In 2022, Jahdé Marley, a portfolio manager for Brooklyn-based natural-wine importer Zev Rovine Selections, organized an event called Anything but Vinifera as a way to showcase her new portfolio featuring a dozen local producers making alternative wines and other ferments with American native and hybrid grapes, regional fruits, and grains. That gathering has become a biannual summit called ABV Ferments and is coming to Oakland on January 8.
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Marley is part of a growing cohort of BIPOC wine professionals and their allies doing everything they can to reclaim ancestral traditions and ensure that wine is for everyone—an important part of their mission.
“We have [based] this global wine industry off of a model that is incredibly Eurocentric and looks at one species of grape as supreme,” Marley tells me. That species, Vitis vinifera, is a European grape that has over 5,000 varieties in its family tree. “If we want to have the diversity in the industry that everybody claims to want, then we have to embrace more than this one species of grape.” It wasn’t only about grape species but questioning the wine world’s constructs and recentering Black and brown communities that had otherwise been erased or disenfranchised in the past.
This past January, ABV Ferments hosted its second volume at Paradis Books & Bread, a progressive bookstore and wine bar in Miami featuring Black studies and solidarity-movement titles alongside a curated selection of natural wines—the backdrop to a weekend of intimate discussions, learning, and celebration. Community members from across the country conversed on panels on everything from holistic winemaking to solidarity economics, and the wine flowed. There was a poetry reading, fundraising for an attendee’s top surgery, and a dance party.
During a panel called “The Elixir of Life,” Marley told the attentive crowd that “we all have a fermented culture interwoven with our people, and just because we’re here doesn’t mean we should be forced to abandon that knowledge and know-how.”
For Black Americans, those fermentation traditions go back to the motherland, to African women who made beer from millet and bananas and wine from palm tree sap. By the brutality of slavery, they traveled across the Atlantic to the Americas and Caribbean, and they carried on through the grapevine.
They were carried on by enslaved farmworkers and cooks tasked with fermenting cider and beer in plantation kitchens throughout the South and by agricultural scientist George Washington Carver (circa 1864–1943), who extracted 49 shades of dye from the scuppernong grape, among his hundreds of other botanical inventions. These traditions were advanced by John June Lewis Sr. (1894–1974), who started the Woburn Winery in the 1930s, the only known producer in Virginia making wine solely from his own farmed grapes, most of them hybrids, and by southern chef Edna Lewis (1916–2006), whose cookbooks included recipes for wines made of every fruit but grapes: blackberry, dandelion, elderberry, and plum.
As the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, Marley traces her original interest in alternative fermentations to the fact that her father’s homeland had a bounty of fermentable fruits, bitters, and roots that the U.S. beverage industry never talked about.
“When we open the aperture, we’re able to explore history and different cultural contributions in a way that is meaningful and doesn’t feel othered,” she tells me.
Among the featured Black winemakers was Chenoa Ashton-Lewis of Sebastopol-based Ashanta Wines. In addition to working with Vitis vinifera, she and her partner, Will Basanta, have experimented with small-batch wines made with foraged fruit. For that reason, Ashton-Lewis demonstrated how to start one’s own ferment using a kitchen juicer and locally sourced star fruit. The message—that anyone can make wine with whatever fruit is available to them—was so powerful that it has become a recurring workshop at every summit.
During another panel, on mutual aid and community, Ashton-Lewis noted how she was deeply moved whenever she gathered with other members of ABV Ferments. “It feels like in 40 years [from] now, we could be interviewed with gray hair and talking about how we revolutionized the wine industry,” she said.
It was only a matter of time before ABV Ferments brought the conversation to California, specifically to Minimo, an airy natural-wine shop and bar at Jack London Square, where this year’s event is being held. California is home to over 80 percent of the country’s wine production and 75 percent of its fruits and nuts—an overwhelming potential for alternative fermentations. The theme for the summit is “W.A.T.E.R.,” which stands for “Who Assumes the Environmental Responsibility?,” a question that speaks to the Golden State at a complex moment when wildfires and drought are taking a heavy toll.
For its fourth volume, ABV Oakland will be cohosted by two of the community’s foundational members, Justine Belle Lambright and Jirka Jireh. The day of the summit will be a series of four conversations led by Matt Niess of North American Press, Christopher Renfro of the 280 Project, Los Angeles–based importer Roni Ginach of Roni Selects, and Ashton-Lewis. They will be joined by other winemakers from locales around the country, including North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Oakland’s social movements have inspired change around the world—could ABV Ferments be a part of the next one?
Tickets for the in-person summit have sold out, but there is still a chance to tune in online and attend other auxiliary events, which will be announced on Instagram @ABVFerments.•
Sydney Love is a wine writer based in Los Angeles. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Wine & Spirits, the Wine Zine, and Pipette.
