The Life, Vices And American Dreams of Malek Amrani

It all started in Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, a country in the Maghreb region located on the northwest edge of Africa, where Malek Amrani was born and raised.

This old-world, multicultural country overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the North and the Atlantic Ocean to the West, boasts a population of more than 38 million people and is said to have first been inhabited at least 400,000 years ago. The first recorded history was with the Phoenician colonization of the Moroccan coast sometime between the 8th and 6th centuries BCE.

Morocco is the land of football and the kingdom of light, the largest city is Casablanca, or Casa, for short, and is famous for its beaches and seafront beach clubs.

The country has attracted the likes of famous writers like Edith Wharton, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs and Mark Twain who sought out Morocco for refuge, inspiration and its “utopian” spaces.

It is said to be a “feast for the eyes” with its Islamic imperial grandeur and old-European elegance.

French fashion powerhouse, Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, famously made it their sacred place and home away from home. The designer found endless inspiration from the colors revealed from region’s unique light.

It is a collective story of love and challenges where they tend to dream big. And it was there, around 2003, that Amrani was beginning to embark on a journey that was to solidify his professional life.

“I grew up in Morocco and graduated at age 16, then went to college in Senegal, West Africa, to study medicine.”

PAGING DR. AMRANI?

“I grew up in Morocco and graduated at age 16, then went to college in Senegal, West Africa, to study medicine,” he comments.

When asked if that was something he was interested in personally or something he was pushed to do, he said: “I absolutely was not passionate about being a doctor.”

But with two uncles who became doctors, he said they represented examples of what it meant to work hard, studying hard and do well in society.

However, it was a different family member in which he found a little more professional inspiration.

“I had another uncle that owned a bazaar in Spain,” he mentioned. “So, he was working with tourists and I loved it. I just loved the happiness and joy that the business would bring him.”

Seeing his uncle in action started to make Amrani’s interest lean more toward having a career in business.

While he wasn’t fully invested in pursuing a career in the medical field and wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with his life, he did have the inkling that he had what it took to ‘make it” — in whatever field he chose.

“I started school very young, so I always competed in class and in sports with people who were older than me, so I felt I had a head start,” he said.

His main goal, at that time, was to get out of his Dad’s house. And to do that, he allowed his father to persuade him to go to Senegal with his older brother for medical studies.

“I did pretty well,” he recalls.”But I really wasn’t into it.

While having a great deal of respect for the medical field and those who work within it, by the end of the year he decided he wasn’t going back to school the next semester.

Trying to figure out his next move and without telling a soul about his plans, he decided to “steal” his brother’s passport and went to the American Embassy located in the capital of Senegal, Dakar, and apply for a visa.

“I went to the interview and the lady thought I was crazy,” he says laughing. “You know, a 17-year-old applying for a visa to the United States? But instead of her interviewing me, I think I was interviewing her the whole time about the United States.”

Then his chance at a different life quickly materialized.

“When it typically takes two weeks to hear back, the very next day I had a 10-year visa to the United States,” he says.

With his mother being out of his life since he was 11 years old, he only had his father to contend with about leaving the country.

“My father thought I was just going to go for the summer and then come back to school around September/October,” he recalls, laughing to himself. “But I told him at the airport on the phone in Dakar: ‘Listen dude. I’m not coming back. I don’t know what you’re thinking.’”

That is where his journey officially started — from the classrooms and hospitals in Senegal to a whole new world of excitement, opportunity and challenges in the United States.

IF I CAN MAKE IT THERE…

While 200,000 to 300,000 people are reported to flock to NYC each year to partake in the life, the culture and the unique opportunities to fulfill their dreams, Amrani’s landing in New York City was purely by circumstance.

“The flights from most African cities land in New York,” he mentions. “I landed in New York and that was that. That’s why New York. I think that if there was a flight to some other place, then I probably would have ended up in that other place.”

Living, breathing and residing in NYC can be like a fairytale for anyone who has ever dreamed of one day calling themselves a “New Yorker.” But unfortunately, with most fairytale stories, they start out a little scary.

By the time Amrani found himself in New York City, he was 17 years old. The city was still under the residual fear of terrorism after 9/11 and it was facing a recession that was much worst than the rest of the country.

To state the obvious, things didn’t go very smoothly for him after he landed. He ended up being one of the estimated 38,000 individuals in the city that year who found themselves experiencing homelessness.

