The Fizz #84: Parallax Project's Lance Lemon and Reggie Leonard see the exponential opportunity in Virginia wine
Wine entrepreneurs and educators Lance Lemon and Reggie Leonard are shining the spotlight on an inclusive, expansive, and diverse Virginia wine scene.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Lance Lemon and Reggie Leonard, two leading figures in today’s American wine industry. Lance is the founder of Penny’s and RichWine RVA, two community wine staples in Richmond Virginia. Reggie is co-founder of the organization Oenoverse, which focuses on building a more inclusive Virginia wine scene with outreach efforts and educational events. Both are now winemakers with their new venture Parallax Project, based in Virginia and making inspirational and unique wines from local grapes.
In our conversation, we touch on the Virginia wine industry and the bounty of opportunity to be found in the state, how both entrepreneurs think about broadening their community outreach, and where they hope to see their future impact in a changing wine industry.
Margot: How would you both describe yourselves and what you do?
Reggie: I work outside of wine by day—I do career development work at the University of Virginia in the School of Data Science. I co-founded Oenoverse with my friend Tracy Love, and now we have a third person on our leadership team, Tiffany Nguyen. I’m trying to look for ways to conspire and collaborate with people and organizations to create more access and opportunity. We do that through Virginia wine because that's where we're based and we see a lot of opportunity here, especially as we're looking at conversations around hybrids and sustainability.
I’m originally from Maryland from PG County. I always like to throw that in there because it's a formative part of my perspective. I moved to Virginia back in 2007 and have been here since. Now Lance and I are making wine together through the Parallax Project.
Lance: I'm an actor—that’s my passion. I do film and TV and I've been blessed in that career. I grew up on the stage performing. I've also worked in hospitality my whole life. I've served, bartended, since I was 14. My mom would drop me off at Red Robin, and I was making money. I lived in New York for almost seven years, and at that time I worked at a restaurant called ABC Cocina. The beverage director there, Anne Marie DiBello, was my mentor and she really was the one that struck my interest in wine.
Just her storytelling, getting to taste and expanding my palate outside of shitty beer and Mad Dog 2020s from college, you know? I got into the wine industry really via ABC Cocina. I was approached by a good friend of mine who owns a company called Vinos Libres based out of New York. He asked if I'd ever thought about being a sales rep. I knew I couldn't be in bartending and serving for the rest of my life, so I took this leap of faith and got into the wine industry.
I sold wine for a company called Frederick Wildman and Sons for about two and a half years. That's when I really started to dive into wine wholeheartedly. I had numerous accounts in New York. Two of my accounts that I sold to were really good friends of mine. They were people of color and in New York in the industry in the company that I was in, there weren’t a lot of people that look like me, if I'm being honest. I really was attracted towards Dan and Jeanette. I ended up leaving Frederick Wildman and said I'm going to help them open their wine shops in Brooklyn and Bed Stuy.
Fast forward a little bit. Me and my wife decided to leave New York. I knew coming back to Richmond that I could find myself in the wine industry there. We opened up Rich Wine, which was an online wine company. I really just wanted a simple brick and mortar something with wine bottles lining the walls, selling wine very easily, hand to hand. The pandemic happened. We started selling wine online. We started doing tastings, getting more involved in the community. I opened up Penny's Wine Shop in Jackson Ward. It's a wine bar and wine restaurant. [Penny’s gained placement Wine Enthusiast’s Best Wine Shops 2023]
About two years ago, I worked at Early Mountain Vineyards and met Reggie out there.
Margot: I'm curious how you use your platform to support local Virginia wine projects. And what does it mean to be a community oriented wine shop?
Lance: It means being able to come in with no expectations and no fear about what you know about wine or what you know about Virginia wine. I'll be honest, I don't carry every Virginia wine in the world, but I'm a big supporter of Virginia wines and letting people know that you can learn about wine right here in your backyard. You don’t have to go to Napa or out of the country to have that experience.
I tell everybody take your jacket off, come in and relax and lay back and experience wine in an atmosphere where it’s no pinkies up, you know, just come in and be open to learning. We're in Jackson Ward. It's this historic Black neighborhood in Richmond. It's like the Black Harlem Wall Street of the South. For us to be entangled in a good way in this community, we're allowing people of color and people of different ethnicities to come in that may not know anything about wine, just trying to break barriers and knock down walls and introduce people to wines from all over the world and then also get to tell our story through Virginia wine and put people on to different things.
