How a tiny vineyard along an interstate may reshape the wine industry
With eight rows of vines in San Francisco and a vision of inclusivity, Christopher Renfro and the Two Eighty Project are training the next generation of winemakers
ALEMANY Farm ripples with life on a steep hillside in San Francisco. Rows of broccoli and collards, tomatillos, chiles and herbs, stands of cherry and plum trees – all this bounty is available free to the public. There’s even a tiny vineyard, a scruffy eight rows, the only one in the city.
With birds singing as volunteers harvest vegetables, it’s almost possible to ignore the constant whizz of traffic on Interstate 280, which forms the 1.4-hectare farm’s southern border, and the miasma of automotive fumes drifting over. Adjacent to the farm are 158 units of public housing. At the top of the hill is Bernal Heights, where homes typically sell for well over US$1 million.
When Christopher Renfro began volunteering here in 2018, taking on responsibility for the grapevines, which had largely been abandoned, he noticed something striking. People from the top of the hill and other parts of the city visited and took home the free produce. But very few came from the primarily Black housing project next door.
“The farm is one of the most privileged parts of the city,” he said. “Who has access to organic produce right from a farm? What is it like for people of colour to have access but not use it?”
The disconnect gnawed at him. Renfro, the son of a sharecropper, had studied the work of George Washington Carver and Booker T Whatley, an agriculture professor at Tuskegee University who helped develop community-supported agriculture in the 1960s.
Renfro was well-acquainted with the history of institutional racism towards Black farmers in the US and the resulting alienation from farming that many people of colour in cities feel. He had worked in fine restaurants and learnt about wine.
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“I never saw people like me working in the front of the house or cooking or dining, except for NBA stars and actors,” he said.
It became Renfro’s mission to reintroduce people of colour to the joys of growing things, to fresh food and its preparation, to the pleasures of wine and how to make it.
He founded the Two Eighty Project in 2019. The initial idea was to increase diversity in the wine industry by using those eight rows of grapes as a laboratory for groups of young people to get their hands in the soil, tend the vines, and learn to prune and trellis, harvest the grapes and make the wine.
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That idea has evolved into an ambitious, idealistic, though still tiny programme, dedicated to opening agriculture and wine to people who for so long had felt shut out and discouraged from participation. It is fuelled almost entirely by the imagination of Renfro and his programme manager, Rita Manzana, and those who have been drawn to help their cause.
“Chris is a singular individual with how selfless he is and how he wants to see the collective rise,” said Jahde Marley, a sommelier and advocate for diversity in beverages. “He’s connected with knowledgeable, caring and giving folks. He’s planted this seed of giving and sharing.”
When the Two Eighty Project was getting off the ground, Renfro contacted Steve Matthiasson, the Napa Valley farmer and winemaker who, with his wife, Jill, have helped to redefine California wine over the past 20 years. Steve Matthiasson had worked in San Francisco in the 1990s and had been obsessed with urban gardening.
“I said, ‘I’ve got to go down there and see this,’” Matthiasson recalled. “He showed us the vineyard and told us how meaningful it was to him to work in this vineyard, especially given the fact that he was Black and the agricultural history of Blacks in the US.”
With Matthiasson’s help, the six-month programme teaches apprentices, who are paid US$22 an hour, many aspects of the wine business, from planting, tending and harvesting a vineyard to getting licences, dealing with clients and becoming entrepreneurs.
Four years ago, he hired Manzana, who had been working in electric vehicle technology and whose family has an organic mulberry farm in the Philippines, as programme director. Together, they have developed a network of wine industry contacts, including Elisabeth Forrestel, a professor in the University of California at Davis school of viticulture and enology, who gave the apprentices access to the school’s resources and facilities. They’ve made wine together at UC Davis, with hybrid grapes and wild species that Forrestel has been collecting.
“There’s been a lot of inclusion work in the wine space, but not as much in viticulture,” she said. “His is the only programme in viticulture. I haven’t come across anything like it, and I feel really fortunate to be a part of it.”
Late last year, Manzana led a small group of apprentices to Japan, where they studied hybrid-grape growing. The Two Eighty Project has welcomed 50 students from historically Black colleges and universities to Alemany Farm, and Renfro has expanded the focus from wine to growing and making all sorts of fermented beverages.
“Wine is special because it’s the sexy side of agriculture,” he said. “But I grow everything.”
Some of the apprentices have begun to achieve toeholds in the industry. Pascal Carole, originally from Martinique, established his own brand, Pascal Carole, in the Loire Valley of France. Sabrina Tamayo now works at Les Lunes, a natural wine producer, and has her own label, Ruby Blanca.
“Chris really honours how much these apprentices want it,” Matthiasson said. “He has this vision of every single one of these apprentices, and the sky’s the limit after that.”
The Two Eighty Project has a wealth of plans. But it lacks financing, both for basic items like a van for transporting the apprentices and for its larger dreams, like acquiring a small piece of land in Napa to plant hybrid grapes or creating a three-dimensional scan of vineyards as a teaching tool for the offseason.
“If we had investors to help us, we could build out Two Eighty rapidly,” Renfro said. “We’re able to dream about bigger things than people typically think of with wine. We’re trying to do something huge.”
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