Front Row Seat: Brion Cephus, Founder of The Certified Wino
Photo: The Certified Wino
If you’re looking for someone with good taste in Charlotte, you may be pointed in the direction of our next Front Row Seat feature, who is known for his refined palate. Brion Cephus isn’t just the founder of The Certified Wino, he is The Certified Wino. As a wine consultant and sommelier, Brion has built quite the reputation in Charlotte, becoming a familiar face in the city’s social scene and a respected voice in its hospitality industry, known as much for his wine knowledge as his impeccable sense of style.
Since launching The Certified Wino in 2019, Brion has taken his love of wine well beyond the bottle, building a brand that includes private tastings, hospitality consulting, wine retreats, and more.
For this edition of Front Row Seat, I caught up with Brion to find out more about the man behind the brand, how wine and fashion became part of the same conversation, and what this Wino plans to pour up next.
Before there was The Certified Wino, what was your relationship with wine like, and what made you decide it could be more than something you simply enjoyed?
A fascinating question that allows me to unpack my superhero origin story, ha! I grew up with a limited perspective on wine, as it was not the vice of choice for my parents or really any family member. When it did show up at a party, gathering, etc., it was typically something inexpensive and sweet, like Boone’s Farm, Sutter Home White Zinfandel, or those fruity wine coolers.
Wine and I didn't enter a formal relationship until I decided to major in Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales here in Charlotte. One of my mentors, the late Catherine Rabb of Fenwick’s, encouraged me to explore my growing interest in the symbiotic relationship between wine and food and subsequently recommended me to be one of the first six students to enter the Sommelier minor/capstone program at the Charlotte campus. It was during this time that the beverage just seemed to click for me; it combines elements of history, agriculture, chemistry, art, and culture all into a single product that always has a new story to uncork. Pun fully intended.
Since starting The Certified Wino in 2019, you’ve built it into something that goes well beyond talking about wine, with private tastings, hospitality consulting, wine retreats, and more. Was this always the vision you had for The Certified Wino, or has the brand transformed over time as new opportunities emerged?
Honestly, no. I started The Certified Wino back in 2016, initially as a visual diary on social media and a blog site where I was recapping what I was drinking and using those recaps as study tools to reinforce information I was learning at the time. As I began to enter the workforce post-graduation and found myself thirsty for new ways to engage with wine, I realized that those around me also wanted to engage with wine in a way that wasn't a formulaic wine tasting, staff training, or wine dinner.
In 2019, I officially created The Certified Wino LLC with the intention of hosting unique, private in-home tasting experiences in collaboration with beverage partners around Charlotte and consulting for hospitality operations that needed a fresh perspective when training their staff. My perspective on wine often blends fashion and music into the conversation and allows me to establish greater connections between audiences and the juice in their glass. This creative approach is what has opened many doors and fostered many partnerships with not just wineries, wine shops, and restaurants, but also creatives across dramatically different industries than my own. The vision for The Certified Wino has always been to create hauntingly beautiful experiences around wine that make us reimagine the stories that can be told through the beverage and the connections it forges.
Photo: The Certified Wino
Representation among the public-facing voices in the wine industry is still fairly limited. How important is it for you to be visible as a Black wine professional, particularly for people who may not often see themselves reflected in the people educating, influencing, and shaping wine culture?
Just like it was important for me as a child to read comic books with Black superheroes like Static Shock and Icon (shoutout to my Milestone Media fans) or see a TV show with leading Black and brown characters, it is equally important to see that visual representation in the field that I operate in. I remember getting to sit in on a private seminar with Dlynn Proctor, a sommelier most famous for being a part of Jason Wise's SOMM, at JWU and realizing that, up until that point, all the wine professionals I had read about or interacted with were white. Dlynn was dapper, charming, and incredibly smart, an early inspiration in my career!
Since wine culture is observed through such a eurocentric lens, it's easy to forget that wine didn't originate there. Wine doesn't have a singular “look” to those who drink it, create it, serve it, and write about it. Being a Black man in this industry that is not necessarily designed with me in mind is critical because I want to be an inspiration for the next generation and remind them that there is no limit to the magic we can create.
Fashion has become a distinctive part of how you talk about wine. Where did the idea of bringing those two worlds together come from, and how does your personal style influence the way you present and tell stories about wine?
It's funny, people ask that and usually assume I grew up being really into fashion, but it isn't really a medium I fell in love with until college. Subconsciously, all the GQ, Esquire, and Vogue magazines my parents subscribed to came flooding into how I crafted my own personal style while in college.
As I studied different wine regions, I opted to look closely at the lifestyle elements of the people and would discover these stories about great fashion houses that ran parallel with the great winemaking houses of that region. Even further, I discovered that there is language in the world of fashion that can be used to explain concepts in wine. For example, blending in the wine world joins grapes together to offset each other's weaknesses and create complexity in the final wine, but in the fashion world, when pieces are joined together to create complexity and nuance in a look, we call it layering. I joke that now I have a mutated form of synesthesia because as I taste wine, I see colors, fabrics, and textures that I then associate with different grapes or wine styles. Like wine, clothing can be a powerful tool for storytelling. I just choose to weave them both together in the stories I tell.
Photo: The Certified Wino
Charlotte’s food and hospitality scene has changed considerably over the years. From your perspective, how has the city’s wine culture evolved along with it?
There used to be a HUGE focus on California's greatest hits, like big Cabernets and buttery Chards, but over my 12 years of being here, Charlotte's palate has become far more exploratory. I attribute this directly to the movers and shakers in my generation of wine professionals who are actively creating spaces for wine to be experienced without preconceived bias toward a producer, grape, or region. Spots like Substrate in Optimist Park or Bar à Vins in NoDa even put a huge focus on drinking the juice from our own backyard of North Carolina and supporting small-batch producers from around the world without it feeling overly pretentious. There is a desire to keep wine as a great connector of people, no matter their walk of life, permeating the wine space in Charlotte. That desire fosters greater camaraderie and collaboration amongst the wine professionals here that, in my mind at least, differs greatly from the more competitive nature felt in more established cities across the U.S. I also believe that the growth in the wine and even mixology scene here in Charlotte is what has directly encouraged our consistent boom of new restaurants, but I'm still collecting data on that, ha!
As you look ahead, what do you want the next chapter of The Certified Wino to look like?
The best-laid plans are often bound to change, they say. I've been actively doing more of the creative collaborations I sought out to do here in Charlotte with gifted individuals and businesses in the community, so more of that in the future, for sure.
I'd love to open a tasting studio, an atelier, if you will, that invites guests in to experience wine selections from small producers across the globe, with a heavy emphasis on wines from the East Coast (NY, NC, and VA, to be exact), against the backdrop of pieces from a rotating selection of local designers and artists, with the opportunity to experience unique events under a home location curated by The Certified Wino. Putting it out into the universe that I can bring that to life with the right partners within the next two years...send me positive thoughts and wine till then.