“I knew from day one that I was going to have to rely on myself,” he said. “He had to embrace the reality of the situation and take things day-by-day, no matter how difficult things could or would get.”

He went on to say: “I was thinking: ‘Its not going to get worse that this and the worst thing that could happen is that I’m going to die,” he says, reflecting on his logic at the time. “So, I was homeless for about six months on the streets of New York City.”

Not to make light of the serious nature of being unhoused as a teenager in NYC, but he says it was sort of a golden era in his life.

“My best days were the days when I absolutely had nothing,” Amrani says, thinking back fondly of those times.

“This morning when I woke up, January 1st (2025), I remembered randomly when I lived my first days in New York; when I was bouncing around in the trains,” he says. “I did have friends. They were immigrants. Three slept in the same bed. Two shared a bed in the other room. And when they let me crash, I slept on the floor in a tiny, little, living room. That was a blessing on its own that someone let me crash there, once in a blue moon.”

Remembering the generosity of friends, the kindness of strangers and appreciating the little things like having enough money to purchase a magnum of Sutter Home White Zinfandel on an extremely hot summer day has been really impactful for him.

Living hand-to-mouth for a while gave him some time to create a strategy, use the city as inspiration and as an intense educational campus. And by using his sports background, Amrani conditioned himself to endure that type of struggle by learning to play the long game — which would later translate into nearly everything he set out to do from there.

He rationalized at the time: “The people my age are going to college and they are going to spend four years in college and come out and go fight and search for a job,” he says. “My plan was to actually pick a field and focus on it.”

Continuing, he says: “I’ve always had this belief that whether it’s sports or life, that if you do something for 100 days, then you become good at it; a thousand days, you become really go at it. And then, you know, 10,000 days or whatever, you’re an expert. That’s what you do. That’s your skill. So I said, ‘let me dive into the wine world, early, while I’m young.’ I kind of loved wine growing up. I’ve tasted it when I was growing up, which kind of drew me to it.”

Another strategy was to conceal his “real” age.

“I’ve lied about my age for most of my life, until a few years go,” he says. “Not even my best friends knew my age. But it really came in handy in that age from 18-21 because I wasn’t allowed to buy wine or liquor or drink it —but I was able to get into the business and set myself a vision of:

I was going to work in this industry, do as many jobs as possible, deconstruct them to understand what it’s all about.
I’m going to save money. I’m not spending money to go to college and I have access to booze, so the party is here. I’m not going to party. The party is coming to me.
When I turned 21, I could actually fully dive into the industry and that’s exactly what happened”

Amrani says he worked religiously — six days a week, 16- to 20-hour days working with wines and spirits in NYC restaurants, bars and nightlife venues.

“I still do that today, just back then I had two or three jobs,” Amrani adds.

DREAMS SOWED ON AMERICAN SOIL

At the age of 21, he started working for Diageo and Moet-Hennessy, one of the biggest distributors in New York at that time. In this sales role, he was instantly exposed to some of the top, luxury wines and spirits brands in the world.

That type of access gave him the opportunity to travel the world and a chance to create a rolodex of contacts in both the wine and spirit categories.

Then one day, he had an epiphany that morphed into a new business concept.

“I’m like, I’m selling all these wines and spirits for them and I can also do this (for me),” Amrani says. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, a conflict of interest, but I started importing small, small boutique wines that people produce all around the world.”

He worked as a middle man to help small producers get into the New York market, selling it the direct import/self distribution route.

In doing that, combined with his day job — traveling, networking and selling the best of the best brands to a diverse group of clientele, he noticed there could be an opportunity to do something special with Napa Valley wines.

Torie Greenberg, his wife and co-founder of The Vice, and Amrani visited Napa in 2009 — and like most visitors — fell in love with the region at first sight.

“I saw Napa as being the apex in American winemaking based on the value of Napa Valley wines in the American wine industry,” he says. “And then I saw the Napa was taking a price increase every single year and Napa wines were getting a little more expensive every year. And the demand was growing.”

Like any in-the-know person shopping in souks throughout Morocco, Amrani is all about getting a good deal.

“I can sit here today and you can offer me to drink a Petrus, but it wouldn’t mean much because I’d probably be happier with a second-growth Bordeaux knowing it costs less,” he says. “It’s not as good, but close to it. So, I saw an opportunity in Napa where there wasn’t that everyday quality wine that I can get behind everyday and not break the bank.”

