Robin McBride Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City.
I have an interview with someone very special for you today, it's Robin McBride, co-founder of McBride Sisters, the largest Black owned and the largest all women founded wine company and the United States. That accomplishment alone is amazing for Robin and her co-founder and sister Andrea. But once you learn their personal story, you'll know it's an even more incredible feat. The two sisters had no idea each other existed until they met years ago when Robin was 25 and Andrea 16. Robin had grown up in California and Andrea in New Zealand. They bonded immediately and eventually decided to go into business together. They had no connections, no money, just the desire to build something together as a family and to build something transformational. No doubt you've seen their brands, McBride Sisters Collection, Black Girl Magic Wines, and She Can Wines.
Robin and I sat down to chat live at the Jubilee Wine Country weekend, hosted by Cherry Bombe earlier this October. The event took place at the Solage Napa Valley Resort in Calistoga, California, and it was an amazing weekend. There was a lot of wisdom shared on that stage. So over the next few weeks, we'll be bringing you some of the talks from Jubilee Wine Country. I thought it would be helpful to hear from some inspiring women as you are thinking about your goals, plans, and dreams for 2025. Thank you to the sponsors of Jubilee Wine Country, Kerrygold, Sam Pellegrino, California Grown, California Walnuts, and California Prunes. Oh, and of course, thank you to all the incredible wine country winemakers we had the privilege of meeting and working with.
Speaking of Jubilee early bird tickets are on sale for our big Jubilee conference taking place in New York City on Saturday, April 12. Buy your ticket now before prices go up January 1st. Jubilee is always a beautiful day of connection and community with great speakers, delicious food and drink, and lots of opportunities for networking. We also have a brand new location this year, we're moving to the Glasshouse on the West Side and it is going to be the biggest and best Jubilee yet. Visit cherrybombe.com for tickets and more information. If you're a Bombesquad member, be sure to check your inbox for a link to special member pricing. Enjoy my interview with Robin McBride.
It is such an honor to have you here and I have been a fan from afar for a long time of what you've built.
Robin McBride:
Oh, well thank you. I'm super excited to be here. I've been on a crazy journey around the country lately and I'm so glad that it worked out timing wise and, of course, I'm a fan.
Kerry Diamond:
Aww.
Robin McBride:
So it's a pinch me moment.
Kerry Diamond:
You have been on busy journey you said, but I feel like your life has been an incredible journey. You and your sister, Andrea McBride John, have one of the most remarkable origin stories I've ever heard. You two were only children and you didn't know each other existed. You grew up here in California and your sister grew up literally a world away in New Zealand. I wanted to know what changed in you when you found out you had a sister?
Robin McBride:
Oh, that's an interesting question. Everything. For those who don't know the story, were half sisters, so we have the same father and we have two different mothers. My sister's mother is originally from New Zealand, so she grew up in New Zealand. But growing up not knowing our father, growing up as an only child, it's your identity, I think, is like that's how I identify. Others have said they were an only child, right? When I found out that I had a sister, suddenly it sort of changed my whole identity. When I was able to meet her, which was about a day or so later from when I found out that I had a sister. I was 25 at the time, so I was a full grown adult, fully formed adult, and she was 16. But getting to meet her and also seeing the resemblance physically, really just changed my perspective being that I'm not alone as a child in this world. I have a sister. I have a sibling.
Because neither one of us had any other siblings at all to relate to and suddenly felt that connection with another human. We found out she grew up in New Zealand, I grew up in Monterey, completely different ends of the planet, but both very similar. And of course that is what initiated our bond that eventually led us to wine. But I didn't feel alone anymore. I didn't feel like no one else understood my experience and the life that I had lived. And then when I met my sister, I had my partner in that.
Kerry Diamond:
And I have to say this happened before things like 23andMe, so it is a miracle that it happened.
Robin McBride:
Before Facebook and Google and all of the things, so it was definitely a miracle. It actually took, I guess all told, probably three or four years for our father's family to find both of us. Again, my sister was all the way in New Zealand, but they found her first and then it took another three or so years to find me, back here in the States. Even when I learned about her, I received a letter, an old fashioned letter that was handwritten in scratchy handwriting by our aunt, who's older, she's like 80 or something, in Alabama. But got the letter and even then I couldn't just Google to see who was this person and what does she look like.
