NAPA'S NEW TASTEMAKER
Carlton McCoy Jr. is an ambivalent member of the elite. One of the select corps of master sommeliers, he achieved this rare distinction despite a childhood blighted by trauma and poverty. An alumnus of some of the nation’s most prestigious restaurants, he disdains the world of fine dining. And as the first Black CEO of a Napa Valley winery, he positioned himself as a polite but firm disrupter inside that privileged realm. “I definitely don’t feel obliged to stay within the lines when it comes to the wine industry,” he says.
Now managing partner at Lawrence Wine Estates, McCoy has been buying up properties, launching brands and staffing them with a young, diverse team. Spurred on by a series of scandals in the sommelier world, he also sees it as his mission to detoxify and demystify the image of high-end wine in America.
As a child growing up in a deprived Washington, D.C., neighborhood, McCoy did not foresee a life spent parsing grape varieties or examining soil profiles. But on a wet spring morning, he is on his way to check out the latest piece of land to enter his portfolio. “I’m just going to go walk the vineyard,” he tells Robb Report via an hours-long Zoom call from his car, one eye on his phone and one on the road. “When it’s raining, you get a better idea of the water-holding capacity of the soils.”
McCoy, 37, clearly relishes these muddy agronomic investigations after years spent studying viticulture in the abstract as an aspirant sommelier. At 28, he was one of the youngest people, and only the second of African-American heritage, to pass the master sommelier exam, which has a success rate of just 5 to 7 percent.
Charismatic and driven, McCoy would put Horatio Alger to shame. Both of
