Several trips abroad opened Natasha Williams’s eyes to what makes Cincinnati special and her own potential to add to the city’s appeal. While using a travel service for digital nomads, the Forest Park native was able to visit several countries, including Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Croatia, and South Africa.
“You want to bring some of the things that you’ve seen in other cities to your city,” she explains. For Williams, much of what she brought back home to Cincinnati revolves around wine. The self-described “hostess with the mostest” developed her interest in wine through repeated exposure during working lunches, where she was served bottles that, initially, held little appeal for her.
“Working in HR, I would be at a lot of networking events,” she recalls. “We would drink during those times, but I just had no desire to drink wine.”
Eventually, however, she found her palate developing, followed quickly by a growing passion for wine and sharing it with others, which led her to create the wine brokerage firm Lush Life Brands in 2018.
“The direction I thought would be the best for me is showcasing certain brands and winemakers, and making wine approachable and fun,” she says. “Making it approachable is really important, especially to people of color, because a lot of us don’t grow up in an environment where it’s offered to us.”
Lush Life started out as more of a mission than a plan, with Williams seeking to showcase brands from minority and women vintners. She initially hoped to stage in-home wine tastings and other wine-centric gatherings, even taking time off of work to get established, but the death of her father followed by the COVID-19 pandemic put the brakes on the party program. She began assembling carefully chosen cases of bottles to share her discoveries. “I did wine cases of different regions as a way to showcase things I was drinking to get through COVID,” says Williams, who has a WSET level 1 certification from Napa Valley Wine Academy.
Those small cases eventually grew into Lush Life Distribution, a curated portfolio of “independent, underrepresented and game-changing wine brands” and presenter of Black Wine Fest and the Cincy Rosé Wine Festival.
“Between watching my father’s transition and then living abroad and coming back, I realized, ‘Oh, I want to create experiences,’” she says. “I want to create moments with wine that are approachable, fun, educational, and just different.”
Now three years strong, Black Wine Fest is the culmination of this desire to create experiences around wine. “It’s bringing together communities of people to celebrate together over wine and cocktails,” Williams says. “Initially, it was to showcase minority winemakers and wines by Black and brown producers. And it has been expanding.”
The inaugural event took place in February 2023 in Liberty Township’s Sugar Lofts Event Center and was a sell-out. Shortly before a second sold-out year in 2024, it was heralded as the nation’s fourth best new festival in USA Today’s 10Best Readers’ Choice Awards. The timing was perfect for Williams, whose corporate career was growing, in her words, “very intense.”
“When I lived abroad, I enjoyed a good work-life balance,” she recalls. “In mingling with locals and getting to know people, I saw that’s just what they did. When I came back home, though…I remember being at a happy hour and asked to do an [employment] offer. I’m in the bathroom of a lounge doing an off er because my leader was like, ‘We got to get this offer out tonight,’ and I’m like, ‘It’s 5:30 and I’m at happy hour!’ That was just one of several moments that made me realize I couldn’t keep doing [it].”
Williams admits the transition away from corporate life into a fully self-employed position presented challenges, but she describes the move as an inevitable shift in her quest for a more balanced life. (She’s serious about mental health, too; last year, she established The Grapevine Foundation to support workers in the hospitality/service industry.)
“I can truly say I’m happy,” she says. “I enjoy every day that I get to walk into my office, sit down, and let my brain create curated wine experiences and moments.”
The 2025 Black Wine Fest took place in February at Music Hall and, in addition to serving plenty of curated libations to another sold-out crowd, featured panel discussions such as “Men in Wine,” “Entrepreneurship and Your Mental Health,” and “Before You Leave Your 9–5.” Plans for the 2026 event are already underway, even as Williams prepares for her second Cincy Rosé Wine Festival, which takes place at Ziegler Park’s Great Lawn in Over-the-Rhine this month.
The festival features more than 30 rosé wines from around the world, a cigar garden, food trucks, mobile bars, and more. Last year’s inaugural event was the nearly impromptu result of a conversation with a 3CDC contact when they both realized National Rosé Day took place in June. Williams hopes to see it grow into one of the city’s key events for the start of summer.
“I want us to celebrate each other and celebrate life,” she says. “I think this is just another way to really kick off the summer in Cincinnati and show the diversity of our beautiful city and some of these small businesses I get to showcase. This is another way I’m able to educate and curate and bring people together. That is major for me.”
Cincy Rosé Wine Festival, 1–6 p.m., June 28, Ziegler Park, 1322 Sycamore St., Over-the-Rhine
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