The Wine Makers – Chris Renfro

This week Bart, Sam, and Danielle sit down for a long-awaited conversation with Chris Renfro, the visionary behind The Two Eighty Project and much more. The project began in 2020, when a neglected vineyard along San Francisco’s 280 freeway more or less fell into his lap. Amid the trials and turmoil of that year, Chris took it upon himself to revive roughly 65 vines that had been left for dead.

As the vineyard grew, so did The Two Eighty Project’s mission: creating meaningful access to viticulture and wine for communities of color and other groups historically excluded from the industry. The soil of Alemany Farm — and Chris’s little vineyard-that-could — became a seedbed for social and racial equity in wine.

Today, in addition to running the 280 Project and its vibrant apprenticeship program, Chris is making wine from grape varieties native to North America, hunting for forgotten vines and vineyards around San Francisco and beyond, and running one of the city’s hottest new wine shops, Friend of a Friend. This one’s got it all — inspiration, ingenuity, and indigenous grapes. [Ep 381]

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