We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jenene Mckay . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jenene below.

Jenene , appreciate you joining us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

It all started with our our mother she was a our inspiration. She was fantastic cook and entertainer abd threw the best parties. She passed away from stage 4 breast in 1993. Since then I have always loved cooking and I started my catering company Til the Last Bite! in 2015 and enlisted my sister Juliet Sosa to join me on this crazy adventure. Clients loved the pairing of our food and wine. So.. we figured we should have our on wine to pair with our food. So we dove in to learn everything about the wine making process.

We launched Til the Lat Sip! With our 2020 Rosé of Malbec in in January 202 We did a lot of door to door shopping our wine , attending wine festivals and received great feed back! Three months later we were in an epidemic. During that time we shipped direct and promoted our brand through social media. What can we say it took off!!

We literally googled how to make wine without owning a winery and google answered custom crush. Custom crush is when large wineries produced wine for small boutique wine companies. We used our own personal funds to make our first product. We had a major love for Malbec wines so we decided we wanted to use Malbec grapes to make a Rosè. Rosé are usually too sweet or too dry and is usually hard to pair with food. Being a chef I wanted to have great bottle of Rosé that would pair great with food. So we purchased our grapes from Paso Robles and had them driven down to Camarillo where we produce our wine.

During the time of production we designed our wine bottles, corks abd logo and obtained the proper alcohol licensing. We did quite a few tastings to perfect the tannin, , acidity , color to achieve
exactly what we wanted. We designed our shipping boxes and had to find a company that specialized in shipping wine.

Our company is a female black owned wine company in Los Angeles ran by two sisters who has love for wine. We are currently in 25 Total Wine stores , members of Black Vines and are local wine shops and bars such as Uncorked in Manhattan and Hermosa beach, CA and 1010 wine bar in Inglewood, Ca.

Jenene , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

There have been plenty of mistakes, lessons and growth along the way that allowed us to continue to make a name for ourselves in this business. We are so proud that we did not give up just look how far we got..

Our community is so use to seeing wine and spirit companies owned and ran by others that are not black and brown. They are so shocked and happy to see that’s it’s two sisters from the inner city having our wines on the shelves of major stores and local businesses. We hope our company has inspired all women and especially African American women that they too can enter the world of wine,spirits and beer.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I believe our catering company helped quite a bit with building our wine company. We had a great following and we would bring bottles of our wine to give to our existing clients. They loved our product and would inquire about purchasing more. Also friends and family help led by sharing our social media post and purchasing our product as well

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

It all started with our our mother she was a our inspiration. She was fantastic cook and entertainer abd threw the best parties. She passed away from stage 4 breast in 1993. Since then I have always loved cooking and I started my catering company Til the Last Bite! in 2015 and enlisted my sister to join me on this crazy adventure. Clients loved the pairing of our food and wine. So.. we figured we should have our on wine to pair with our food. So we dove in to learn everything about the wine making process.

Contact Info:

• Website: tilthelastsip.com
• Instagram: Tilthelastsipwine
• Facebook: Tilthelastsipwine
• Linkedin: Tilthelastsipwine
• Twitter: Tilthelastsipwine