At that time, he noticed many of the wines were known for that $50-plus price range. While he says there were some producers that made exceptional wine in the $25-$30 range, it wasn’t very common.

“So, that’s where I saw the opportunity,” he says.

Looking back at all the roles he’s had in the NYC wine and spirits scene, he realized that one of the only things he hasn’t done yet was to make wine.

That’s when the winemaking seed was officially planted.

FOR THE LOVE OF NAPA

By 2017, Amrani and Greenberg were living bicoastal lives. He was racking up the miles, flying back-and-forth from New York to Los Angeles, juggling his full-time sales job, his now full-time, side gig, and a little dream of making wine in Napa.

“I would fly Friday morning (to Los Angeles) and take a red-eye Sunday nights to New York, and land Monday morning as if nothing happened,” he says. “Along the way, it was a: ‘what if, as a hobby, I started making wine?’”

With all that back and both, Napa —just about 400 miles north of Los Angeles — was a much-needed weekend escape for both of them.

“Napa is extremely beautiful,” Amrani says. “Napa is magical. Everything about it, I love.”

And Napa was also a place that could offer him the opportunity to explore a winemaking endeavor.

“I know that having my own brand in Europe would be a lot more difficult, than actually going to the best in the United States, the apex of American winemaking as a region and say to myself: ‘I’m going to establish myself here,’” he says.

Armed with a dream, a passion and a hope that it would work, Greenberg and Amrani set out to make their first wine.

“We had no idea of what we were doing in 2013,” Amrani says. “We started with 500 cases of Chardonnay, which is a pretty good amount of Chardonnay. That was batch number one. The following year we did a Napa cab. The following year, we did a Yountville Cab.”

Those successes offered them some confidence that this dream might actually become a reality and it also reinforced their love of Napa, the region and the wines.

“Napa is what hits the spot for me,” Amrani says. “I love wine from all over the world. There isn’t really a wine from somewhere that I will say: ‘I don’t like.’ But Napa is super unique. It’s a tiny wine region. It’s 30-miles long, five-miles at the widest part. It’s super small. But you have so much innovation. You can plant anything you want. You can have Cabernet or you can have Pinot Blanc or St. Laurent. You’re not going to have that flexibility in Bordeaux or Burgundy. If I go to Burgundy and plant Cabernet, I’ll probably go to jail.”

After receiving some “really good reviews” and having a couple of their wines being picked up by the London Wine Competition, they had some decisions to make.

“We’re like, okay, this is very promising,” he says. “At the same time, my two other businesses were doing well, like really well. But I was so married to that lifestyle of 18-20 hour work days, seven days a week since I landed in the United States that I thought, maybe, this will be my ‘American Dream.’ Maybe this opportunity is what I really want to do.”

It was then, in 2016, that Greenberg and Amrani set out to build a company and luxury brand they would name “The Vice Wines,” which reflected their values: quality, sustainability, sophistication and health.

THE VICE

When looking up the dictionary definition of the word vice, it is strongly associated with a slew of negative connotations like immorality, wicked behavior, wrongdoing and badness.

But Amrani doesn’t think of it that way at all. In fact, his approach to the word is all positive. For him, it translates more into a passion, enthusiasm or admiration for something.

“Vices are pleasures of life, as long as you don’t overdue them” he explains. “We all have vices. These vices give us a purpose in so many ways: happiness, joy.”

Along with his primary vices, the list goes on to include triathlons, cooking, motorcycles, airplanes, business and edibles.

“I’m a man who believes in vices,” he says. “Wine has always been a vice for me. I wake up thinking about wine. I go to sleep thinking of wine. And, most importantly, I drink wine often. And Napa Valley became ‘The Vice.’ It has become my main vice.”

Not only had Napa become his main vice, it also became his official residence. The couple relocated to Napa Valley from Los Angeles in 2023. He said it was time; time to put an end to city living, time to connect better with the Napa community and time to be closer to work.

Before relocating to Napa, Amrani took on a 400-mile, door-to-door commute for work — mostly by car — with an average of 33 round trips per year for about three years.

During the time period of living full-time in California from 2020 to 2023, the business and the couple experienced a lot of changes.