Most importantly, it's a vibe. Like, I'm all about good vibes. Like, don't come with that negative energy, man. You know, it's just a vibe.
Margot: I love that. I'm curious why you both decided to stay in Virginia once wine became such an active part of your life, because there are so many people that I know who, once they get bit by the wine bug, they're like, I'm out. They go to California, they go to France and set up shop there. Why did you both decide to stay and build in your local community?
Reggie: For me, I'm a big hip hop fan. I remember Phonte, a rapper, he used to be in a group called Little Brother. He has an album called Charity Starts at Home. That sentiment is one I always think about. It's easy to go somewhere else. Grass is always greener, you know, to use all the platitudes and things like that. But there are a lot of folks that are raising their hands wanting to be in the industry here, wanting to learn more about wine, but just not seeing opportunities.
I always experienced Virginia wine as extremely inclusive. But it's hard to crack that. You have to be in the right conversations. I don't love worlds built by happenstance when you can usher those experiences in for other people and you can create structure that orients the world in a way where more people can experience those things. That was it for me. Plus the products were great. Like the wine was really good! It's compelling. I also love a good underdog story. When I think about us being on our first generation or second generation winemakers and we're already making the waves that we're making on the quality side of things—that speaks to the upside and the potential and the exponential opportunity that's here.
The other thing I think about is, and this might feel like a stretch, but when Clubhouse the audio only app was taking off during the pandemic, there were articles written about how it became such a more inclusive social media platform than any other ones and how it did it so fast. They talked about network effects, and how we tend to have relatively homogenous networks, so if you build with disparate networks from the beginning, then—I mean, I have a lot of folks that are Black in my community. I'm from a predominantly Black county. I went to an HBCU. I know lots of African Americans, so the folks that I invited to Clubhouse were African Americans. When you build with diversity from the beginning, that's what exponentially expands when the networks start to grow.
That's the opportunity I saw pretty early in Virginia is, okay, crap. If people are already game for people from all types of backgrounds to be a part of wine as a customer, or wine as an industry participant, but people just don't know about that yet—then if we create opportunities for them to join and be a part of this work or enjoy Virginia wine in a way that's built for them and contextualized to them where they feel normal drinking wine here, then this can be a place where they invite their friends to do that. They invite their colleagues to think about working here. They might think about joining the industry, even if they were just on the customer side, they might see wine in a completely different way, like I did. We might be able to lock in those network effects on the early end of our quality train where, as we're figuring out what grapes work for us and what flavor profiles and all that kind of stuff, we get more and more diverse people to inform that, and we can become such a dynamic industry because of the breadth of perspectives here.
Lance: With the same kind of sentiment, I'm Virginia born and raised. I wear this Virginia flag on my back all the time, and I try to promote what we do here. When I was at one of the wine shops I met Lee Campbell. She was working for Early Mountain at the time and she was talking about Virginia wine and how it's on the map. I wasn't too hip with Virginia wine yet. It really put this extra propeller behind me to really push what I wanted to do in wine in general.
I really wanted to get into the vineyards. I wanted to get my feet dirty. I wanted to get into harvest, you know, to really start to understand how it works. How does one get from dirt to vine to grape to bottle, like how do we even get there? I knew how to sell wine. I knew how to drink wine. I knew how to read portfolios and read the numbers. But I wanted to really dive into understanding like the bigger ethos of what is behind wine making in Virginia. And it really was just a trickle down effect to becoming part of the industry here in Virginia.
But I started to realize that it wasn’t very inclusive. I wanted to break that barrier just so people could feel comfortable and understand that Virginia wine is here. We can break into it in so many different avenues, whether that's in the cellar, with a wine shop, at a wine bar. I wanted to come at it from so many different angles.
Reggie: You’re making me reflect on the fact that I recognized pretty quickly when I moved to Charlottesville from Lynchburg, another small town in Virginia, that I was more comfortable around white people than a lot of my family and my friends and a lot of my community. I knew that was what made wine feel so accessible for me. When I started going to free wine tastings, I did not see people that looked like me, but everyone that I talked to was super nice.
I was able to converse, like, I understood the euphemisms and references to music and movies and things like that, that I know I didn't grow up on, but I learned in grad school, where it wasn't just Black folks. I was like, I know why I feel comfortable here and why my friends and family don't and I think that they could feel comfortable if we built it with them in mind as the norm, as the baseline participant. That's a big part of what I saw in Virginia. I was like these people are super nice, but there was a version of me that wouldn't have even gotten to see that because I wouldn't have felt comfortable even talking to them. Cause I would have been like, what do we have in common?
