Hospitality

Brenae Royal Brings a 98 Point Zinfandel to SOUTH on October 21

Winemaker Brenae Royal pours the Violet's Paradise range at SOUTH in Philadelphia on October 21, an intimate wine dinner hosted by Harry Hayman.

By Harry Hayman 7 min read
Brenae Royal Brings a 98 Point Zinfandel to SOUTH on October 21

On October 21, 2026, SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club on North Broad Street in Philadelphia will hold something that does not happen often at the venue: an entire evening organized around a single winemaker’s voice. Harry Hayman and the team at SOUTH have been building toward this kind of event for some time, pairing the kitchen’s food with producers who bring not just bottles but biography. For this particular Wednesday evening, that producer is Brenae Royal, founder and winemaker of Violet’s Paradise, whose 2023 Monte Rosso Vineyard Zinfandel scored 98 points from VinePair and placed twelfth on its list of the 50 best wines of 2025. Tickets are on sale through SOUTH’s Tock page. The seating is intentionally limited.

SOUTH Restaurant and Jazz Club on North Broad Street

SOUTH sits at 600 North Broad Street, a stretch of Philadelphia that has seen more than its share of reinvention. The Bynum brothers opened the restaurant in 2015 in a space that had previously housed a Stephen Starr seafood concept, and WHYY documented the early vision: a jazz parlor and supper club in the same room, Southern cuisine anchoring a menu built for an evening rather than just a meal, and Harry Hayman shaping the beverage program and the overall hospitality identity from the start. A decade later, SOUTH has become one of the more consistent venues on the North Broad corridor for both food and live performance.

What Harry Hayman has worked to make the venue known for is specificity. SOUTH does not just book performers; it builds evenings. The jazz parlor is designed so that nobody in the room sits far from the music, and the kitchen thinks in terms of what an evening spanning several hours needs rather than what a single dish can do alone. The October wine dinner with Brenae Royal is that logic applied to wine. Every course will be paired with a bottle from Violet’s Paradise. Royal herself will walk the room through each wine: the vineyard, the harvest conditions, the winemaking decisions that shaped what is in the glass.

Brenae Royal and the Origins of Violet’s Paradise

Brenae Royal’s path to Violet’s Paradise runs through agriculture scholarship, 4-H, the California State University system at Chico, and then roughly a decade managing one of the most historic vineyard sites in Sonoma County. She ran vineyard operations at Monte Rosso for approximately ten years, overseeing 250 acres of vines, leading the property through organic certification, and learning the site with the depth that comes from being responsible for it season after season rather than simply sourcing fruit from it.

She left Monte Rosso in 2024. She named her new label after Violet Mae, a dog who had been with her through most of her vineyard career. The name is spare and the story it carries is not. Violet’s Paradise is a wine project founded and led by a Black woman, rooted in one of California’s most significant growing sites, built by someone who spent years farming that ground before making a single bottle under her own name. Wine Enthusiast named her a 40 Under 40 Tastemaker in 2020, a recognition that preceded the label’s public launch and pointed toward what was coming.

The winemaking at Violet’s Paradise is handled in partnership with Marc Gagnon, whose work includes stints at Bryant Estate and Screaming Eagle. The fruit is from Monte Rosso. The combination of a grower with intimate knowledge of a storied site and a winemaker with that kind of technical formation has produced wines that reviewers have treated as serious. The 2023 Zinfandel is the clearest evidence so far.

Monte Rosso Vineyard and the Wines Coming to Philadelphia

Monte Rosso’s story starts in 1886. San Francisco grocers Emmanuel Goldstein and Benjamin Dreyfus planted the first vines on what they then called Mount Pisgah, climbing from 690 to 1,300 feet into the Mayacamas Mountains on Sonoma’s side of the ridge. Some of those original vines, particularly Zinfandel planted in that first decade, are still in production. Louis M. Martini bought the property in 1938 and renamed it Monte Rosso, Italian for red mountain, a name that points directly at the volcanic soils with high iron content that define what grows there. The Sonoma County Winegrowers describe the Martini family’s connection to Monte Rosso as spanning three generations before E. and J. Gallo acquired both the winery and the vineyard in 2002.

The Moon Mountain District was formally designated an American Viticultural Area in 2013, and Monte Rosso sits within it. The volcanic origin of the soil and the altitude together produce conditions that generate wines with what reviewers consistently describe as structure and natural acidity rather than straightforward ripeness. Old vines intensify that tendency. The 2023 Monte Rosso Vineyard Zinfandel that VinePair rated at 98 points shows citrus peel, ripe berries, spiced meat, and earthy notes alongside tannins that are present without being heavy.

The pour at SOUTH on October 21 will move through the Violet’s Paradise range: the California Sparkling, the Grenache, the Zinfandel, and the Cabernet Sauvignon. The 2023 Monte Rosso Zinfandel is the featured wine. Each will be paired with a course from the SOUTH kitchen.

The Veraison Project and a Broader Purpose

Violet’s Paradise donates fifty percent of its proceeds to The Veraison Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in May 2020. The Veraison Project’s mission is to expand access, education, and leadership opportunity in the wine and hospitality industries for people from underrepresented backgrounds. The name refers to the moment in a growing season when grapes begin to ripen and change color, a moment of transition the organization uses as a metaphor for what it wants to see happen across the industry. Its programs include mentorship, scholarships, and apprenticeship partnerships with wineries such as Silver Oak in the Napa Valley.

The other fifty percent of Violet’s Paradise proceeds goes to the Violet’s Paradise Agriculture Scholarship, which supports collegiate students pursuing degrees in agriculture, following the path Royal herself took.

The structure of the label is not incidental to the wine. Royal built it that way deliberately. Violet’s Paradise is an argument, made in the language of carefully grown grapes and precise winemaking, that fine wine can carry a clear social purpose and that the purpose need not soften the wine to make it. The 98-point Zinfandel and the scholarship funding are the same project, not competing priorities.

What Harry Hayman Looks for in an Evening at SOUTH

Harry Hayman has spent years at SOUTH looking for evenings that work as a unit. The wine dinner with Brenae Royal fits a pattern he returns to repeatedly: find someone doing genuinely interesting work, build a room around what they know, and let the food and the conversation carry the rest. SOUTH has hosted this kind of event before, and what makes the October date notable is the quality of the producer at the center of it.

Philadelphia’s wine culture in 2026 has expanded beyond the traditional white tablecloth wine dinner. Wine events organized around a single theme or a single producer have multiplied across the city, with Philadelphia Magazine’s annual Wine and Dine event drawing dozens of restaurants and hundreds of wines to the Kimmel Center each year. SOUTH’s version of that conversation is smaller, more focused, and built around a single winemaker’s voice rather than a broad tasting. Royal will speak to each wine as it is poured. The story of Violet Mae, of Monte Rosso, of a decade spent farming ground she eventually translated into a label of her own: that is the evening’s real content, alongside the food and the wine.

Harry Hayman’s approach to hospitality has always been less about spectacle than about the conditions under which a room can actually come together. An intimate dinner where the winemaker explains the harvest rather than a showcase where the bottles speak for themselves. That is the choice being made at SOUTH on October 21. Seating is limited by design.

Tickets are available at SOUTH’s page on Tock. The evening begins at 5:30 PM.

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