The company went from producing its very first batch of Chardonnay in 2013 to currently having a total of 180 batches created thus far from several different varietals. Not only did the portfolio of wines they produce increased, overall production increased as well. The company went from those initial 500 cases in 2013 to now somewhere around 20,000 cases per year — give or take.

And Greenberg and Amrani expanded their family, outside of their dog and assistant winemaker, Bruce Wayne Amrani, they welcomed a daughter who we will refer to as “Baby Vice” in this article.

But while his weekly, local commute changed, Amrani still retains his national road warrior status by spearheading and growing the business all throughout the country.

He says visiting markets helps him stay strategic, like making a move to expand distribution before an economic downturn in 2022 and relaunching his DTC (direct to consumer) offerings before Covid-19 struck the country in 2020. He says it helps him spot trends before they start, Then he puts plans into motion to coincide with the next wave of consumer behaviors.

In 2024, he traveled to about 27 States to sell wine which meant being on the road for 46 out of the 52 weeks of the year.

“I felt like I was campaigning,” he jokes. “It’s a huge advantage, I believe, to be in the streets and travel across the country, talking to consumers directly and all the time.”

Those trips, over the course of three to four days, typically play out like this:

Take a red-eye flight to the destination and nap
Land, rent a car and find a gym to wake up the body up
Hit first appointment around 10 a.m., tasting with the prospective buyer
Continue meetings throughout the day with local sales rep
In the evening, host an event, conduct a tasting or support an account at dinner
Back to the hotel, prepare for the next day’s agenda and sleep by 11 p.m.
Then repeat with slight variations over day two, day three, and sometimes, day four
Fly back to California in the evening, arrive around 11 p.m., drive home and off to bed

It’s a grueling schedule, but he says it is very necessary.

“It’s crucial,” he says when referring to the importance of an owner/co-founder representing their brand in the market. “What really makes a difference is the personal element. It’s what really makes the difference between existing as a brand and building a brand.”

With such a demanding work load paired with his strong work ethic, Amrani concedes that it is difficult to find a balance between work and family.

“I get to spend as much time as possible with her (Baby Vice) as possible, but not as much as I want,” he admits. “That’s the conundrum of the industry. It’s like, ‘what can you do?’ It’s a choice to be made and I am choosing to find balance. The reality is that I’m working a lot more than spending time with my family.”

While Amrani is laser focused on building the brand through sales, he has a close-knit team behind him that is responsible for the day-to-day operations.

Greenberg serves as co-founder and Chief Brand Officer. Hailing from a fashion and design background and Parsons The New School for Design, she has been instrumental in crafting the look and feel of the company since day one, creating the logo and overseeing the evolving brand identity of the company.

Then there is the warehouse manager, estate manager, designer and national sales director and winemaking team to keep things moving.

In terms of winemaking, he has a specific style and approach that has become the DNA of the brand.

“Less steps are always more,” he mentions. “Our philosophy, really, is less is more in everything we do — from vine to bottle. The land that we have. The soil. The climate. We’re set up to succeed with the raw material we have.“

Amrani also brings an athlete’s mindset into the winemaking process by focusing on one word: “patience.”

“Not only patience, but knowing we’re not in control,” he says. “In triathlons, I can train religiously, 365 and follow certain workouts and then come race day and you have a flat tire. You don’t get upset. You keep a positive attitude, get up, remember the good work — the hard work — you put in all year and not let it discourage you from what you are doing and carry on!”

Besides the unique Napa terroir that’s encapsulated in each bottle, the brand also throws in some intangibles into the mix that include a renegade spirit and strong desire to go against the grain.

“I learned how to be a little bit different than everyone else, but still resonate with the masses,” Amrani says.

By using unique buzzwords from the spirits world, personal inspirations and pop culture phenomenons, The Vice Wines features labels like “The Brooklynites,” “Pickleball,” “Closer to God” and “Extra Añejo” to vividly describe the style or the essence the wine embodies.

For example, the Cabernet Sauvignon Extra Añejo, Batch No. 73 is Cabernet Sauvignon from St. Helena and Coomsville. It is an experiment in extended oak aging inspired by Extra Añejo Tequila.

Therefore, the wine is aged for 60 months, five years in barrels. He says most of red wine around the world doesn’t rest in oak barrels for more than two years. But most oak-aged spirits spend way more than two years in oak barrels.

