Q&A: TJ DOUGLAS

TJ DOUGLAS

Uncorking the wisdom of a game-changing wine expert

As co-founder of the Boston wine shop The Urban Grape, TJ Douglas wants to knock down every barrier that stands between you and a great bottle of wine: the uncertainty, the geographical minutiae, the elitism. Toward that end, he and his wife and business partner, Hadley, created a wine classification system that helps both oenophiles and oenephobes find what they like. The Douglases also established the Urban Grape Wine Studies Award for Students of Color at Boston University, to promote diversity in the industry. Plus, they’ve written a highly accessible wine guide, Drink Progressively, that aims to take the confusion out of pairing food and wine. —Amy Traverso

Sometimes it seems the wine world is divided between box-wine drinkers and connoisseurs. But what about everyone else?

Actually, most of us fit into the in-between: the world of $10-to-$30 bottles. And I’d say 95 percent of wine

Q&A

drinkers might not consider themselves connoisseurs. Most just want to drink something that tastes good to them.

How do you help newbies discover those wines?

I taste about 6,000 wines a year. Based on their body or mouthfeel, I put them on a scale of 1 to 10 for whites and 1 to 10 for reds, and they’re organized that way on shelves in the store. You can explore within those categories based on your palate. At the end of the day, it’s much easier to pair wine with food based on its body, rather than its vintage or aroma or geography or varietal.

Do you think that the pandemic changed the way we drink?

In the beginning, people were hoarding alcohol like they were hoarding toilet paper. And people were cooking more at home, trying new recipes, learning how to pair wine with food. It’s been an incredibly busy year for us at The Urban Grape—we did more than 500 virtual tastings!

Looking ahead, I can’t wait to have dinner parties again. I think we’re going to appreciate that communal table even more.

How has your experience of being a person of color in the wine world shaped what you do?

I’m using my platform to amplify the voices of others—for instance, promoting a first-generation, award-winning Mexican winemaker whose wines are extraordinary and get our customers thinking.

But most important, we realized a few years ago that brown and black people weren’t applying for our sales jobs, only for labor jobs. There’s that excuse of “How can I hire people if they aren’t applying?” We realized we had the opportunity to show people that even if they didn’t have wine on the table growing up, the wine industry can be an amazing career path. With the Urban Grape Wine Studies program, we’ve raised enough money so that two students per year will go through a certificate course into perpetuity. We’re also offering paid internships and mentorship. When people come out of this course, they can do whatever they want in the industry.

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Tag along as Amy and chef Douglass Williams pay a visit to The Urban Grape on Weekends with Yankee season five.