Lance: Man, you’re so right. I'm not talking down on New York, but going back to Virginia just being a really dope place, I remember going to portfolio tastings in New York. I could look around and there would just be two, maybe I'd be the one Black person there in a sea of white people. I grew up around white people. I mean, my wife is white, I went to UVA, like I'm with it, but I also spent my summers in the city at all Black camps. You know what I mean? I was very good at code switching. I just always felt this urge to be like, yo, where my people at, you know?
I was at one portfolio tasting and there was another Black guy there. He was older. He had a little bit too much to drink, but everyone knew him. He was an OG. He came up to me and he was like, look around. If you don't do something with this shit, he was like, you’re missing out. Take what you're doing here, use it and build and grow with it because this is what we need. That always stuck with me.
Margot: Reggie, you mentioned building the industry with people of color in mind. As you're thinking about your own place in the industry, how do you approach not only building with people of color in mind, but building for people of color?
Reggie: Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. That's why diversity is so important because so many different segments or communities of people see things differently, closer to the ground and being in it—more than people who want to support and be allies and things like that. For instance, I like to think that I'm an ally for supporting more women being in the industry and folks from different gender expressions but I am a cisgender male and so maybe I don't need to be the person that builds the thing for them because they see things in a different way than I see them, regardless of how much work I do to see them.
That's one of the reasons why the way that we do stuff in the Oenoverse, for instance, for Two Up Wine Down festival, as an example, is we invite 15 or so different people to curate wines that will be poured at the festival. We don't just say whoever wants to send us wines, we'll make sure they get poured. We actually have them select a winery that they want to represent, and a lot of times it's a place they've had some kind of experience where they felt seen, validated, they felt comfortable, they felt supported. They worked, they had opportunity, whatever. For whatever reason, we've gotten a lot of feedback that all the wines at the festival are always delicious.
We have DJ Nobe up in Richmond that spins R&B and hip hop. Even the food that we have—we have vegan comfort food, a Thai food truck. We have a Venezuelan arepas. Even eating food like that feels normal to different communities is super huge. Even the way that we talk in the marketing. It doesn't have to be super buttoned up and traditionally professional. We’re looking for every little subtle opportunity to infuse culture and visibility and normalcy to make sure that folks know that this is for them.
I remember being at an Oenoverse club event a few months ago. Actually Lance, it was the one that you did at the end of last year. I don't know if I told you about this conversation, but there was a guy that was there. He was there with his girl and she was like I'm so excited about what you and Lance are doing, and he was like, yeah, man, it's good to see y'all. I'm like, I appreciate it, and it's good to see you. And he's like, I heard y'all doing a festival, congrats on that. I was like, yep, you should come and he paused for a second. He said, you know, I might come, and I’m like let me tell you about what me and Lance are doing with our wine. We named our wine What's This and What's That after a Currency lyric. He was like Spitta? Wait, y'all listen to him? And we're like, come on. Now he's asking me about other artists and he's like, man, all right, I'm gonna come to the festival for sure. Little moments like that, where he's like, oh, I can be me for real. I don't have to be a version of myself that shows up to these wine events with my partner. I can just be me here. That's what we want. I've seen him at other events since then, which has been cool.
Lance: There’s so many things that different cultures bring to an industry that has been predominantly white. I’ll never forget, I got married at Keswick Vineyards in 2016. I wanted to get married at a vineyard. We went down there. They had preferred caterers. I don't want none of that fucking food! I want Mama J's Soul Food that I have in Richmond and we went through this whole back and forth. They just weren't comfortable with it. Sure enough, Mama J's came out, did their thing, the winery set up some of the best food they've ever had. They're now one of their top preferred caterers to host at these weddings. I mean, Mama J's is on the list. Now Mama J's is catering at other wineries around the state.
Another thing, my sister went on a wine tour at Veritas the other day with a group of her Black friends—something they never really did back in the day. My sister does this thing called Art of Noise. It's a big concert in Richmond. Veritas is now wanting to do this hip hop and wine night. They ran into Kelly. Kelly was like, how can we help? It's a simple thing of breaking the barrier down very easily, so we can expand in different ways. At the end of the day, we all win.
Margot: Reggie, I want to ask you about Two Up Wine Down. It’s your third year. I'm curious what you've learned from that experience three years in and how you hope to make an impact based on what you've learned.