I knew nothing about her. I did not know what she looked like at all. And so when we arranged to meet each other, we didn't even know who we were looking for. It sounds so weird today because you can look at anybody now, but we didn't even know who we were looking for. I was like, "I don't even know. Do we look alike?" Is she tall like me, which is hilarious. If anybody's ever seen my sister, she's over six feet tall. I thought I was tall before I met my sister. Is she tall like me? Do we look alike? And we do and yes.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so interesting because I knew about your company before I knew your story, and it just gives so much more meaning to the fact that the word sister is in the name of your company. I'm guessing there was no other option.
Robin McBride:
That's intentional, yes. Yeah. Yeah, and it really is for us, it's us coming together as family, as siblings, as sisters, finding new family, but also paying respects and homage to our family that we each got to know through our union. It truly is about family. When we met each other and we started our company, which from the time that we met to the time we started our company together, I think was maybe five years or less. We figured out our destiny pretty quickly. But one of the first things that we did was we actually made our own family crest, which is what's on our labels now, today. But it was like, well, what else do you do when you find a sibling and you have a whole new family is you make yourself a family crest. But we wanted to do that to honor this family that we didn't know that we had and we never thought that we would have and are just so happy that we have the business and the family and the community that we've built over these years. So we honor that with our own family crest. Why not?
Kerry Diamond:
You've used an interesting word you said that you two figured out or decided on your destiny. I wrote you two decided to go into business together, business versus destiny. That's a little different. You two started by importing wine. You decided that you would go into business together, both of you so young, like you said, she was-
Robin McBride:
Youngish.
Kerry Diamond:
Youngish.
Robin McBride:
Yeah. Yeah, for me.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, you said you were 25. Was she in college or high school at the time?
Robin McBride:
Well, when we met she was 16 and she was still in New Zealand, so high school years. They have weird school year numbers. I don't know what that is. Anyway, but high school-ish time. But when we started our business, she came back to California, was at USC and was in her junior year when we started our first business.
Kerry Diamond:
But you decided pretty early you wanted to go into wine. You had no contacts, no history in that world, no connections.
Robin McBride:
Right, it wasn't a smart move. But I will say, so I grew up in Monterey down the coast, and my sister grew up in New Zealand, in Marlborough, in wine country in the south island. So we both grew up in wine country and her uncle, her mother's brother was a grape grower. And so Andrea was exposed, I'll say to grape, growing at a young age. She hated it because she was, in her words, forced labor, so work in the vineyards and it was cold and it was wet and it was hard and she wasn't getting paid and she didn't want to do it. So she swore she would never do that again.
Kerry Diamond:
She was an orphan. It was a tough-
Robin McBride:
Yeah, she was. She moved to New Zealand at five years old or so, and her mother had terminal breast cancer when they moved back. Her mom passed away shortly after that, and then she ended up in foster care in New Zealand until she came back to California to go to college. So she had that experience in wine, hated it, swore she would never have anything to do with it ever again, but did grow up in wine country. I did not work in the vineyards as a child, but I did grow up in Monterey, Monterey County, which is obviously heavily in agriculture and wine, grape growing and wine making. A lot of the people around me were winemakers and came from wine making families and I just always thought it was really cool. I love process and I grew up around agriculture, so I loved the idea of growing something out of the ground, processing it somehow via magic and making it into wine, into a bottle that you could then get on the shelf and that you could enjoy with your friends and family. So separately, we both had those experiences.
Once we met each other and started to understand what our backgrounds were like and the places where we grew up were like and how similar they are. I don't know, have you ever been to that area of New Zealand? Okay. Gorgeous. For those who haven't been to New Zealand, you need to go. But very similar to the central coast of California, just in terms of the coast, obviously, but the terrain, the agriculture, everything. To us, it was like there are no such thing as coincidences that we were like, "What are the chances that we both grew up separately, independently in these two places that are so very similar?" We both have touched wine and wine making and grape growing in some way. We find out about each other. We meet. When she comes back and goes to USC in Southern California, we ended up spending time, not intentionally necessarily, but in wine country in the central coast.
Because if you've ever driven from Monterey to L.A., there's not a whole lot there. So when we meet halfway, we would meet in tasting rooms and in wine country. In a couple of short years, I guess the universe had to hit us over the head maybe 400 times to put the idea in our minds. It's like, "Well, maybe there's something here for us in wine." Once we really started kind of as a joke, but once we started talking about it, just ideating, being creative around the idea, we were like, "Why not? Why not us?" There's a lot of reasons why not because we didn't know anything about starting a wine business, but that's what led to us coming up with the idea and taking the leap to start our first business.
