Rideau, Iris

Impact on the world

After three decades building a successful Los Angeles insurance agency and securities firm — itself a rare achievement for a Black woman in 1960s-80s California — Rideau purchased a historic 1884 adobe property in the Santa Ynez Valley and, in 1997, opened Rideau Vineyard, widely credited as the first Black-woman-owned winery in the United States at a time when Black-owned wineries represented (and still represent) under one percent of America's roughly 11,000 wineries. Specializing in Rhône varietals — Syrah, Mourvèdre, Viognier, Roussanne — she built the operation into a top regional producer generating around $3.5 million annually and 7,500-9,000 cases a year, winning Best of Show and Best White Wine honors at competitions including the Los Angeles County Fair, before selling the winery in 2016 at age 80; she has since mentored other Black vintners, including Theodora Lee of Theopolis Vineyards, who has credited Rideau as the example that made her own winery feel possible.

Life & background

Born Iris Duplantier around 1936-37 in New Orleans's Creole Seventh Ward, the light-skinned descendant of an 18th-century French colonist, Rideau moved to Los Angeles with her mother at age ten, married and had a daughter as a teenager, and worked in a garment factory while taking night classes, later working as an insurance receptionist where she sometimes passed as white to keep her job. In 1967 she founded her own agency, Rideau & Associates Insurance, followed by Rideau Retirement Planning Consultants and, in 1982, a securities brokerage employing fifty people; from 1973 to 1976 she chaired Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's Affirmative Action Committee, securing jobs for hundreds of women of color. After selling her financial businesses in the late 1990s, she converted a historic adobe property she had purchased in 1995 into Rideau Vineyard, bringing Creole food and culture into the Santa Ynez Valley's wine-tasting scene. She published a memoir, “From White to Black: One Life Between Two Worlds,” in 2023, and continues to live near her former winery in Solvang, California.

Sources

1. Wine Spectator; Santa Ynez Valley Star; Vintner Project; Santa Barbara Independent