Reggie: One of the first things that comes to mind is your point about community and calling back to our curators being the folks that select the wines and things like that, a lot of folks have seen the traction of the festival who are either winemakers or own wineries, and they're like, how can we be involved? Or why haven't we been reached out to? I have to have a hard conversation of how we don't pick the wines, so this is a very authentic festival that feels like home for a lot of people. Because everything about it is community grown.
These wineries that were selected are the ones that were building relationships with these curators, they were sending DMs to people saying congrats on your journey, you know? I see what you're up to. Not asking them to do anything or be their token diversity for a collaboration event, but just generally supporting people as human beings, showing up to their stuff. Lance, I saw that Justin from Rosemont pulled up to Chance’s event at Penny’s earlier this week and Justin pulls up and he lives in the cut! That's the kind of stuff that makes the festival feel so different than so many other things.
One of the things we ask each year is, did you try your first Virginia wine here? Did you buy your first Virginia wine here? Every year, there's always a significant amount of people who say yes to those things, which is telling us that we are bringing new customers to the market. That's one of the lessons learned is that if you want to do something that's authentic, then you have to be authentic all throughout the year. It can't be event associated.
Another thing is that a lot of folks want to see good things happen, but don't necessarily know how to make them happen and don't want to fund them. I also don't expect other people to want to fund it. I do think that we are taking up space, so we should figure out multiple mechanisms of funding, like our festival, our work and things like that, in addition to finding people who want to support the work. That's been the hardest part is figuring out sustainability financially. We've tapped into a lot of grants but we haven't leveraged many sponsorships. We've definitely done some, but nothing particularly significant.
The finance piece of the festival is always going to be the hardest part for anyone, but for ours in particular. That’s the kind of struggle that we're facing is trying to keep it priced accessibly because we can definitely do everything bootstrap if we just raise the prices and charge what other festivals charge. But that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to bring in new community, build that community, keep them here for the long haul. Some of them we expect will stay customers, others we expect will be bit by the bug and transition to industry. That's what we hope and expect and want to build pipelines for as well. Those are a couple of lessons learned.
Margot: How are you thinking about help? People are going to read this interview and they're going to say, oh, I want to support that festival. It sounds like it's within my mission.
Reggie: If they want to help us in our festival, we could always jump on a call to see if there are opportunities to collaborate. We always open the lines for conversation because it may just be points of collaboration, whether they be around the festival or otherwise, we're definitely also wanting to expand into having more conversations at the festival. Right now, it’s a walk around tasting kind of vibe, DJ, dancing, food, very low key, but no programming around it. We definitely want to expand next year to having interactive experiences, more intimate things. We have a hike the morning of that's led by Act Three Explorations, a Black women owned business who curates these outdoor experiences for people of color.
There's a community out in Michigan, Wild Big Camp that does camps that are geared towards people of color and they have a podcast called Music in the Bottle. I would love to see Wild Bit Camp do a camp out here around Two Up Wind Down and then spend some time at the festival and bring their community out here. It's not even just how can people support us, it's more like how can we build the world that we collectively want to live in together, and how might we use our platform to do that? Our posture is that we want to be collaborative, and if they are too, then we would love to help. And I mean, we always take checks.
Lance: Venmo!
Margot: Moving into your wine project, The Parallax Project, what made you choose to crossover into the winemaking side? Why do this?
Lance: I think Reggie and I saw an outlet. When I was working with Ben at Early Mountain when he was a winemaker there and then Commonwealth Crush, they were starting up the incubator program. I think Reggie and I wanted to try to take the next step and not only be part of the wine industry, but have a wine to represent what we're all about and what we're trying to do. When the incubator program came up, Ben knew that we were serious about it. We were talking about that in 2021. For us to be able to make our own wine, that’s on another level of this journey.
We can learn, take this and hopefully inspire others that look like us or that don't look like us, to just put themselves into the shoes of trying to create something in wine. We can sit here and tell you the truth about it and let you know this is not for the easy, it's not for the faint of heart. You still have to have a passion for it. It's evolution too, you know? You keep going up. There are vineyard aspirations.
Reggie: We’re not forcing it, like we don't have our five year roadmap for how that's going to happen kind of thing. That's not even how we made wine. To Lance's point, we were in the vineyard together and just talking about how rewarding that was and how much of a learning experience it was and how we've not seen folks that look like us do that side of the work much, but we've seen a lot of brands pop up and we felt like we wanted to close that information gap and solidarity gap as well.