Kerry Diamond:
You also had no investors or outside capital. How did you fund the business?
Robin McBride:
We also had no idea what we were doing, but I found out-
Kerry Diamond:
I left that part out.
Robin McBride:
Yeah, no idea what we were doing, but I had been professionally in another industry and involved in importing and exporting of goods in and out of the country. So I felt like logistically I could figure out how to get anything into the states. So we talked about being importers and bringing over just some really small productions from the family-owned wineries around where my sister grew up in New Zealand. To do so, to start that, it was the cheapest way we could figure out how to get into the wine industry because we did not have money. It was $1,895 to get the permitting that we needed, the licenses that we needed to be permitted to import wine into California. That was everything that we had and so that's where we started.
From that point, bringing over the wines, literally hand selling them, knocking, going door to door. Again, we didn't know what we were doing, so if there's any restaurateurs here or on-premise folks, you'll laugh. But we didn't know that there was a way you're supposed to do things, so we would literally just walk into restaurants during service hours with our bottle in our hand, like, "Hey, can we taste you on this?" We got yelled at a lot, but we were remembered. We did learn the ways, but we did start out very naively with very little money and we learned as we went along. We figured it out as we went.
Kerry Diamond:
Naiveté can be a gift, as a lot of you know.
Robin McBride:
It is a gift.
Kerry Diamond:
You might not realize it at the time, but when you look back you know that. You said something very interesting on a podcast called She Pivots. I listen to all your podcasts.
Robin McBride:
Oh, do you?
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. You said you've gone through five, six, even seven different iterations of your business. I thought a lot of us could relate to that. Yeah. We talked about this a little bit with Tanya and knowing when it's time for change and tough decisions. I was curious, I don't know what you want to call them, pivots, iterations. Did those pivots happen naturally or was it the result of you and Andrea deciding it was time and it was time for change?
Robin McBride:
Well, we pivot when we recognize the need, but the need erupts spontaneously, I think. Something that we didn't know and couldn't have known, probably, just how much of a roller coaster it is, having a wine company, producing wines in two different countries, dealing with market conditions and things that are going on. Obviously, nobody knows that we're going to have a pandemic or we're going to have economic collapse like we did 15 years ago or so, or what's going on right now with the shift in consumers. And it does. It feels like we have a good two or three years and something completely changes in the industry or in the business and requires us to adjust accordingly.
We've gotten very good at adjusting accordingly, but it is every few years. That's something that I think we didn't anticipate at all because I think from the outside looking in, you look at wine is this very stable, rich history of a business that you harvest the grapes every year and you make the wine and you sell the wine. So many things affect it from a business perspective that are outside of your control that do, in fact, require you to shift. I don't know why, everybody says, "I hate the word pivot." So now I feel like I say I hate the word pivot. I don't think I hate the word pivot, but maybe shift is a better word.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you give us an example of one of the shift's, pivots, iterations?
Robin McBride:
The pandemic is a really great example for us. We had built our business by 2020. We had three brands. We have McBride Sisters Collection Wines. We have Black Girl Magic Wines, and we have She Can Wines. Our business had grown from the time that we went into national distribution, which was maybe 2012-ish, had grown to be very, very heavily weighted in off-premise international accounts, retail, nationally, which isn't a good idea to be too heavily weighted anywhere in any segment. When we have something like the pandemic that occurred and nobody knew, does stores stay open, do restaurants stay open, does trucks operate, all of the things? A lot of people in our industry had to make the same adjustment and shift too. It was like, "How are we engaging virtually? How are we engaging online? How are we engaging directly with our consumers?"
It was like, we have a wine club and we have different ways, but we really leaned into direct engagement with consumers for two reasons. One, so that we would continue to exist as a wine company, but also how we could be helpful and engage with folks during a time that was just really, really difficult and nobody really knew what to do. So we're like, "Well, what can we do to make things a little bit better?" We can be entertaining and ship wine to people, so that's what we did. It helped for us to start to diversify our distribution, which was so primarily weighted in one segment, which is, like I said, never a good thing. So that from 2020, 2021 and on helped us to start to shift our strategy and start to shift with where our wines are available across the country in distribution.
Kerry Diamond:
Today, the stated mission of McBride Sisters is to transform the industry. Just that, it's right on the first page-
Robin McBride:
That's it. Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
... of your website. When did that become your mission and why?
