Melanie Bias didn’t think she’d end up in Charlottesville. The Wisdom Oak Winery co-owner originally had hopes of being a diplomat, but a wine class after hours sparked an interest she didn’t know she had. Photo: Virginia Hamrick
Taking care of business
Consultant, restaurateur, and winery owner Melanie Bias never sits still
If someone had suggested to Melanie Bias as a child that at age 35 she’d live in the Virginia countryside, work as a business consultant, and co-own a winery with her husband, she would have laughed. The oldest of five children with a knack for leadership, she grew up in rural Connecticut and yearned to get out and travel.
“I wanted to be a diplomat,” Bias said with a laugh. “Not in a million years did I think I’d end up back in the country. I’ve visited and lived in every major city known to man, but I’m back here long-term now.”
Shortly after graduating from Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, with bachelor’s degrees in international relations and economics—”Nothing to do with what I’m doing now,” she said—Bias landed a job as a department head at an industrial supply company in Atlanta, Georgia. Having always been fueled by hands-on, project-oriented work, she got a kick out of wearing a hardhat and driving a forklift every day, and it wasn’t long before she was overseeing a team charged with designing a new warehouse for the “50,000 widgets and nuts and bolts that they held.”
Because she’s never been one to sit idly by, Bias signed up to take wine classes after work.
“I bartended back in college to make a little extra money, but my goodness, some of the dive bars I worked in had Yellowtail on the reserve list,” she said.
Turns out being a rookie served her well, and at the guidance of the instructor—who described her as a “blank slate” because she had no preconceived notions about wine—Bias went on to become a sommelier. Not only that, but in her spare time, while still holding down a full-time job, she opened her first wine bar, Vino Libro, in 2006.
Everyone told her she was crazy. She prefers the word fearless. Once Vino Libro became relatively self-sufficient, Bias bowed out of corporate America to run the place full-time and, ultimately, join forces with a big-time developer to open three more locations on the East Coast.
It was the time of her life, she said, but it wasn’t easy.
“There were times when I had to decide if I was going to pay my mortgage, or pay rent for the business,” Bias said. “It becomes real really quickly.”
It’s been several years since Bias left the restaurant world, and while she misses it, she said she has no desire to go back. She now splits her time between Charlottesville and New York, drawing on her experience to run a crisis management business. When she’s not advising both nonprofit and for-profit sectors on how to increase their efficiency while trimming costs, she’s bringing her wine education and childhood craftiness full circle, helping her husband run Wisdom Oak Winery.
“It’s been fun. I get to get my hands dirty and really see the full life cycle of a grape,” she said. “Not just read about it, but feel and touch it, and have an influence on the taste.”
As a business woman who splits her time between two cities and travels the world with her husband every chance she gets, Bias said her life couldn’t be more different from her mother’s, which was spent raising the children she had at a young age.
“I never felt any pressure to have the same life,” Bias said. “I just felt pressure to do something with my life.”—L.I.