I always think about the quote from another hip hop artist that said you got to fly so your people know they can fly too. I've connected with three different people who currently have either contracts or projects in the works, who have reached out to me after Lance and I started making wine to ask about what it's like to make wine. You can buy books, you can take classes, you could Google that question. You could talk to winemakers who actually have been doing this for decades and ask them. But for whatever reason, none of these people felt like they could, but they immediately came and asked me, and I'm sure that Lance gets that all the time.
Leadership, a lot of times it's not necessarily knowing the future any better than anyone else. It's just having the guts to take the first step and knowing that somebody has to go somewhere that other people haven't gone yet and figure out what that looks like and take some of the risk on. Lance and I are figuring that out. For the incubator program, they're able to fold in our learnings to create new documentation and spreadsheets and longer runway models where it's not just a year, but it actually tapers into success and sustainability and so that's been cool.
The other thing is, to Lance's point, I don't particularly value making decisions based on the future. We've all lived through a crazy last several years whether it be politically or pandemically, if that can be a word, and just uncertainty is around every corner. This is what I'm excited about now in wine, is learning this next level of winemaking. Lance and I, we have such a great camaraderie about everything that we've done together, so it's been really fun to build with Lance too.
Lance: It's truly a passion project. We're not looking to make millions off of this, we just love wine. But if we see millions though, we're not going to wait. Everything has a financial side. Like I said, with the evolution of things, maybe it will take us one day to own our own winery or vineyards, that’s big.
Margot: I realize you just said you don't really think about plans for the future but I’m gonna ask you anyway, as you think about where you are in ten or fifteen years—I'm not talking about where you are with a winery or physical things, but where you are as human beings in the next ten or fifteen years, what kind of impact do you hope to have on your community?
Reggie: The first conversation that I had about Oenoverse with Tracy was that I don't think this organization should exist. I wish that we lived in a world where everyone was just fully human all the time to everyone. I want to build this in a way where we have planned obsolescence. That means that there will be material changes in the industry if we are successful, which means that like, we have to make decisions in a way that allows us to do that.
I'd love to be able to see a very diverse set of harvest interns that come from around the world to Virginia to do harvest first, instead of Burgundy or Napa or wherever else, I want us to be a top choice. Particularly for people from historically marginalized and underrepresented communities in wine. I want us to see winemakers who are head winemakers and assistant winemakers who are people of color, who are queer folks, women from backgrounds who have not been represented as much in Virginia wine.
I want to see ownership shifts and expansion. I want to see the market expand so it's not kicking people out of spots. It's more so building the industry in a way where it's like no, it was actually bigger than we ever thought it was. We've just never really made room for it and now it's expanded. New tasting rooms, new wine-tainment. All of that is part of the vision. Then us just being able to be normal and not talk about diversity stuff because I don't think that's something anyone wants to talk about. No one wants to be resilient or strong. People want to have rest and have life work out.
Lance: I want to be that O. G. that when I walk into the spot, they can be like, yo, that's Lance and Reggie. You walk in, everyone's just like, let's go! Yo, y'all did it! We made it! [laughs] I mean, Reggie said it. I want to see paths created for the youth. I have to take a hospitality and restaurant approach to it as well because I have Penny’s and so I want to see more communities being built around food and beverage and in the neighborhoods here, to really expand on entrepreneurship.
Ten to fifteen years from now, I just hope that we are looked at as influencers trying to pave the way for the greater good in the wine industry. Penny's, Parallax Project, it opens the doors to creativity and thought provoking ideas. I'm not here to be anybody's role model. I'm just saying, like, they did it. We can do it too.
It's easy to think about incremental changes. It's hard to think about structural ones that actually work for everybody. But I do think that it's easy to try new wine made out of a grape that you don’t know or didn't realize was a hybrid, for example. Maybe that's like a little exercise in people's muscles of change and being open to new perspectives that fundamentally change the thing that they held true for most of their lives. That's what I think about when I think about the Parallax Project. I hope to be a part of driving conversations like that.
Margot: I love that, and I think the way that you're approaching your winemaking in terms of the grapes that you're using and how you're doing it—creating a red and a white wine from the same grapes—is an interesting way to showcase not only technique in winemaking, but also saying hey, things could be different, they’re not always what they seem. I’m so excited to try your wines!
You can support Lance and Reggie’s work by following them at The Parallax Project and supporting their Gofundme campaign. Check out the amazing work Oenoverse is doing.