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KOLUMN Magazine
Black Sommeliers Take the Floor
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On a packed Friday night, the room is all soft light and stemware. At the center of it, a Black sommelier moves between tables like a conductor, decanting a Barolo here, explaining a South African Chenin Blanc there. Guests lean in as she talks about soil and fog and family-run vineyards.
For generations, this role—caretaker of a restaurant’s most expensive bottles, cultural broker of taste and status—was all but closed to African Americans. Today, a small but growing cadre of Black sommeliers is not only working the floor; they’re rewriting the rules of who gets to hold the wine key at all.
Yet their rise has unfolded inside an industry that still looks overwhelmingly white. In the United States, Black-owned wineries and wine brands account for less than 1% of more than 11,000 wineries, according to research cited by the Association of African American Vintners (AAAV). Of 168 Master Sommeliers in the country, just four are Black.
The statistics suggest absence. The stories of individual sommeliers tell a very different truth: Black people have always been present in the labor of wine, and today they are fighting to be visible in its power and prestige.
A seat in a room not built for them
The modern American image of the sommelier is almost cinematic: a white man in a dark suit, gliding through a Michelin-starred dining room with a silver tastevin at his chest. For Black professionals entering the field, that image isn’t just cliché—it’s a barrier.
Academic and industry studies on “terroir noir,” or Black participation in wine, show that Black entrepreneurs across the sector—sommeliers, winemakers, importers, retailers—face a mix of structural and informal exclusion, from lack of access to capital to outright racism in hiring and promotion.
In consumer research conducted for the Maryland Wineries Association, many Black and Hispanic wine drinkers said they wanted to see more people of color working at wine companies and in tasting rooms—a clear signal that representation is not just a moral issue, but a market demand.
The relative absence of Black sommeliers at the top of the profession isn’t about lack of interest in wine. It’s about who has historically been invited in, sponsored, and trusted with the keys to the cellar.
André Hueston Mack: walking away from the bank
For André Hueston Mack, one of the most visible African American sommeliers of his generation, the leap into wine started with a decision to leave the safety of a bank.
Mack was working in finance—at Citicorp Investment Services—when he began to feel pulled toward restaurant work. He quit, took an entry-level job in hospitality, and started at the bottom of the ladder: a dishwasher with an interest in what was on the wine list.
He proved himself quickly, first at The Palm in San Antonio, then as the founding sommelier at Bohanan’s Prime Steaks and Seafood. Soon he caught the attention of chef Thomas Keller’s team and landed at two of the most influential dining rooms in America: The French Laundry in California and Per Se in New York, where a sommelier’s decisions can shape reputations and revenue in equal measure.
In 2003, Mack became the first African American to win the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs’ Best Young Sommelier in America competition, later placing runner-up in the Best Sommelier in North America contest. Those accolades translated into prestige—and a form of financial leverage. In 2007, he founded his own wine company, now known as Maison Noir, leasing vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and designing bottles with labels that nod to hip-hop and Black culture.
Mack’s journey is also a story about money and the institutions that move it. He walked away from a conventional career in financial services—the world of retirement plans, mortgages and mutual funds—to build a business in an industry where Black ownership is rare and access to debt and investment capital can be elusive.
He told one interviewer that what drew him to wine was the “instant gratification” of a guest’s reaction when he introduced them to something new. But behind the romance of that moment is the arithmetic of risk: maxed-out credit cards to start a brand, unglamorous travel to pitch accounts, and the daily calculation of whether the bet on himself will pay off.
Tahiirah Habibi: refusing to play by rigged rules
If Mack represents a path from bank office to wine cellar, Tahiirah Habibi embodies a different tension: what happens when you reach the door of the old gatekeeping institutions—and decide not to walk through.
Habibi honed her skills in some of the country’s most acclaimed restaurants, including J&G Grill at the St. Regis Bal Harbour and Michael’s Genuine in Miami. There, at the intersection of fine dining and luxury hospitality, she built a reputation as an exacting sommelier with a gift for connecting guests to bottles that felt personal, not performative.
Early in her career, she dreamed of becoming the first Black woman Master Sommelier, the profession’s highest and most intimidating credential. But experiences of bias and the wider public reckoning over the Court of Master Sommeliers’ culture changed her mind. By 2011, Habibi had turned away from the Master Sommelier track altogether, asking a more radical question: what if the hierarchy itself was the problem?
In 2017, she founded The Hue Society, an organization that uses tastings, festivals and education to center Black, brown and Indigenous wine lovers and professionals. Today, the group’s Wine & Culture Fest has become both a party and a pipeline: a space where aspiring sommeliers, bartenders, and wine writers meet mentors, sponsors and potential employers who share their lived experience.
The Hue Society’s work is as much about economic justice as it is about aesthetics. Access to formal wine education—like WSET courses or Court of Master Sommeliers exams—can cost thousands of dollars in fees, travel and time off work. In a field where many Black professionals are the first in their families to pursue this kind of career, scholarships and community-backed funds can mean the difference between a dream and a dead end.
“The only one in the room”
Ask Black sommeliers what their early years in the business looked like, and the answers often rhyme.
Tonya Pitts, wine director and longtime buyer in San Francisco, recalls that when she started decades ago, Black representation in the wine industry was even thinner than it is now. She describes being mentored by one of the few Black sommeliers she encountered—and still feeling acutely alone at tastings and trade events.