Robin McBride:
Oh, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Were you and Andrea talking about this-
Robin McBride:
Yes.
Kerry Diamond:
... early on?
Robin McBride:
We were, yeah, early on. So, unsurprisingly, as young women, when we were meeting in between Los Angeles and Monterey and we were in tasting rooms, we were comfortable in the space of wine country and the world of wine. However, we were still sort of outsiders. We were treated as outsiders. We weren't really received as valuable customers and consumers and that's one of the things that made us want to become a part of the industry, to help advance where we saw the industry needed to go from the inside. So yes, that's always been a part of our purpose and our mission for being here and it remains so throughout ... It's so crazy. I was just talking yesterday and I can't believe it ... it's going to be 20 years since we started our company, which is wild to me because it feels like it was last month. But 20 years ago, what attracted us to the industry, what brought us in, what our mission was still holds true today.
I think, also, the industry today is going through another shift in evolution too, with recognizing who the customer is and who the consumers are and how we engage and interact and recruit new wine drinkers, which is critical now just for the longevity of everybody who wants to remain sustainably in this space. That's another shift that we have done. That's why I said youngish when we started, I'm 50 plus now, which is we. But we were the young kids, initially the new kids on the block when we first started in. It's more important now, I think, even though when we realized it's important that we are really collectively doing the work to make sure that newer drinkers feel welcomed and can see themselves engaging with wine as a beverage, as a product, but also just in the culture around wine. We love it. We understand how rich and how much we love it, but we have to make it a place that's welcoming and engaging for new folks to come in, and at the very least doesn't put them off.
That's one of the things that we've done too. I have a partner here, a founder, Jess Druey, who's a Gen Z founder of Whiny Baby Wines, which is a brand that's new to market that me and my sister collaborated with her in a joint venture to bring her brand, which she started during the pandemic, to international distribution and help to give her the platform as well to tell her story as being a Gen Z founder who loves wine and wants to bring more people from her generation and demographic into wine. She's very different than the McBride Sisters, of course, but we all understand and recognize the importance of the work that she's doing as well to help bring wine into a new generation.
Kerry Diamond:
And that's W-H-I-N-Y.
Robin McBride:
Whiny.
Kerry Diamond:
Yes.
Robin McBride:
Whiny.
Kerry Diamond:
If you want to look it up later.
Robin McBride:
Because she said that Gen Z is known as the whiniest generation.
Kerry Diamond:
Another way you are bringing your mission, making it happen is through the She Can Fund and I know you're very proud of that. Can you tell us about that?
Robin McBride:
Yeah, absolutely. So we started the McBride Sisters, She Can Professional Development fund when we created our wines in cans called She Can. I laugh because like duh, but they're called She Can. We launched that in 2019. We launched the fund along with it and up to that point, me and my sister, we were always very available to any women and young people in the industry who want to ask us questions or have unofficial mentorships with. But we we're getting a little short on time, so we thought it'd be better if we created something organized where we could connect with and provide assistance to, initially, women in wine and spirits. That's with scholarships, mentorships, grants, and technical services. It has been one of the things that definitely fuels us to this day, but we recognize the importance and the need for the industry and also, for women in adjacent fields.
So we've expanded over the years from specifically women who were already in wine and spirits to women in hospitality. We also did grants for Black women entrepreneurs. We assess what's going on in the world and then figure out what the focus of the fund is going to be that year. But I think now we have somewhere around 3,000 plus women who have been engaged with the fund in some way, either through grant scholarships or mentorships. We have great partners like Meta and financial institutions who help fund the efforts. It's become this growing, robust community of women.
Kerry Diamond:
That's fantastic. How can folks learn more about it?
Robin McBride:
Well, on our website we have mcbridesisters.com, but we have shecanfund.org. We open up scholarships every year, or we announce every year on International Women's Day on March 8th what the focus is going to be for the year and when we're going to open up applications for grants or scholarships and then we take it from there,
Kerry Diamond:
Mark your calendars-
Robin McBride:
Mark your calendars. Yep.
Kerry Diamond:
... and help spread the word.
Robin McBride:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
I know you are very excited about this project, but M Ranch Estate, some of you will know what that is in this room.
