The Fizz #79: Louie Seamus has revolutionized San Francisco's wine scene
In this issue, Louie Seamus, a wine entrepreneur who has been on the cutting edge of the wine industry for 30 years, speaks about their career highs and lows.
I’m so inspired by Louie Seamus. Louie has been in the wine industry for over thirty years and has run or worked in almost every kind of wine business, from wine shops to wine bars to consulting and starting wine fairs like Califermentation and WINeFare. Louie started and runs the non-profit The Vinguard, which centers equity and community in the wine industry.
In this interview, Louie and I look back across their career, starting from their time at Astor Wines and Spirits in New York’s East Village, as a sommelier at a California formal restaurant, opening their first and second wine bars, starting their wine education program. We take a look into the challenges they have worked through, including sexism and misogyny in the industry, financial ups and downs, and the difficulties of entrepreneurship. We speak to their time building wine fairs and starting a non-profit. The impact of Louie Seamus on today’s wine industry cannot be overstated.
Margot: When you were growing up, were wine or grapes a part of your life?
Louie: No, I remember my parents drinking screwdrivers and scotch, my grandparents drank peach schnapps, not wine. This was in the seventies. When I went to college, people were drinking beer, which I don’t love. I would drink vodka sometimes.
Margot: Where did wine come into your life?
Louie: I spent some time as a student in London. When I was over there, I noticed there were wine bars all over the place. I didn't really know what I was drinking, but I liked it. After college, I spent a year and a half traveling abroad. I came back, I was applying to graduate school and I wanted to do something fun. I didn't want an office job. My first job out of college was working for a publishing company and I was like this sucks. I'm not using my mind. When I came back to the States, I just said, okay I need to do something fun while I'm applying to grad school.
So I got a job in a wine shop. I was hired by Kevin McKenna, who is one of the partners at Louis/Dressner, or really Louis/Dressner/McKenna. He was the buyer at Astor Wines in New York. It was 1990. I just thrived. I loved my co-workers. We used to taste together all the time. I just fell in love with wine. I was about to start a graduate program in the fall of 1991 and decided to move to California and establish residency and then go to graduate school. But when I moved to California, I got a job as a sommelier at a very fancy formal French restaurant.
Margot: I'd love to hear about your experience at Astor in the nineties—what was it like at that time?
Louie: So it was 1990. Astor was great. Kevin was amazing. What was so cool about Astor was that they had a much bigger Italian selection than anywhere else in the city. It wasn't just Tuscany and Piedmont. There were more wines from the Loire at the time than there were from Bordeaux. It was the opposite of Sherry Lehmann. It was the downtown cool stuff where you would find wines that you wouldn't find anywhere else. That shaped my entire outlook on wine where I was always looking for the eclectic and interesting things you wouldn't find somewhere else.
Even though natural wine wasn't really a term back then, there clearly were some wines that were stocked very early on. Kevin was buying wines from Joe and Denyse at Louis/Dressner before they before he started working with them. Unsulfured wines from Frey and Coturri were in the back next to kosher wines, there for the few people who were going to come in and ask for them. It just wasn't taken seriously. That said, there was an amazing selection and it was a really fun, vibrant time in the Village.
The Village at the time was still cool and hip and young, and if you didn't have a lot of money or if you were a student or an artist, you could afford to live in the East Village. You could get a studio at the time for like $700 and there was great music around. It was just a really amazing time to be in New York. Astor was in some ways a little microcosm of that with the people who worked there, Jake Halper from Field Blend Selections, lots of other great folks, it was a very eclectic, interesting group of smart people. Working for Kevin and being under his tutelage was amazing. I have only had one mentor in the industry and that's Kevin McKenna.
Margot: What did that relationship look like with Kevin? What's a good mentor relationship to you?
Louie: Well, Kevin and I are really good friends now. A good mentor to me is somebody who exposes you to a lot. Who is open minded and sees who you are and listens to you and realizes they have something to learn from you as well. By having that kind of relationship, they can get a better sense of who you are and how they can help you grow. That to me is a good mentor. A good mentor is not somebody who says this is the way you do it. This is what you should be drinking. That's not a good mentor.
I've had a few people tell me that I've been a mentor to them. I hope that when they say I've been a mentor to them, what they mean is not just that they learned from me, but that I helped them grow as a wine professional.
