Virginia was home to John June Lewis (1894–1974), the first African American in the United States to make wine commercially. His story began at Woburn Plantation in Mecklenburg County, where he grew up in the Burwell household. Lewis’s father taught him about growing vines and making wine.
During World War I, Lewis served in Europe. He encountered wine in France and, later, in Germany, where he developed a lasting interest in making it. Virginia had introduced Prohibition in 1916, so he knew wine would be unavailable when he returned home. After the war, he worked at the Burwell sawmill. When his father died, Lewis inherited 193 acres near Clarksville.
Once Prohibition ended in 1933, Lewis planted ten acres of wine grapes. The varieties may have included hybrids such as Catawba and Norton, along with native Concord. Growing grapes in Virginia was difficult: humid conditions, storms, and disease threatened crops, while the region’s soils often needed careful management.
Lewis faced financial barriers as well as agricultural ones. Banks and the US Department of Agriculture would not lend to Black farmers, leaving him to fund the venture himself and do much of the work. He planted and grafted the vines, built a winery with a 5,000-gallon capacity, and made wine by crushing grapes in barrels. He fermented the juice with yeast cultures from California and bottled the result. His wines included light reds and sweet whites.
Independence and resilience
In 1940, after giving the vines seven years to mature, Lewis opened Woburn Winery. He sold his wines under the Virginia-Carolina Brand, with labels including Raisin and Virginia Red Grape. Initially, sales went to family, friends, and local customers; later, the wine was also distributed to churches and speakeasies in Washington, DC. As late as the 1970s, Woburn was the only Virginia winery making wine exclusively from its own grapes.
Racism added to the challenges. Black farmers were denied loans and excluded from trade associations, while crop diseases could ruin an entire harvest. Early trade publications offered Lewis’s wines only lukewarm praise, describing them as having “rustic vigor.” But by 1960, the Wines & Vines Annual Directory listed Woburn as a producer of table and dessert wines, suggesting that the winery had gained recognition as an established business.
Lewis died in 1974, and his son, John June “Duckie” Lewis Jr, took over. Financial difficulties followed, and the winery eventually closed. In 2008, Lewis Jr sold the remaining winemaking equipment.
A growing legacy
The Black-owned wine industry grew in the decades after Lewis’s death. In 1997, Iris Rideau became the first Black woman to own a winery in the United States, founding Rideau Vineyards in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. That same year, Mac McDonald released his first Pinot Noir through Vision Cellars in Sonoma County. He later founded the African American Vintners Association, creating a network for winemakers to share knowledge and support one another—a resource Lewis had been denied access to.
By October 2025, 151 wineries in the United States were African American-owned. Eighty-one were in California, while 70 were elsewhere; only six were in Virginia. The number and reach of these wineries represent a significant change from Lewis’s time. Though they all began after his death, they also stand as a tribute to the pioneer who helped establish Black commercial winemaking in America.