This feature is part of our 2024 Next Wave Awards.
When Reggie Leonard moved to Charlottesville, Va., in 2015 for a job at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science, he didn’t know much about the city, or anyone in it. But he knew he needed to make friends and build a community. Recognizing his introverted tendencies, Leonard had committed before relocating to get outside his comfort zone. So he started attending free wine tastings at Market Street Wine.
“I wasn’t even specifically searching for wine,” Leonard explains, recalling the first tasting he went to at the independently owned shop. “But I found this free mechanism that would get me downtown, and it happened to be wine tasting.”
Never having attended a professional tasting before, Leonard’s first experience was overwhelming. He was unfamiliar with the complex vocabulary used to describe wine and wasn’t even entirely sure what was in his glass. But he liked what he was tasting, so he returned the next week, and then again the week after that. And as he continued showing up, he wasn’t just surrounding himself with the community he was searching for, but his knowledge and love of wine swelled exponentially.
“Eventually I started coming back to the shop the day after the tasting to ask questions about the bottles on the shelf and about the regions,” he says. “I would stay there for two, three hours asking questions and we would just sit there talking and nerding out about wine.”
A few years into his wine journey, Leonard fell in love with one region in particular: Virginia. In April 2019, Market Street Wine hosted a tasting with Early Mountain Vineyards and he was blown away by the wines, not to mention the way Ben Jordan, then-head winemaker for Early Mountain, and Maya Hood White, current head winemaker, connected with the crowd.
“It was just humans talking to humans about a beverage they were passionate and excited about,” he recalls.
But as Leonard continued to immerse himself in the world of wine, and the Virginia wine community specifically, he came to understand some major gaps in the industry. Accused by his friends of being fancy now, he knew that he had to think of a new way to bring people into the world of wine that wasn’t the high-end, ultra-marketed experiences they may have envisioned. Instead, he wanted them to see that wine is agricultural, communal, historical, and just plain fun — all the things that attracted him to it in the first place.
“This experience made me start thinking about how to invite more people into wine. I want to be able to help people see themselves in it the way I was able to see myself,” he says. “Jumping into the wine industry is a challenge, especially for newcomers. It’s one of the things that has really driven what I’ve done.”
One of the ways Leonard seeks to make wine less intimidating is through the Oenoverse Club, which he co-founded with Tracey Love from Virginia’s Blenheim Vineyards. Launched in 2022, the experiential wine club is focused on providing a space to share information about Virginia wines in a welcoming and relaxed atmosphere. Membership includes a bimonthly selection of wines hand-picked by local professionals, and discounts on all bottles of Blenheim Vineyards wine and events at the vineyard, in addition to complimentary tastings.
When it comes to selecting the individuals who will curate each selection, Leonard is focused on uplifting wine professionals who have historically been overlooked and underestimated to provide an on-ramp into the industry that doesn’t really exist elsewhere.
“There are so many folks who want to be in this space. They’re raising their hands, jumping up and down, just wanting to be a part of it so badly,” Leonard says. “But they don’t have the right certifications or the right experience, or whatever other things people might point to. We’re just really underestimating these people.”
Leonard also co-organizes Two Up Wine Down, an annual wine festival started by the Oenoverse Wine Club and its partner The Veraison Project. Dedicated to spotlighting the Virginia wine scene and the people who make it so special, the festival is particularly focused on elevating BIPOC winemakers, wine lovers, and allies in the state.
This year’s event is set to kick off the first weekend of November at Jefferson School African American Heritage Center — the first secondary school for African American students in Charlottesville. There, attendees can expect to taste lineups of wines organized by previous and future Oenoverse curators, experience live hip hop and R&B music, and even attend a live session of Jermaine Stone’s “Wine and Hip Hop Terroir Tapes Listening Sessions,” which compares a wine’s sense of place to the sonic differences of music produced in various regions.
It’s a layered affair, but it’s one with a singular goal: to make wine more inclusive and more welcoming. And in doing so, Leonard hopes to be one of the individuals responsible for putting Virginia wine on the map.
“We expect a diverse audience to represent people, so we’re building for that audience,” he says. “When we have more interesting experiences, contextual experiences, and just a wider range of people, we can push our industry forward together.”
