McBride, Robin

Impact on the world

Raised apart from a half-sister she didn't know existed until age 25, Robin McBride co-founded what began as a boutique New Zealand wine import business in 2005 and grew it, alongside Andréa, into the McBride Sisters Wine Company — by 2020 the largest Black-owned wine company in the U.S. by volume, selling 35,000 cases a year and carried in nearly 2,700 American stores. She helped launch the Black Girl Magic Wines label in 2018 and the SHE CAN canned-wine brand in 2019, alongside the McBride Sisters SHE CAN Professional Development Fund, which by the mid-2020s had awarded more than $3 million in scholarships and mentoring to women entering the wine and spirits industry, including a pipeline partnership with Southern University, an HBCU.

Life & background

Born in Los Angeles around 1974 and raised in Monterey, California — “among miles of vineyards,” as she has described it — McBride began her career in technical sales and international import-export before learning, at age 25, that she had a teenage half-sister, Andréa, living in New Zealand whom their dying father, Kelly McBride, had asked the family to help reunite. The sisters met for the first time at LaGuardia Airport in 1999, discovered a shared passion for wine, and in 2005 launched their first business importing boutique New Zealand wines into California, hand-selling to independent retailers and fine-dining restaurants. The pair went on to found eco.love Wines (2009) and, in partnership with Diageo, Truvée (2013), before consolidating their labels into the McBride Sisters Collection in 2017; Robin continues to lead the company's wine production and industry relationships from its San Luis Obispo, California, base.

Sources

1. Forbes; WWD; NPR (“How I Built This”); Afroelle Magazine