Nupur Gogia, one of the founding members of Vinequity, tours the vineyard at Legends Estates Winery in Beamsville, Ont.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
For Nupur Gogia and Nabilah Rawji, their first meeting felt like something of a revelation.
By that time in 2017, Ms. Gogia had already been working as a wine agent in Toronto for more than a year. But Ms. Rawji was the only other racialized person she’d ever met working in the industry.
“I was like, ‘another brown girl!,’ ” Ms. Gogia said. “It was an exhale moment. Like, ‘I can relax. There’s other people like me.’ ”
The two formed a quick friendship based on their shared experience of working in a world that looked little like them. Their stories were eerily similar: of customers or colleagues questioning their expertise; of being passed over for jobs or promotions; of being mistaken as subordinates to their white, male employees.
“We’d meet, and just be like, ‘We should do something,’ ” said Ms. Gogia. Then, in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd – and a groundswell of conversations about racial justice around the world – they decided it was time.
The two of them, along with five other racialized women they’d met in the industry, created a group called Vinequity to support other Black, Indigenous and people of colour (including LGBTQ+ and persons with disabilities) working in Canada’s wine industry, which is overwhelmingly white.
In 2½ years, the group has grown to nearly 300 participants across the country – from winemakers, to marketing and sales agents, to servers and sommeliers. They’ve given out almost $50,000 in scholarships, arranged mentorships, and created a community for racialized people working across the wine industry.
Vinequity isn’t alone. The past two years has seen the creation of several industry-led programs in Canada recognizing the lack of diversity as an issue, and making efforts to address it.
Exact figures on the demographic breakdown of Canada’s wine industry are difficult to come by. In the U.S. by comparison, the popular wine publication SevenFifty Daily found in 2020 that 85 per cent of some 3,100 wine professionals surveyed were white. And the general recognition is that Canada’s industry, too, has similar figures.
Debbie Shing, founder of Quvé Group, at Le Phenix, a Toronto restaurant that carries a selection of bottles represented by her agency.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Part of this is owing to the specifically European history of wine. And that history, said Debbie Shing, “has deep roots in colonization, and slavery.” Ms. Shing, another Vinequity co-founder, runs Quvé Group, a wine agency.
The French wine capital of Bordeaux, for instance, built a large part of its fortune up until the 19th century off of the slave trade. And the history of wine across Europe is inextricably linked with the history of colonization. Even today, many of the lowest-paid employees in the industry – the men and women who grow and care for grapes – are racialized migrant workers from developing countries.
It’s also owing to the rarefied nature of Canada’s wine world – where wine is still treated as a drink for the moneyed, and where knowledge has been passed on from generation to generation.
As a result, Black, Indigenous and people of colour looking to rise up in the industry face a long list of barriers, Ms. Shing said. Wine education is expensive, costing thousands of dollars just for courses and certification – not to mention the many thousands it costs to buy and taste wine.
And then there are the less-obvious barriers. For those who didn’t grow up on a typical “western” diet, said Ms. Shing, adopting the heavily European-influenced vocabulary of wine can be additionally challenging – where tasting notes of “butterscotch” or “barnyard” are common, but rarely acai berry or turmeric.
“Why are you allowed to say it smells like a horse’s bottom, but I can’t say it smells like ginseng?” said the Hong-Kong born Ms. Shing. “It does not make sense.”
Ms. Gogia samples a recent creation at Legends Estates Winery in Beamsville, Ont. with winemaker Derek Barnett. They are sampling one of Ms. Gogia’s own creations for Khush Wines, a PetNat made from Pinot Noir.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Rawji echoed this. As a Canadian-born sommelier whose family had immigrated from South Asia and East Africa, her touchstones – and tasting notes – are often wildly different from those of her colleagues.
With Sangiovese wines, for instance, “I always and forever get the smell of henna paste,” she said.
Her career as a sommelier – most recently as wine director at Toronto’s Shangri-La hotel – has been frequently dogged with barriers because of race.
“I call them microagressions, but sometimes they’re just straight-up aggressive,” she said.
“There’s a very strong association that people have in their minds as to who is knowledgeable about wine,” she said. And as someone who doesn’t fit that image – with her brown skin and relatively youthful appearance – the reception she receives can range from dismissive to outright hostile.
She’s had customers refuse to speak with her, she said. And met wine agents who, upon realizing that she’s the one in charge – and not her older, French-speaking male colleagues – end the conversation and simply walk away. When training her younger, white colleagues, she has often been confused as the one being trained.
“Those interactions – that’s one table, one guest,” she said. “But hospitality hires and promotes and trains people for their ‘cultural fit.’ And that’s where it becomes a really big problem.”
In the immediate aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s killing, many corporations – including major wine and alcohol companies – made promises to support racial equity, said Beverly Crandon, who is Black and a co-founder of Vinequity. She is also a sommelier who runs Spice Food and Wine Group, which hosts events on wine pairings with so-called “ethnic” cuisines.
“That was the fuel,” she said.
“We want people to understand that if they made a commitment in June, 2020, that we’re here to hold you accountable to that, and to keep you honest.”
Happily, she said, many of those companies have since become Vinequity donors.
Ms. Crandon said she’s hopeful that efforts like Vinequity will help to create a future wine industry that’s more diverse.
They’ve already watched, in the past few years, their members progress – move up with their education programs, or in their careers.
“I’m optimistic that down the road, in five or ten years,” she said, “you’re going to see different people around that table making decisions.”