Despite the fading evening light on Lankershim Boulevard, I had to squint a bit in the dim light of the club. The wide-open floor was already beginning to fill up with fashionably dressed people as the sounds of hip-hop coursed through the club’s speakers at a relatively subdued volume.

A glance around the room suggested the action was on the periphery, where several individuals stood behind small tables each holding a couple of wine bottles. I grabbed a proffered wine glass from a side table (noting with a somewhat delayed shock that it was a Zalto Universal) and headed for my first taste, walking up to a table staffed by a young woman wearing a hoodie. With a pleasant hello and a smile, Saskia de Rothschild poured me a taste of 1985 Lafite, and that is when I knew I was in for a wine event unlike anything else I had ever experienced.

This was Vin et Hip-Hop Los Angeles, the first US version of a wine event originally held in 2022 at the venerable Château du Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy. The event sprang from a collaboration between vintner Jeremy Seysses of Domaine Dujac, podcaster and educator Jermaine “Wolf of Wine” Stone, and Milena Berman and Loïc Lamy, the duo behind the experiential marketing agency Hautes Côtes. In its first incarnations, it brought hip-hop performers to the heart of Burgundy for a music-festival-meets-wine-tasting event celebrating two expressions of craft that have historically had only the most tenuous of relationships.

The Birth of Vin et Hip-Hop

As a recent Art History graduate working in Los Angeles art galleries, the young California-born Milena Berman jumped at the chance when she received an offer to join an art tourism company based in Burgundy.

“Three weeks later, sight unseen, I moved to Beaune,” she said when I interviewed her in March. It was something of a dream job, creating bespoke tours to art fairs and museums all over Europe for high-level donors to top museums around the world. But like so many things during the Pandemic, it all came crashing to a halt. Berman looked around at her options and decided she might be able to work in wine.

“I reached out to Domaine Dujac and I said, I’m not sure what I can do at a winery, maybe marketing and sales,” she recalled. “And they were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t do marketing and sales.'”

But the family clearly saw something in the young woman and found her a position on the administrative side of the business, working closely with winemaker Jeremy Seysses, particularly on activities supporting The Roots Fund, something meaningful to her as an American in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and moment.

As the world opened back up, Berman decided to leave Dujac and launch her own agency, Hautes Côtes, with partner Loïc Lamy, but just before she did, she ended up helping Dujac put on an event that featured podcaster Jermaine Stone. Berman and Stone hit it off and began discussing other potential events they could collaborate on, and they settled on the idea of a post-harvest party.

“I said to Jermaine that I’d make grilled cheese sandwiches and we could find a DJ, and he could do the playlist for the event, and I could ask Jeremy [Seysses] and a few other winemakers to pour a white wine, and so we made a terrible little logo, and made an announcement, and it sold out in minutes,” said Berman. “We were like, ‘Who’s coming to this?'”

Young interns from all over the world staying in Burgundy for their harvest jobs snapped up many of the inexpensive tickets, but some were locals, like Dominique Lafon.

“Dominique said, ‘This is amazing, next year you have to do it at Clos de Vougeot,’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, right,’ and he said, ‘No, I’m serious, I will go with you and tell them they should do this,'” recalls Berman.

Come as You Are

With Lafon’s urging, the Château du Clos de Vougeot agreed, and Vin et Hip Hop was born. When word came through the grapevine that Mike D was coming to Burgundy to be inducted into the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, the opportunity proved too good to pass up. Introductions were made, and the Beastie Boys founder agreed to DJ the inaugural event following his induction.

From the outset, the organizers envisioned an experience with far more accessibility than the black-tie affairs that have made the Château du Clos de Vougeot legendary among wine lovers.

“We were like, ‘Come in your jeans, come as you are,'” said Berman, “and we wanted the tickets to be less than 100 bucks with dinner included.” The organizers set aside a portion of the proceeds to benefit The Roots Fund.

The resulting event was certainly unlike anything that the Château had ever hosted: 700 young people (and a few older folks, too) partying to the sounds of hip-hop while tasting Burgundies from top producers. In a model that has continued through all subsequent events, producers made bottles available for sale to attendees, who, in the fashion of La Paulée, could open them and share with friends, acquaintances, and strangers throughout the night.

“We talk about how wine can reach different audiences, but sometimes wine needs help,” said Icy Liu, of Becky Wasserman & Co., one of the event’s sponsors. “Wine has had a very different way of relating and representing itself and being engaged with culture in a certain way for a long time, but it’s maybe a bit out of touch with the mainstream of the culture. Hip-hop is cool. The artists are always driving the dialogue with what we’re wearing, where we’re eating, and what we’re doing. Hip-hop is shaping cultural identity.”

That sense of connection with mainstream culture, as well as the passionate communities that have arisen around hip-hop, became a core tenet of the event, which now describes one of its primary goals as “bridging worlds through cultural exchange.”

