The support, naturally, has been essential. Take date night to the next level and come out to sample all four of Melanated Wine’s bottles. Had I gone anywhere else or decided to put my business anywhere else outside of North Carolina, I don’t know if I would have had that. “The people, the wineries, vineyards and all the owners, they are amazing,” she says. The Yadkin Valley Wine Country, which constitutes the wineries in seven central North Carolina counties, is another group that provides Lashonda with high-end local options. For example, she works directly with the popular Childress Vineyards for both production and bottling. Much of her early success, she says, stems from quickly-developed relationships with several local vineyards and wineries. Lashonda already had that idea in the back of her mind, but Melanated Wine’s grand opening in October confirmed it she anticipated 60 people showing up that day… and wound up serving several hundred. … Wine is one of those things where people want to taste before they buy.”Īnd did they ever. “We need something where we can store all our wines, and we’re just going to be on a computer shipping across the states. “It was like, ‘OK, we don’t need a facility that’s too big,’” Lashonda says. At first, that was to focus on e-commerce. That meant applying for permits with the state Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) Commission, finding a brick-and-mortar location – on Industry Lane, just a short drive from the Southpoint area – and, you know, building a business model. That drive, in combination with her prior work experience, was the perfect base to propel her newfound passion.īefore Lashonda could even dive into developing her business, though, she had to learn how. “He was the inspiration behind our family that’s still open 20 years later,” she says. She comes from a lineage of entrepreneurs – she kindly remembers her late grandfather making pork sausage and selling it to neighbors in Illinois. Black women? They make up an even smaller fraction of that miniscule number.īut that didn’t deter Lashonda. What she ended up doing was opening Melanated Wine, Durham’s first woman-owned, Black-owned winery, this past August.īlack-owned wineries account for less than 1% of all wineries in the U.S., while Black people often make up more than 10% of American wine consumers, according to “Terroir Noir: 2020 Study of Black Wine Entrepreneurs” published by Monique Bell, a professor at California State University, Fresno. I was like, ‘But why?’ I was curious and really wanted to figure out what I could do.” “African American women – it’s so few of us. “In the wine industry, women – there are so few of us,” Lashonda says. Eventually, the wine connoisseur couldn’t help but do some research of her own on her favorite wind-down beverage of choice. She spent the first decade of her professional career working as a researcher in life sciences. Lashonda Modest had little to no experience in the wine industry (outside of the occasional glass she’d drink in the evenings). By Hannah Lee | Photography by John Michael Simpson
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