Margot: How did you get introduced to Kevin?
Louie: I went in and filled out an application. They gave me a test and I guess I knew that Bordeaux was made from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and Cabernet Franc. It was a very simple test, but I passed and they hired me. I learned really quickly because I loved what I was doing and I was young and a sponge for it. I would come home from work and just read about wine.
Astor shaped me and my outlook to wine and about always being open for things that are new and different. When I moved to San Francisco and got this job at Amelio’s, it was really a formal stuffy French restaurant. It was the opposite of Astor. However, it was also a learning experience because they had a very deep cellar—we won the Wine Spectator Grand Award of Excellence, like—big fucking deal now, right? But at the time, it was cool. We had a bottle of 1798 Lafite from Thomas Jefferson's cellar. I'd never tasted it, but I did have an opportunity to try a lot of' ‘61 first growths, wines I would never be able to afford on my own.
After a year of doing that and having a misogynist work situation, I left and at the time I didn't call it out. If I were in the same situation today, I would have made a much bigger deal over it than I did then by the time I left. That was in 1993. I had been thinking about opening up a wine bar that was similar to the wine bars in London, and then I met a like-minded person. We opened up a wine bar together.
Margot: What kind of environment was the consumer landscape in at that restaurant? What were folks interested in?
Louie: People wanted Bordeaux. They wanted California. I introduced wines from the Loire and the Rhone because it was all basically Bordeaux, Burgundy, and California Cabernet with a little California Pinot, not a lot. Chardonnay, some Sauvignon Blanc. If you were looking at it today, you’d say that wine list sucked, right? At the time, it had all these trophy wines on it. With the by the glass program, I would often suggest—why don’t you try a Syrah or this Chenin Blanc from the Loire? I tried in my own way to get people to try things that were different.
Margot: How did you approach the list at your first wine bar, Hayes and Vine?
Louie: I opened up Hayes and Vine in the early nineties. That's where I was able to really do fun stuff. We had 600 wines on the list initially—we had more German Riesling than we had California Chardonnay. We had wines from South Africa, Austria, Hungary, before anyone else in the city. We had a really extensive by the glass selection. We had flights. We were doing things nobody had been doing before. It was the second wine bar ever opened in the city.
The first wine bar, it was called the London Wine Bar, and it was basically like a British style pub, and they served California wine. We revolutionized everything. I'm just stating a fact here. We created a wine bar that set the standard for every wine bar that's come since. Now that's not to say it wasn't done elsewhere. There was a wine bar in New York called The Greene Street Wine Bar that I used to go to in Soho that had tons of flights and wines from other places. So I'm not saying that we were the only ones in the world who were doing it—Hayes and Vine was the first place in San Francisco to do this. That’s how my career really took off.
Margot: What was the impetus for starting a wine bar? You were working at a shop. Why not do another shop? What made you excited about the bar?
Louie: It's interesting because right now, I would only do a shop. I don’t think I would do a bar again. I actually like retail a lot more, but at the time it was, I did like that idea of customer interaction. It was new and novel. There had been wine shops. There weren't wine bars. I don't really see the need to do things that are already around.
Everybody was welcome because we were both queer. We had a huge lesbian following. There were a lot of gay men that came in too and people of all genders and sexualities who came in, but there were not a lot of places like that at the time.
My business partner was the financial lead. I was the wine person. I created the wine list and ran it all. She was not actively involved in the running of it, but it was her family that put the money in. I have since learned that when you open something up, you need to be much more frugal about it, but that was not the case at the time. It was a really nice place. We spent $600 on each chair! We created a place that people really enjoyed going to, it was really cool.
I left because the partnership was very difficult, and then started teaching about wine. People had been saying to me for a while that I should teach people. I started a wine school called Grapes of Path. It was mostly restaurant wine industry people, but then consumers found out about it.
Margot: In creating this new type of wine bar, what were some of the challenges that you experienced in that process?
Louie: Construction takes longer. You open up the floor, you find out you have termite damage, so that's gonna take another month. There was definitely sexism—oh two women, two lesbians are doing this. We were totally patronized by people. There were men acting inappropriately. And looking back on it, it wasn’t just men. Women could be incredibly misogynist and women often don't take other women seriously. That was definitely the main challenge. But really, San Francisco probably was an easier place to open up a small business than it is now. San Francisco is a terrible place to open up a small business now. It's very difficult.
