5/31/2023 0 Comments Argentina wine maps![]() ![]() I recommend that you plan a visit.īrown Estate. Those wines are what you’ll get when you visit the tasting room, though last year the winery also launched a second label, House of Brown, designed to be more accessible, with a red, white and rosé at $20 apiece.Ī wine tasting at Brown is fun. The core Brown Estate lineup isn’t cheap (these are Napa wines, after all), with bottles up to $125. The entire tasting room experience is very dialed-in, with impeccable service, smart glassware, a way-better-than-average cheese plate and - most important - great wines.īrown’s specialty is Zinfandel, which grows well in Chiles Valley, and many of its other wines fall into the full-bodied reds category. ![]() Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. This high-profile incident moved Brown Estate to become more vocal and visible, to show people that even if there was a current of racism in certain Napa Valley institutions, there was also a Black-owned winery here. It never advertised tastings people just kept showing up.īrown wasn’t even on social media until 2015: That was the year that the Napa Valley Wine Train kicked out a group of Black women for laughing and talking too loudly. For many years, the winery was content to host visitors in a makeshift tasting area on its vineyard property, in the remote Chiles Valley region of eastern Napa County. Word has spread organically over the course of the winery’s long life Brown has never engaged in aggressive marketing or public-relations strategies, the Brown leadership team explained to me in a conversation last month. It has cultivated a large, devoted following of Black wine lovers. Why aren’t more Black wine consumers coming to Napa? That question is likely beyond the purview of this newsletter, though the “overt racism” that wine writer J’nai Gaither describes in her experience working at a Napa Valley tasting room offers some clues. The crowds I see are seldom racially diverse. This disparity tracks with what I observe anecdotally, during my frequent embeddings in Napa and Sonoma tasting rooms. That’s much lower than one might expect given the fact that Black drinkers account for around 10% of total wine consumption in the U.S., as a 2021 study by Fresno State professor Monique Bell found. Once I found my way up the elevator into the second-story tasting room, I felt as if I were entering an entirely different Napa: one that’s racially diverse and pulsing with energy.Īccording to a 2018 study by Destination Analysts, only 4% of visitors to Napa Valley were Black. There’s no big, flashy sign advertising the tasting room’s existence. I’d made a reservation for a Friday afternoon and had some trouble finding it. ![]()
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