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Today we’re hearing from Jonella Orozco – co-owner of Mantra Wine Distributors – about how she and her teammate, Brooke Lago, turned a passion for wine, food + bev, and the minority community into a local business.
Brooke Lago and I are the co-owners of Mantra Wine Distributors (109 S Cranford Rd., Goose Creek). I have been in Charleston for about seven years now and moved here to attend the College of Charleston, from which I have a degree in Marine Biology with a minor in Computer Science. In my last year of college, knowing that I no longer wanted to pursue marine biology as a full-time career, I got into wine.
I’ve been in the food and beverage industry for about 10 years, have always loved it, and wanted to find something more niche to get into that I could also continue to learn about throughout my career. I am now a certified sommelier and work at the renowned Peninsula Grill.
Brooke and I met in a wine class when I was starting to learn about wine and we’ve been friends ever since, for about four years or so. Brooke has also been in the food and beverage industry for over a decade, has a degree in Hospitality Management from the Culinary Institute of Charleston, and has worked at some of the best hotels and restaurants in the city.
The idea for this company started at the beginning of this year. One of the reasons why I decided to become a somm is because you are always on the lookout for the next big wine. I started to think about how I could help expand my restaurant’s wine list and find some exciting new wines to add to it. I was starting to hear whispers that the wines coming out of Baja California, Mexico were going to be “the next Napa.”
I was intrigued not only because the Napa style of wine is very popular with our guests at the restaurant, but also because I am a first-generation Mexican-American and I thought, “How cool would it be to have a wine on my list that comes from my own roots!”
Long story short, we were unable to get the wine into the restaurant due to the pandemic ceasing the few months’ progress we had made in conversing with the importer and a local distributor in picking that wine up for us.
Fast forward to May, where we have seen many protests rising up all across the country demanding racial equality for all citizens of color, but especially for the African-American community. I started finding ways to support that specific community by donating to charities and purchasing from local Black-owned restaurants and businesses, which got me thinking about Black-owned wineries. Were they currently being represented in my local community?
I compiled a list of about 60 known Black-owned wineries in the States (of which I could find – there are way more than this number) and found that only four of them were available in the area, two of which were not bought by working class citizens. This was before lists of Black-owned wineries were available on the internet.
With everything going on in our nation, the time for a change seems to have arrived. We cannot let these underrepresented communities fly under the radar as they have been for so long. It’s time to support these communities in a long-term way so they can achieve the success they so greatly deserve. It needs to be more about an everlasting support than a one-time buy.
And thus, Mantra Wine Distributors was born. As far as we know, we are the only wine distribution company established whose goal is to represent minority winemakers and winery owners, specifically from the Latinx, African-American, Indigenous, Women, and LGBTQ+ communities, among others.
While the Mantra Wine team is in the process of applying to + receiving the licensing and permits necessary to fully operate, they are raising funds through GoFundMe.
Stay up-to-date with the process here, and find additional ways to support local minority-owned businesses here + here.