In addition to the several editions of the event held at Clos de Vougeot, the organizers have also put on Pop et Hip-Hop in the Champagne region. After several years of European events, American wine and hip-hop lovers clamored for a domestic version, and in a lobbying campaign that I imagine was something like the competition for Olympic host cities, Los Angeles won the right to host the first event on American soil.

A Los Angeles Exclusive

The 2026 event in Los Angeles at Verse was unlike any wine event I’ve attended across a number of dimensions. The wines being poured for attendees were spectacular: Vintage Krug Champagne, Billecart-Salmon Elisabeth Salmon Rosé, Domaine de Montille 1er Cru Les Sizies, Dalla Valle Maya, Harlan Estate, Colgin IX Estate, Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle, Château Lafleur, Comtes Lafon 1er Cru Meursault-Charmes, Domaine Dujac 1er Cru Aux Combottes, Michel Lafarge Volnay, Domaine Fourrier 1er Cru Combe aux Moines Gevrey-Chambertin, and yes, 1985 Château Lafite Rothschild, among many others.

The crowd was impressively diverse, in both age and race, and the vibe was electric even before the performers took the stage. Common, Keyon Harrold, Dominique Sanders, Jason L. Martin, Dilated Peoples, and a guest appearance from Wiz Khalifa kept the room thumping until late, while the parking lot was filled with food trucks dishing up everything from smash burgers to caviar bumps.

A team of sommeliers behind the bar handled an enthusiastic crowd of spendy wine lovers who were more than happy to deplete the stocks of wines from Burgundy, Champagne, Napa, Bordeaux, Abruzzo, and the Rhône being sold at eye-poppingly excellent prices. Not to unnecessarily tantalize you, but a 2021 Arnoux-Lachaux Vosne-Romanée was on offer that night for $250. Try to find that bottle at retail today, and you’ll pay somewhere north of $600.

The catch to all this was the price of entry. This party and concert (which Hautes Côtes flew me down to LA to attend) had no tickets. Attendance was by invitation only. And to secure an invitation, you had to purchase a seat at one of the many winemaker dinners that preceded the event, with price tags starting at $850 and going up to more than $2,500. I believe the capacity of the club topped out at around 200 people.

Standing there with a $78 hand-blown wine glass filled with $500-per-bottle Burgundy, watching Common freestyle his way through a verse about drinking wine, I didn’t exactly feel part of anything close to “the mainstream.” I was lucky enough to attend an event the likes of which few people have ever had the opportunity to experience. Rarified doesn’t begin to describe it, and that struck me as quite the opposite of what Vin et Hip Hop was trying to achieve, significant donations to The Roots Fund notwithstanding.

When I put this to winemaker Jeremy Seysses and to Berman, they both agreed that the level of exclusivity featured in this event was not in alignment with the mission and vision for Vin et Hip-Hop long term, and reflected more of the specific opportunity they had to partner with the Verse supper club, owned by Grammy-award-winning sound engineer Manny Marroquin.

“I want to see something much bigger in the US,” said Seysses, “closer to or even bigger than what we do at Clos de Vougeot, with similar ticket prices.”

I’d love to see that, too.

A Deserving Synergy

At a time when wine seems to be struggling for relevance with younger generations of drinkers, and demand is shrinking, the appeal of Vin et Hip-Hop becomes obvious. Making inroads with hip-hop’s own diverse audience, and more specifically Black wine drinkers, seems not just smart but imperative. Taking wine off its pedestal and putting it in contexts where it connects with other dimensions of culture offers an opportunity to have different conversations or even just experience wine in different moods. A festival called Blood of Gods, named after a ‘zine of the same name, is doing something similar with heavy metal music in Washington State.

Can events such as these truly change the world of wine, a few hundred people at a time? That remains to be seen. At the very least, they represent something novel and exciting in an industry that seems convinced we’ll all be enthused by a press release touting the latest 90-point scores or the achievement of a new sustainability certification.

Wine needs to be more fun. And it needs to be more fun to a lot more people than it has in the past if the industry is going to survive and thrive. It also needs to connect with communities of passion, and especially those that have at their center things other than wine itself.

Wine also needs to be a bigger, more welcoming place for populations that have historically not been part of the wine conversation, for people who haven’t historically seen many people who look like them engaging with and enjoying wine.

These, I believe, are the glimmers of promise that can be seen amidst the strobes and heard amongst the thumping bass beats of Vin et Hip-Hop. Whether Vin et Hip-Hop can hold onto that promise while retaining its founding ethos (come in your jeans, come as you are) is the harder trick, and the one worth watching (or listening) for.

The next Vin et Hip-Hop event will take place on October 14th, 2026 at the Château du Clos de Vougeot in Burgundy. Tickets went on sale today, September 16th.