Margot: Why do you say that?
Louie: The city gives everything to tech and big corporations and does nothing to help small business. There are some loans and grants and things like that. If I want to open up a wine shop in San Francisco, there are very few areas where I can actually do it. There’s a moratorium. It's just local politics. This city has become increasingly hostile toward small businesses. There are other challenges too—I don't know if vandalism is worse now than it was then. There are statistics that actually show it's not. I do walk around the city and see a lot of broken windows. You do see more businesses that have gates.
Income inequality in the city and throughout the country is awful. There are more people who live on the street, which is horrible. It's horrendous. If you're a business owner and you also care about social justice, there are a lot of ethical quandaries around having a business in the city and wanting to have a place where people are going to want to come in. Then also realizing that, you know, the city's kind of filthy right now.
At that time, we could offer wines by the glass for six dollars a glass. I know there’s inflation, but there are very few places where you find wine for under fifteen dollars a glass in San Francisco now.
Margot: As you decided to move into education, you could have gone and become an educator for the Court or for the WSET, but you chose to start Grapes of Path on your own. Where did that come from?
Louie: I was in an MS group at one point and it just wasn’t for me. They’re teaching you a very top down patriarchal approach of how to taste wine and what you should be doing. Even though there are now more women who are part of it, I still think it's male dominated and it's very white male dominated. The MW people were telling me to do the MW and I went to some MW sessions, and I would just stare out the window. I just found it boring. I have more respect for the MW than the MS because I feel like it is a more thorough intellectual approach but when people ask me about that stuff, I always advise people not to do it.
I think for some people who may have trouble motivating themselves, I can understand that it does create motivation, but I also think it breeds conformity. It doesn't breed critical thinking. It doesn't enforce critical thinking about wine. It doesn't talk about the history and the oppression of winemaking. The Vinguard now has a wine school and we talk about all that.
To be honest, I think that people saw me as a lone wolf and I was not invited to those spaces. I think I wasn't invited to those spaces also because I was viewed as a queer woman. I identify as non-binary. I would talk to some companies and say, hey let me know if you need an educator. They’d say no, we're not hiring now. Then six months later they hire some white guy to be an educator.
Margot: What lessons did you take from your first wine bar, Hayes and Vine, to your second wine bar, CAV? What came with you?
Louie: I didn't need to have such a big wine list. CAV had a big wine list. We started out with about 300 wines, which is still a lot, but we could still have a nice place and not spend that much money to build it. $200 on a chair is plenty. Today, I'd probably just go to a vintage store and get chairs. But, you know, that's something that I learned. I also learned not to take shit from people. I think at Hayes and Vine, because of the financial power dynamic with my business partner, there’s a lot of stuff I let by.
We were definitely overstaffed. There are a number of ways that that place was run that I would definitely not run it that way now. There were definitely times where it was touch and go. But we got there—the Chronicle reviewed us we got an amazing three star review. Then the recession hit and it really impacted us. We ended up in incredible debt. When I sold the place, it just turned into a total nightmare situation.
After I closed CAV, I started getting more and more into the natural wine scene. I was in the midst of an incredibly deep depression that lasted pretty much from about 2009 through 2019. But in 2014, I started working at a natural wine shop in Potrero Hill. I had met the owner, on a trip to France. At first it seemed okay. But then I started to notice the misogyny. I actually left for a while, and then I came back under certain conditions and then he broke those conditions. I called him out on it and he fired me and then we got into a legal situation. I decided at a certain point, I was just going to start talking about what happened.
It didn't make me very popular with this crew. But I started to reflect on all the sexism and misogyny I had put up with in my career. I should have made a bigger issue of it than I did, but I didn't. This was in 2017, right before #MeToo started happening. Even while I was working at the wine shop, I was writing about the sexism in the industry. When I started doing that, I couldn't go to a tasting where a salesperson who was female wouldn’t come to me like, hey, I want to talk to you about something. This buyer's harassing me. I’d say well, you need to talk to your manager about it. She'd be like, my manager will just take the account and give it to somebody else and I have rent to pay. I hear these stories all the time. So yeah, I continued talking about it.