So the experiment began in 2015, when he decided to start holding back a few barrels of each vintage to craft the “Extra Añejo” — a Napa Cab with a minimum of 5 years of oak aging, a similar time in oak barrels than the finest oak aged tequilas. And the experiment has continued on with a 2017 vintage.

THE FUTURE

For Amrani, there is no finish line in sight for The Vice Wines.

“It’s going to be infinity,” he says. “I’ve always been inspired by multinational brands that started where they started in a certain era, especially the ones from the 1800s, the 1700s, that still exist today. They’ve still maintained the name or it might have changed a lit bit. But it still has the same philosophy since day one and has endured through multiple generations.”

Therefore, he is both optimistic and excited about the future — not only about Napa Valley winemaking and his expanding brand, but by the generation of wine lovers he believes will be the “driving force” needed to turn things around.

“I really believe our industry is going through a transition period in every sense on a global scale,” he says. “We might have another tough year to two years. Eventually we’ll turn (the corner).”

His experience, consumer insights and business instincts point to Millennials as the group to push the market forward for a couple of decades. He believes it will be similar to like what the “Baby Boomers” did for the wine industry in their day.

“The big boom was in the ‘70s; people who came in around the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s,” he says. They came in at the age of 40 and 50, which I believe the Millennials will be there soon. An older Millennials is 43 or 44 this year or 45. But it’s coming where you have a lot more people in the industry in their 40s and 50s, more as a lifestyle and a business, than just retirement.”

He says this new crop of leaders in the industry, who are also consumers, are going to be very mindful of diversity and innovation — particularly when it comes to women winemakers, sustainability and organic farming practices.

“It’s already happening,” he says.

When it comes to the future of The Vice, more specifically, Amrani has an “ace-in-the-hole” in the form of a budding second-generation winemaker.

While his daughter, Baby Vice, is just shy of her third birthday, she is already showing tremendous potential and promise. By occasionally putting her fingers in her parent’s glass of wine, he said she is already calling out tasting notes: “cherry” and “chocolate.”

“(From the) first 10 words she said, a year and a half ago, five were: vice, wine, glass, cork and grape,” he said.

If that’s hard to believe, Amrani has an equally surprising story about her grape tasting prowess.

“Since grapes started showing up, right after flowering last year, there were very small, tart, you know, barely grapes — sour, super tart,” he describes. “So she tasted them through veraison as the grapes changed colors and now the grapes are fully colored and she was always like not ready, not ready. And then one day, with our Cabernet vines on the estate, she tasted them and she was like: ‘it’s ready!’”

Intrigued by her declaration, he measured the brim and it was 22, which he says he could have picked and made a wine with about 12.8 to 13 percent alcohol.

“I was shocked,” he says, still in amazement. “I was like, ‘how does she know it was ready to be picked?’ So yeah, she’s definitely involved.”

THE AMRANI AMERICAN DREAM

Does Amrani feel like he has achieved the “American Dream?”

“I think about that almost everyday,” he responds. “But if I did, I would not have the motivation to continue. It would really slow myself down. I hope I have a lot more to give to be able to say I made the American Dream. I believe I will say, the American Dream has been established when I am able to give others — that may not have the opportunity to live a certain way today — to provide them with the opportunity to live the American Dream regardless of if they are born here in the U.S. or not even born yet.”

He continues to say: “When I’m able to provide that, that opportunity, then I will say, you know what: ‘I think I have achieved the American Dream.’ Until then, I’m living it. I’m chasing it.”

In the meantime, he his dreams are expanding over into Europe.

“One of the top goals, the stops in this journey, is for The Vice to be one of the top wine brands in, not just the world, but mainly in Europe,” he proclaims. “Europeans, I’ve said this before, they’re eating McDonald’s, playing with iPhones, drinking Coca-Cola and wearing Nikes — the American brands.”

With great hope and pride in Napa Valley talent and terroir, he is looking forward to the day when a slew of Europeans develop a strong hankering for wines with that distinct Napa Valley taste, body and smell profile.

“I do believe that we make some of the best wines in the world, very different from old school wines,” he says. “Whether you’re talking about Pinot, Cab, there is singularity of terror, and I think, the European palate — if they can only taste it, liquid to lips — I think American wines will become their vice. The Vice would be their vice.”

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The Life, Vices And American Dreams of Malek Amrani

Charles Dion Springfield

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The Life, Vices And American Dreams of Malek Amrani

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