Everything Happens for a Riesling By Sarah Baird When Robin McBride reflects on the growth of her company, McBride Sisters Wine, over the hectic, high-stress past two years, she lets out a deep sigh. “These have definitely been a very scary and challenging past couple of years. But we’ve grown so much during this time, in part because so much light has been shed on the importance of taking an interest in, and supporting, womenowned and Black-owned businesses.”
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he largest Black-owned wine business in the country, Robin operates the company — which makes, among other vintages, the popular Black Girl Magic line of wine — with her sister Andréa. And in the face of these challenging times, the duo has created a model for how to use digital tools to build a more inclusive, welcoming wine world for drinkers across the globe, even during a global pandemic. The open-arms attitude the sisters have toward community is rooted in their own story, which started when the siblings found one another as adults and began to see parallels between their continents-apart upbringing. “When we met and learned that we both grew up in wine country — Andréa in New Zealand and me growing up in the Central Coast of California — that definitely put a little pin in ‘Hmm, what are the chances?’ That doesn’t feel like something that’s normal, particularly for little girls of color to have grown up in really agricultural areas that have a focus on wine.” While getting to know each other, the pair spent weekends meeting up at wineries along the California coast, a choice that would lead to a business idea that would not only shape their lives but also redefine the boundaries of global wine stewardship. “We encountered a lot of situations where it was assumed that we didn’t know much
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R O U S E S M A R C H | A P R I L 20 22