I also decided we need to do something to promote and amplify women. In 2015, I started Califermentation [with a co-founder], which was the first natural wine fair in the United States. We did it for two years in a row. Wine fairs started to happen more and more. It just got so bro-y. I started hearing about people being sexually harassed at some other natural wine tastings. At that point I said, okay, we need to do something that's just for women. So in 2018 I started WINeFare.
WINeFare started out with 14 women pouring and about a hundred people came. This past year was a two day event with 76 people pouring and we had probably about 500 people over two days. It's grown, but what's interesting is WINeFare does not get nearly as much attention as other wine fairs that have been started and run by men that are not nearly as old. It's really frustrating. I feel like I need to persevere because the gratification comes in seeing how much WINeFare is really appreciated, not just by all the winemakers, but a lot of the people who come. There are a lot of men who come to the fair and tell me it's their favorite tasting because the atmosphere is so different.
Margot: I’m not going to miss it next year, I’ve heard great things about it! The Vinguard started as a wine blog. Now it's a nonprofit. Can you talk to me about the lifespan of that venture and what kind of work you do?
Louie: It started out as a wine blog and when I first started in 2013, I wanted to write about wines, yes, but issues that people weren't really talking enough about, like how Vin De France was taking off and the issues that French winemakers were dealing with, like the French government and forcing them to use pesticides that they didn't want to use, like what Emmanuel Giboulot went through. Also writing about sexism and racism, et cetera. In 2020, it became an official non-profit.
I went to graduate school in 2018. It was a master's in education with a concentration in equity and social justice at SF State. It was one of the best decisions I've made. That program gave me the confidence to run a non-profit and the tools to be able to create what I wanted to create with The Vinguard.
I have learned so much along the way. In the last four years, I've made mistakes. I'm always going to be learning things—that's just how it is. We have a board, and we've had board changes over the last four years, and there's a lot of trial and error. It's still a very young, very small organization, and very much underfunded, which for any nonprofit, that's always an issue. We started out being gender focused, and gender is still a very big part of it, but we're intersectional. We have Wine Flair, a wine fair with queer winemakers that we started in 2022 with CoFermented. We did an event in LA and an event in New York.
This year we want to do it in places where there are oppressive laws and atmospheres toward the LGBTQ community. I'm actually going tomorrow to Austin for an event with the Violet Crown. We're going to do an event in Nashville at the end of the year. We're doing events with queer identified natural winemakers. I only want to work in the natural wine space. I'm not interested in working with conventional producers.
We're doing a wine label with the Lideres Campesinas, which is an organization in Sonoma that supports farmworker women. The idea came out of a wine and environmental justice conference that we had last year, and the label will be a little bit like the idea with Brutal, where it's a natural wine that doesn't have any sulfur and there's like the Brutal logo. This label will be about promoting farmworkers. Creating farmer protections and also trying to get consumers to realize that there is a human being who's in the vineyard picking the grapes.
We're working on the requirements for what the label is going to be. Then we're going to send a questionnaire out to the winemakers to send out to growers and the vineyard managers—no synthetics, no pesticides, not forcing people to work in an evacuation zone, safety requirements.
We do forums as well. We had a Zoom forum with Miriam Zouzounis from Terra Sancta, and Vicky Sahagian from Philokalia, which is a winery in the West Bank. We discussed winemaking in the West Bank and what it's like for Palestinian winemakers. Wine is fun and we love wine and we like having events and showcasing the wonderful things that women and queer people are doing, but we also need to talk about the ugly side to the wine industry.
Margot: Looking back through your career, you have a huge entrepreneurial spirit. Where does that passion come from and how do you harness it?
Louie: Both of my parents are entrepreneurs. My dad went into the family business and my sister took it over and and she's grown the company, but it has been in my family since 1892. It’s also just—I'm not great about working for other people. There aren't too many Kevin McKennas in the world. I have a creative side that comes out in different ways. Being an entrepreneur and even with The Vinguard, it allows me to be creative and that's something that I enjoy.
Margot: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. I can’t wait to come to one of your events!
You can support Louie and their many impactful projects by following The Vinguard on Instagram. Keep your eyes posted for upcoming events! Subscribe to Louie’s substack on vegan food and wine pairing.
Great interview, as per usual. I started working my first job in wine at Astor a few months ago. Believe it or not, there are still folks here who overlapped with Pamela & remember them fondly!