The First One: Wine Tasting 101 at Proletariat
We oversold our own first event.
That wasn't the plan. The plan was a modest first gathering — see who turns up, see whether the idea holds. Instead the tickets went, and then we released a few more, and the room at Proletariat Wine Company filled anyway.
That was October 4, 2024. The first First Fridays Boise.
[IMAGE BLOCK 1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/66ced3a199491a223c55b0b2/7d978a39-e6ee-48e5-a7ca-480e7a035bb6/347-DSC_2929.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg Alt text: Guests connecting at the first First Fridays Boise gathering, Proletariat Wine Company, Garden City, Idaho, October 2024
Why a winery
We wanted the first one to be an experience, not just a mixer. Wine tasting is one of those things that can feel like it comes with a password — you're either fluent or you're quietly nodding along. We wanted to hand people the password.
Proletariat Wine Company was the right room for that, and not by accident. Proletariat means the people, and the company was built on the idea that good wine shouldn't be gatekept. Angela had gotten to know one of the co-owners through Leadership Boise, and the fit was obvious the moment we talked about it: a wine company whose whole premise is accessibility, hosting a community whose whole premise is belonging.
They gave us the loft upstairs, just off the deck. Early October in the Valley, doors open, light coming in sideways the way it does that time of year.
Wine Tasting 101
Elizabeth Baggerly and her tasting room team ran the evening with us, alongside their sommelier. Four wines over the course of the night, and before each pour they walked the room through it — where the grapes came from, what to notice, what you're actually tasting when you taste. Then everyone tried it and talked about it.
Nobody had to pretend to know anything. That was the point.
[IMAGE BLOCK 2] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/66ced3a199491a223c55b0b2/65c02932-390f-4bee-931a-13fc4e3ac9ec/DSC_2705.jpg?content-type=image%2Fjpeg Alt text: Attendees at the first First Fridays Boise wine tasting at Proletariat Wine Company, October 2024
⚠ Adjust this alt text to describe what the photo actually shows — I couldn't view it. If it's the tasting, the loft, or the artists painting, say so specifically. Alt text is read aloud by screen readers and indexed by Google, so "attendees at an event" is a wasted line.
Food came from Wepa Cafe, just around the corner on 35th — Puerto Rican, and at the time the only place in the state doing it. Wepa is an expression of joy, which turned out to be about right for the night. Two Garden City businesses, a block apart, both built on the idea that culture is something you serve to people rather than keep from them.
Wepa has since closed. Which only makes us gladder they fed the first one.
And in the corner, artists worked on canvases while everything else happened. Not a performance, exactly. Just the room having more going on in it than conversation.
The part we didn't plan
Late in the evening, a couple who'd been downstairs in the main tasting room came up to find us.
They said they'd noticed the energy from below and wanted to see what was happening. They'd moved to Boise from California, and they told us they seek out diverse spaces on purpose — and that in all the wineries they'd visited around the Valley, they hadn't walked into a room that looked like ours. They wanted us to know how good it was to see it.
We hadn't advertised anything. They just heard a room full of Black and Brown professionals enjoying themselves in Garden City on a Friday night, and came upstairs.
That's the whole thesis, and we learned it on night one: a room changes what a place feels like. People notice. Some of them come find you.
[OPTIONAL THIRD IMAGE — drop one in here if you have another from that night. A group shot or the artists working would both land well at this point in the story.]
What it started
There were people from across our partner organizations in the room that night, a lot of them meeting each other for the first time. Nineteen gatherings later, across First Fridays Boise and Sistas Who Lunch, we're still doing the same thing we did that evening: pick a room, make it easy to walk into, and let people find each other.
Thank you to Proletariat Wine Company for the space and the pours, to Elizabeth and her team for making wine feel like everybody's, and to Wepa Cafe for feeding us that night.
And to everyone who bought a ticket to something that had never happened before — you're the reason there was a second one.
First Fridays Boise gathers every month, usually the first Friday at 5:30 PM, at rotating venues across the Treasure Valley. See what's coming up →
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