might bite. You may cringe, but she weighs it carefully, helping readers see it as a chameleon before always bringing us back to her father, his work, and his life before and after her and that word.

It’s a push-pull balance that holds readers fast, and keeps them there. It’s perfect for fans of this genre, or Richard Pryor, or of language – and it’s going to make you think. If you want a good memoir this week, one that may send you to your old album collection, “Something We Said” is rock-solid.