America’s answer

“When I was seven or eight,” recalls America Brewer, owner, winemaker and viticulturist of Oastbrook Estate Vineyard in Sussex, “my mum grew a very old vine at the back of the house, and it creeped on to the house itself. I would come back from school, climb on to the vine and eat the greenest grapes.”

This is America’s first experience of wine. It’s also the beginning of the journey she took to become the only commercial black winemaker in the UK. The vine she described climbing up her family house in the Bahia region of Brazil sparked something in her. She knew at such a young age that she “just loved grapes”, but instead of immediately embarking on a career in winemaking after finishing school, she worked in the second-largest bank in Brazil for 14 years.

“One day, I decided that I wanted to explore the world,” she says. “I liked people and I wanted to meet people from different countries.”

America was going to start her odyssey 20 years ago in the country she’s named after – she was born on 4 July – but then 9/11 happened and a friend suggested they go to London instead. When she arrived, she found that the English she had learned was difficult for people to understand, but she adapted quickly and began working in restaurants as a bartender. She met her husband Nick, who was born in Tonbridge, Kent, a couple of years later.

“I thought that I knew England,” she says. “But my husband said I didn’t know England at all. He said let me introduce you to the countryside. That was the first time I felt like an alien because I was the only dark person.”

I understand that feeling. I grew up as the only dark person in the semi-rural market town of Dunstable. I’ve always wanted to live in the countryside but the reminders of my childhood – the racism in the classroom, the fear of walking to school as passersby hurled insults from cars, the strange looks in shops – puts me off from straying from metropolitan areas. I’m fed up with explaining my British-Asian identity to strangers in 2022. I want to conquer these fears, but I also don’t have the time or energy, and prefer my children to grow up in a diverse area where they aren’t othered by their skin colour.

But I do like hearing how Brewer took the opposite approach to me.

“My husband said he’ll ‘take me to a proper English pub’,” she says. She recalls her visit to the Bull Inn in Wadhurst. 

“So I said ‘wow’! I’m going to dress up! I’m going to put on silk! I bought a red dress! Everyone was a farmer coming from their work to the local pub and I was wearing massive high heels, a red dress and [had] very dark skin as I had just come back [from visiting] Brazil.”

Everyone was happy to meet her – but the question I have, that is perhaps unanswerable, is: would her welcome have been so warm if she was black British? Because the micro-aggressions I’ve endured when I’ve visited this part of Britain – I used to live and work in Sevenoaks – were commonplace.

To me, America’s story shows the energy – and determination – needed to conquer white spaces like this village pub, and she has vim and strength of will in huge reserves.  

She wanted to learn more about wine so she took her baby in a pushchair to France when her daughter was just four months old – sometimes she even got the farmers to hold the baby while she looked at the machinery and the vines. The information was locked into her mind even though she couldn’t use it: the family relocated temporarily to Hong Kong. It wasn’t for another seven years that she could put her research to use, when they moved back to the English countryside near Bodiam Castle, buying a property that used to grow hops for Guinness’ brewery.

Next door to their new family home was a vineyard, so she went – in high heels – to convince the owner to let her work for free to gain valuable first-hand experience. They refused at first, but relented due to Brewer’s persistence. Her determination is the leitmotif of her story, and it was really tested when she approached Plumpton agricultural college to undergo a course at the higher learning provider in Lewes, East Sussex.