By Eric Asimov
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 whiz of traffic on Interstate 280, which forms the 3.5-acre 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 $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 color 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 toward Black farmers in the United States and the resulting alienation from farming that many people of color in cities feel. He had worked in fine restaurants and learned about wine.
“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 color 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.
That idea has evolved into an ambitious, idealistic, though still tiny program, dedicated to opening agriculture and wine to people who for so long had felt shut out and discouraged from participation. It is fueled almost entirely by the imagination of Renfro and his program 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 Jahdé 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 U.S.”
With Matthiasson’s help, the six-month program teaches apprentices, who are paid $22 an hour, many aspects of the wine business, from planting, tending and harvesting a vineyard to getting licenses, 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 program 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 program 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 honors 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.”
In March, Renfro and his business partner, Jannea Tschirch, opened a tiny, welcoming wine shop, Friend of a Friend, in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, selling natural wines as well as art, food, clothing and fragrances.
“This shop is a safe space for people to come in and be interested,” Renfro said. “I’m not going to somm-splain anything to anybody.”
Wine and the shop are useful in achieving his larger goals, building communities and helping people get back to the land. “Wine is a conversation starter,” he said.
The work for the Two Eighty Project is purely voluntary. Renfro, 41, with two young daughters, must work at several day jobs, at Alimentari Aurora, an Italian deli, and Ruby Wine, a natural wine bar and retail shop, as well as Friend of a Friend.
During the pandemic, Ruby organized an outdoor presentation in which Renfro took part, introducing people to natural wine. Carole, who had been working as a software engineer, attended. He had been interested in fermentations, primarily in baking and miso.
“Wine had not entered my consciousness as something I could do,” he said in a telephone interview.
His curiosity piqued by the presentation, he got in touch with Renfro, who invited him into the apprentice program, which had just started. He learned farming, winemaking and made connections. A few years later, with some experience, he and his family moved to the Loire Valley.
“Two Eighty was instrumental,” Carole said. “Without the project, I had the motivation, but I didn’t have the community. I was coming from a community that was white, and it helped me see the possibilities.”
In a year when wine sales are down and growers are talking about pulling out vines, the project is taking its opportunities where it finds them. One day, a woman walked into Friend of a Friend and Renfro struck up a conversation. He learned that her mother had an organic vineyard in Lodi, California, but had been unable to sell the grapes, including old-vine zinfandel. Apprentices with Two Eighty helped with the harvest, received some grapes and will return to prune the vineyard. This year, they also got some Napa cabernet sauvignon from another grower who was unable to sell the grapes.
“I’d much rather people call us than tear out their vines,” Manzana said.
A few years ago, Renfro took over stewardship of a remarkable small vineyard at Filoli Historic House and Garden, a repository of many rare plants in Woodside, California, including 120 varieties of American and hybrid grapes, which he makes into wine.
What kind of grapes are they? Renfro shrugged. “I look at them all as wine grapes,” he said.
As for the state of the wine business, Renfro blames the industry for its exclusivity and lack of imagination. Fewer than 1% of American wineries have Black owners, according to one study.
“Everybody’s saying, ‘Wine’s not selling, wine is oversaturated,’” he said. “But with so few people of color, how can you say that? There’s a lack of correspondence between supply and demand.”
Renfro suggested the industry reexamine wine coolers, combinations of wine and fruit juice that were widely popular in the 1980s, but which the fine-wine world dismisses as mass-produced trifles.
This year, with the apprentices, he produced what he called a natural version of a cooler made of apple, quince, mugwort and other herbs, which they put in 250-milliliter bottles. It was lovely, floral, lively and delicious.
“I wanted to make something like what my mom was drinking,” he said, adding that ridiculing such beverages was part of the gatekeeping that has for so long has made people feel shut out of wine. “I would like to make things more approachable. Making this is power.”
He imagined what could happen if a corporate wine company were to produce something like this. I suggested that a natural beverage might not lend itself to mass production.
“You might have to let this sector of the business tell a different story,” he said. “What if we had a bunch of smaller projects rather than one big one? People like one-off things. What about a bottle of wine dropping like streetwear?”
Renfro’s vision is infectious, drawing in people like Matt Niess of North American Press, which makes wine and ciders from hybrid and native varieties. Niess has volunteered his facilities, and his licensing, so that the apprentices would have a place to make wine and legally sell it.
“To already see the effects of what he’s doing to create a more equitable, diverse and sustainable community is amazing,” Niess said. “It’s not just morally right, it’s creating a more exciting, creative and economically viable business in the long range.”
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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