The Nostalgia of Color

JonesBoy215 × Violet's Paradise x The Veraison Project

I always knew Alfred Jones could draw. We were teens, and I still remember his sketches, the kind of talent that everyone just accepted as fact. These weren’t mindless scribbles but an active way of putting his voice on paper. So when I learned years later that he'd started painting on canvas, I had to see for myself.

What I found was nothing like what I remembered. It was abstract, electric, and unmistakably home, it pulled me right back to the concrete jungle of my birthplace, Philly. JonesBoy215 had grown up. His range floored me: meditative pieces worthy of an executive's office or a spot over the fireplace, sitting right next to bright, graphic work that belonged on the side of a building or the wall of a school. A red rose forcing its way up through cracked concrete. A skyline dissolving into hometown graffiti. Money bags hanging like fruit off a leafy green vine - pop, a little witty, and to a wine person, a little prophetic.

All images by JonesBoy215 take from JonesBoy215 Instagram

Some pieces hummed while others were filled with hope.  A few carried that specific 80s-and-90s nostalgia, like a hip-hop medley you could somehow see in color. That's what I keep circling back to - the color. Vibrant, bold, and placed with real care.

A simple revelation popped into my mind, I've tasted those colors before.

At The Bubbles Society we have a name for that crossover - the Theory of Tasting Color™, an idea that what we see and what we taste are speaking the same language. The bottle that proved it to me was Brenae Royal's Violet's Paradise × The Veraison Project sparkling wine.

Bottle of Violet's Paradise x The Veraison Project Sparkling Wine

I was hosting a tasting for friends, and the very first sip turned into a conversation about being kids again. It landed like technicolor pink and mango-orange - the exact shades of the beads that used to clack at the ends of my braids. It was lively and a little reckless, like two girls turning a double-dutch rope in the middle of summer. It had that first-step-into-Caribbean-sand kind of thrill. Guava and perfectly ripe peach, zippy and energetic like watching a game of basketball on the blacktop. A vacation in a bottle. We couldn't stop trading summertime memories between sips, and not once did we reach for tasting vocabulary. The smiles and the laughter said all of it. Simply put: these bubbles were GOOD.

And they're good for a reason bigger than the glass. The wine comes from Brenae Royal who is the youngest person, and the first Black woman, to run Sonoma's historic Monte Rosso Vineyard, where she tended hundreds of acres of old vines almost entirely by hand. You don't meet many Black women in wine, and fewer still out in the rows with the fruit. Her label gives back the way she came up: every pour of Violet's Paradise feeds The Veraison Project, the nonprofit putting scholarships and mentorship into the hands of the next generation of BIPOC and women in wine.

(L to R) Brenae Royal Photo Credit: Megan Latify; Violet's Paradise x Veraison Project Sparkling Wine; Brenae Royal with Violet Mae  (Violet's Paradise Instagram)

While her resume is impressive, what's stayed with me since that night is the way the wine moves in the glass and on my palate. That rush of guava and ripe peach, the restless energy of the bubbles, the pink-and-orange brightness of the whole thing: it never asks you to analyze it. It just reaches back, finds a summer you'd half-forgotten, and hands it to you, the same way JonesBoy215's color does from clear across a room. Two artists, one working in paint and one in fruit, both using their hands to bottle a feeling. This collaboration deserves to be enjoyed on a warm day with music that has a soulful beat. The bubbles do what a great piece of art is known for, it walks you back into a memory, then leaves you standing in a brand-new experience.

Full Lineup of Violet's Paradise wines via Instagram; Art by JonesBoy215 via Instagram

CHEERS!