Alicia Towns Franken, executive director of the nonprofit Wine Unify, tells a similar story. As wine director at Boston’s Grill 23 & Bar, she spent 11 years as the only Black wine professional in the city, sometimes feeling, as she put it, “like being by myself on an island.” That sense of isolation seeded the program she now runs, which offers scholarships, mentorship and community to wine professionals of color at all levels of experience. Wine Unify has awarded more than $350,000 in educational support to over 160 recipients across dozens of states.
Denver-based sommelier and entrepreneur Maia Parish has written about stepping onto the local wine scene with bold, natural hair and quickly facing a barrage of microaggressions—from colleagues questioning her expertise to customers assuming she couldn’t be the wine professional in charge.
Research published in wine trade and academic journals backs up those individual accounts. Black wine professionals report being overlooked for key promotions, ignored at trade tastings, or typecast into front-of-house roles that don’t come with control over the wine list or access to profit-sharing.
For many, the emotional toll of being “the only one” comes bundled with financial vulnerability. When a sommelier complains about racism in a high-end dining room, they risk being labeled difficult and losing not just a job but a pathway to better-paid positions, consulting work, and brand partnerships.
Banking on themselves
In conversations about diversity in wine, the question of money is never far behind. To become a sommelier requires more than a passion for Pinot Noir; it demands disposable income for exams and tastings, flexible schedules for unpaid stages, and often, the safety net to survive low wages in entry-level restaurant jobs.
For Black sommeliers, who are more likely to carry student debt, support relatives, or navigate the legacy of discriminatory banking and lending, those barriers can be steep. Even once they reach decision-making roles, building something of their own—a consulting firm, a wine bar, a private-label brand—requires access to credit and investors that have historically been harder for Black entrepreneurs to secure.
Many choose to “bank on themselves.” Mack used personal savings and credit to launch Maison Noir, often hand-selling bottles to restaurants and retailers in person. Habibi built The Hue Society as a community-first platform before it attracted major sponsorships. Parish parlayed a side catering business into The Wine Suite, a full-service wine and events company.
Their paths echo what Black entrepreneurs across industries report: traditional banks are often the last place they can expect early belief. Instead, they turn to friends and family, community crowdfunding, or reinvested wages. That reality makes every successful Black sommelier-run business not just a professional milestone, but a quiet rebuke to the risk models that once said they didn’t belong.
Building new institutions, bottle by bottle
If the old system was built to keep Black people at the margins of wine, the current generation of sommeliers is busy constructing alternatives.
Wine Unify, under Towns Franken, offers tiered “Welcome,” “Elevate,” and “Amplify” awards that connect recipients not only to education but to long-term mentorship. Graduates of the program form a network that spans restaurants, distributors, and media.
The Hue Society functions as both cultural home and economic engine, partnering with brands that want to reach diverse consumers and insisting that representation be more than a marketing slogan.
Organizations like the Association of African American Vintners push for better data, more visibility for Black-owned labels, and pipelines for Black talent in everything from vineyard management to tasting-room operations and sommelier services.
Taken together, these projects represent a quiet revolution: a move from asking for a seat at someone else’s table to building entirely new rooms—tasting rooms, festivals, wine lists—where Black expertise is assumed, not questioned.
Redefining taste
What happens to the culture of wine when the people defining “good taste” come from different histories?
One answer can be found on Mack’s labels. Maison Noir’s bottles—names like OPP (“Other People’s Pinot”), Love Drunk, and Horseshoes & Handgrenades—pull their aesthetic from streetwear, hip-hop and Black graphic design, deliberately puncturing the visual codes of European chateaux and script fonts.
Another answer lives in the playlists at tastings organized by Black sommeliers: Afrobeats and R&B instead of Vivaldi, jerk-spiced lamb paired with Cabernet, or collard greens next to a nervy Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc. These experiences challenge the unspoken assumption that Eurocentric food and culture are the default setting for “serious” wine.
Black wine professionals also push the industry to reconsider its blind spots. Advocates have drawn attention to how Black and Indigenous labor built many American wine regions, even while ownership remained almost entirely white.
Consumer research suggests that younger drinkers—especially those of color—respond to this more expansive vision of wine. In surveys, nearly a third of American wine drinkers identify as nonwhite, and many say they want brands that reflect their identities and values, including transparency about how grapes are grown and who profits from the final bottle.
Black sommeliers, in other words, aren’t just catching up to an existing culture. They’re helping to define what wine will mean to the next generation of drinkers.
The floor, the future
On that busy Friday night, the Black sommelier who glides through the dining room isn’t just selling wine. She is doing a kind of quiet translation: between the language of terroir and the lived experience of her guests, between an industry’s exclusionary past and a more expansive future.
Her path to that floor likely ran through a patchwork of side hustles, unpaid tastings, mentors found through organizations like Wine Unify or The Hue Society, and perhaps a difficult conversation with a bank officer about yet another loan application.
The numbers remain stark. Black ownership, leadership and certification at the highest levels of wine are still the exception, not the rule. But the presence of Black sommeliers in dining rooms, on tasting panels, in classroom lectures, and on the labels themselves is no longer an anomaly. It’s a movement.
Wine professionals often say that what’s in the glass reflects a place, a climate, and a series of human choices. The story of African American sommeliers is no different. It’s about the land and the labor that made wine possible in the first place—and about the choices this generation is making to claim their share of its power, prestige and profit.
In the end, their work is changing more than restaurant wine lists. It’s expanding who gets to be seen as an authority on pleasure, luxury, and taste—and who gets to build wealth from it.