Robin McBride:
So yeah, M Ranch, so for all of these years, we've been a winery without a home. We started importing wines from New Zealand. The first wines that we made were also in New Zealand, but with a partner winery in New Zealand. We started making wines in the central coast of California. And so last year we purchased a small property in Carneros in Napa. There's no coincidences, right, but it was already named M Ranch, for one. So like McBride, M Ranch, when we visited the property, we're like, "That's a sign." We purchased the property, we got the keys on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and we took the keys in our hand and we were like, "I have a dream." It's the first time that we really truly have a home for the McBride Sisters and for all of our efforts in wine. It's funny because we never thought we would purchase a property in Napa because we make our wines not in Napa, historically, we're down the central coast and San Luis Obispo and Paso and Monterey and New Zealand, but it just felt so right.
We live in the Bay Area. I live in the East Bay, and my sister lives in San Francisco, so it felt so right. Everything has come together. It's a milestone for us to be able to have a property. Sorry, I'm talking about it... it's a vineyard, it's maybe, I don't know, five or six acres of Chardonnay and Carneros, but it's also a historic family home. It's a hundred year old property. It's like a resort. It's got multiple buildings. They had horses, pools, and tennis courts and all of those things. But it's important for us, as a family, as a business to have that home, to have it accessible to ourselves, but also to our friends and community in the East Bay and in wine country to be able to come and visit us. We think it's important for wine as an industry and for Napa also to have us present.
We have been very much welcomed into the area, but it's the next chapter for us. So it's going to be a big renovation problem or project. I said problem already. It's a problem. Hopefully, if I play my cards wherever Brené is ... Oh, Brené ... if I play my cards, she'll help us with the planting project for the future on the site. But we're just getting ready to dig in and get started on what's probably going to be a couple years of work, but we look forward to welcoming people.
Kerry Diamond:
Congratulations on that. I know-
Robin McBride:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
... 20 years is a huge milestone, and the M Ranch Estate is also a big milestone. For those of you who are here for the first session, you might've heard Jen Pelka from Une Femme Wines talk about setting goals. I was curious, a big goal of yours, maybe wine in the White House like Jen? Are you working on that?
Robin McBride:
Yeah, I would love that as well.
Kerry Diamond:
You took a partner on that.
Robin McBride:
I was thinking maybe we can hold hands and make that happen. Yeah, I think for us, our next set of goals is really to go global, to become more global. It was an initiative and a strategy of ours prior to the pandemic to expand our distribution outside of the U.S. and then the pandemic happened. And then we spent the next three years trying to make enough wine to provide domestically. Now, we are back to having our eyes set on what other places may be good markets for all of or one of our brands. We've just started exporting a little bit to Canada, to the Caribbean islands. Just came back from a trip to the continent of Nigeria, looking at some African exports. But I think that's the next frontier for us. We've done all of the work here in the States and we want to bring these wines and this message across the world. That's all, just global domination, nothing big.
Kerry Diamond:
I have no doubt you're going to get there. So, okay. My last question for you, same as with Tanya. Tanya, your motto or your mantra ... where's Tanya ... was it grace and ease? So Tanya's were grace and ease. What is a motto or mantra that gets you through the day?
Robin McBride:
That's a good one, Tanya. I don't know that I have a mantra necessarily, but I think for myself, I constantly am reminding myself of perspective. Very visual person in my mind, so I have to remind myself not to internalize and take things so seriously at times. I wish I had a two word answer, I don't. I'm sorry. Remembering that we are on literally a rock hurling through space that's chasing a fiery ball of gas to put things in perspective. I think, particularly as women in business, mothers, we put so much pressure on ourselves unnecessarily, and it doesn't do us any good.
It's like when I start really feeling all of the pressure, I start having a difficult time with something, it really helps me just to put things in perspective like we're flinging through the universe at the moment, I'm double booked at 11:00, I'm sure I can figure that out. It'll be fine. For me personally, that really helps me out. But I think it's a good message for all of us to share with each other too, is to alleviate some of the self-imposed pressure that we put on ourselves and have some faith that if we're working in the right direction, we will figure it out and everything will be fine.
Kerry Diamond:
So think about the universe and take a breath.
Robin McBride:
Think yes.
Kerry Diamond:
Yes. Well, Robin, thank you so much. It's been an honor-
Robin McBride:
Thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
... getting to know you better. That's it for today's show. I would love for you to subscribe to Radio Cherry Bombe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and leave a rating and a review. Anyone you want to hear on an upcoming episode? Let me know. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer for Newsstand Studios. Our producers are Catherine Baker and Jenna Sadhu, and our editorial coordinator is Sophie Kies. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.