Hip-Hop Doesn’t Need Wine, But Wine Just Might Need Hip-Hop

Despite the fading evening light on Lankershim Boulevard, I had to squint a bit in the dim light of the club. The wide-open floor was already beginning to fill up with fashionably dressed people as the sounds of hip-hop coursed through the club’s speakers at a relatively subdued volume.

A glance around the room suggested the action was on the periphery, where several individuals stood behind small tables each holding a couple of wine bottles. I grabbed a proffered wine glass from a side table (noting with a somewhat delayed shock that it was a Zalto Universal) and headed for my first taste, walking up to a table staffed by a young woman wearing a hoodie. With a pleasant hello and a smile, Saskia de Rothschild poured me a taste of 1985 Lafite, and that is when I knew I was in for a wine event unlike anything else I had ever experienced.

This was Vin et Hip-Hop Los Angeles, the first US version of a wine event originally held in 2022 at the venerable Château du Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy. The event sprang from a collaboration between vintner Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac, podcaster and educator Jermaine “Wolf of Wine” Stone, and Milena Berman and Loïc Lamy, the duo behind the experiential marketing agency Hautes Côtes. In its first incarnations, it brought hip-hop performers to the heart of Burgundy for a music-festival-meets-wine-tasting event celebrating two expressions of craft that have historically had only the most tenuous of relationships.

Performer Jason L. Martin and Bassist Dominique Sanders at Vin et Hip-Hop Los Angeles.

The Birth of Vin et Hip-Hop

As a recent Art History graduate working in Los Angeles art galleries, the young California-born Milena Berman jumped at the chance when she received an offer to join an art tourism company based in Burgundy.

“Three weeks later, sight unseen, I moved to Beaune,” she said when I interviewed her in March. It was something of a dream job, creating bespoke tours to art fairs and museums all over Europe for high-level donors to top museums around the world. But like so many things during the Pandemic, it all came crashing to a halt. Berman looked around at her options and decided she might be able to work in wine.

“I reached out to Domaine Dujac and I said, I’m not sure what I can do at a winery, maybe marketing and sales,” she recalled. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t do marketing and sales.’”

But the family clearly saw something in the young woman and found her a position on the administrative side of the business, working closely with winemaker Jeremy Seysses, particularly on activities supporting The Roots Fund, something meaningful to her as an American in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and moment.

As the world opened back up, Berman decided to leave Dujac and launch her own agency, Hautes Côtes, with partner Loïc Lamy, but just before she did, she ended up helping Dujac put on an event that featured podcaster Jermaine Stone. Berman and Stone hit it off and began discussing other potential events they could collaborate on, and they settled on the idea of a post-harvest party.

“I said to Jermaine that I’d make grilled cheese sandwiches and we could find a DJ, and he could do the playlist for the event, and I could ask Jeremy [Seysses] and a few other winemakers to pour a white wine, and so we made a terrible little logo, and made an announcement, and it sold out in minutes,” said Berman. “We were like, ‘Who’s coming to this?’”

Young interns from all over the world staying in Burgundy for their harvest jobs snapped up many of the inexpensive tickets, but some were locals, like Dominique Lafon.

“Dominique said, ‘This is amazing, next year you have to do it at Clos de Vougeot,’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, right,’ and he said, ‘No, I’m serious, I will go with you and tell them they should do this,’” recalls Berman.

Come as You Are

With Lafon’s urging, the…