How Tuanni Price’s Zuri Wines is raising wine consciousness among African Americans
After 20 years collecting a regular paycheck working administrative jobs, South Los Angeles native Tuanni Price, founder of L.A.-based Zuri Wine Tasting, made her longtime side hustle into a full-time bicontinental business.
Today, the 46-year-old organizes events in California including Wine Over L.A., an annual festival featuring wines made by African Americans, Latinos and women, and a wine-themed fundraiser to support single parents spearheaded by NFL star Anthony Barr. On the other side of the world, in South Africa, she offers tastings and tours that showcase the country’s small, slowly growing stable of black wine producers.
She was 28 when her manager at the now-defunct five-star St. Regis Hotel in Century City invited her “to have dinner on us” at the hotel restaurant. She took her mom and sister.
“I was presented with the wine list, which looked like it was a foreign language,” she recalled. “My mom had to tell me I was supposed to taste the wine when it was brought to the table.” Her embarrassment at not knowing anything about wine, she said, made her want to learn more.
So Price in 2000 started a wine club with friends called Distinguished Blackberries. She and her girlfriends took turns hosting, with each required to research and pair wine with food. The club ended after six years but in 2010, while helping a start-up prepare to go public, she wrote a business plan for Zuri Wine Tasting and built a website with the tagline she still uses: “Wine is complicated. We make tasting simple.”
Price said she started the business because she felt the approach to wine was all wrong.
“It was just so snobby back then. You had to talk a certain way … like, ‘This wine smells like gooseberries and black currants,’” she said. “It’s intimidating. I say, describe it like a man you dated or an experience it reminded you of.”
She partnered with Rahman’s Art Gallery in Inglewood later that year to create a monthly networking event, which became a weekly wine class, and one of the first formal wine education and social experiences in Inglewood, she said. Soon after, she listed her wine classes on Groupon; in three days, she sold 200 tasting sessions. She spent the entire summer that year hosting in-home wine tastings all over L.A. while still working full-time.
A few years later, Price took courses with the National American Sommelier Assn. and the Society of Wine Educators.
Accustomed to being a minority in the predominantly white wine scene, her world was turned upside down when a Ladera Heights client said to her, “Honey, have you been to the black-owned winery in Solvang?”
