Lauren Friel is an award-winning sommelier and author living in Cambridge, MA.

She’s the owner of Rebel Rebel, a natural wine bar in Somerville’s Union Square that opened in 2018 to local and national acclaim, including three James Beard Foundation nominations for Outstanding Wine Program nationwide. In August of 2020, she opened Wild Child, a pandemic pivot that now serves as a culinary events and education space, offering books and natural wines to go. In November of 2021, she helped bring to life Dear Annie, a collaborative reimagination of pub culture for a new generation. The pescatarian natural wine bar immediately garnered accolades for its fresh take on an old institution, including spots on the NYTimes 50 Best Restaurants list and the Bon Appétit 50 Best New Restaurants List in 2022.

Consulting

Lauren is also the creative brain behind VinDrop, a beverage consulting and content development company she founded in 2014. VinDrop is fueled by Lauren's drive to bring good wine to everyone's table, and she's lucky to have written wine programs for retail and restaurant establishments up and down the East Coast, including the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and Michelin-starred Dirt Candy NYC. She has three times won Wine Enthusiast’s 100 Best Wine Restaurants Award—once for her program at Oleana Restaurant, once for Dirty Candy’s all-woman winemaker list, and once for Dear Annie’s irreverent natural wine program. Lauren’s wine programs have been featured in The New Yorker, New York Times, New York Magazine, Food & Wine, Bon Appétit, Pipette, Forbes, Elle Magazine, the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Eater, VinePair, and Serious Eats, and she’s proud to say that the all-woman winemaker wine list she developed for Dirt Candy is currently the only existing program of its kind in the US. Though she’s paused consulting work to focus on being a first-time mom, she’s happy to recommend a few of her former team leaders who’ve struck out on their own to those seeking the same brand of mission-driven natural wine programming she’s known for. Get in touch via the “Say Hello” tab.

Awards

Lauren has received numerous national accolades for her work at Rebel Rebel, including a Top 100 feature in Saveur’s Saveur 100, a StarChefs Rising Star Sommelier Award, and Bon Appetit’s America’s Top 10 Bars award. She has been invited to speak on intersectional feminist hospitality business models on Pineapple Collaborative Radio and the Heritage Radio Network’s Speaking Broadly with Dana Cowin. Locally, Boston Magazine named her Boston’s Best Sommelier, and in 2019 she was named YWCA Cambridge’s Woman of the Year for her work to raise awareness around inequities in housing opportunities for survivors of domestic violence in the city of Cambridge. After her first year of business, she was inducted into the Heritage Radio Network Hall of Fame, and she was named one of Imbibe Magazine’s 75 People To Watch. In the same year, she was one of four beverage professionals nominated for Wine Enthusiast’s prestigious Wine Star Award for Best Sommelier (she was nominated again in 2020). That summer, she was widely featured in both local and national press for her industry-grown grassroots fundraising efforts for abortion access, during which Rebel Rebel raised more than $27,000 for the Yellowhammer Fund in just one week.

Writing + Thought Leadership

In addition to being a hospitality industry vet, Lauren is a queer woman, an intimate partner violence survivor, an outspoken advocate for intersectional feminist disruption of the hospitality industry, and an avid community activist. Her long history in the wine industry means she has been honored to present on the topics of feminist business models and sustainable food ways for Wine Enthusiast, Wild World, Maine Wine Week, HERMuse Collective, and the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute at Harvard University.

Previously, Lauren was a wine and lifestyle columnist with both ChefsFeed and Boston.com, the Boston Globe’s digital vertical, and her writing has appeared with New York Magazine, Bon Appétit, Eater, The Kitchn, Terre Magazine, Bravo TV's The Feast, Thrillist, GOOD, Wine Advocate, and Gear Patrol.

Lauren also held the position of Wine Director at award-winning Sarma and Oleana restaurants, where her eclectic beverage programs received local and national recognition, including Wine Enthusiast's 100 Best Wine Restaurants Award and Boston Magazine's Best of Boston Award. She is as enthusiastic about Baga as she is about Barolo, and though she learned more about wine in Christian Venier’s kitchen than she has in any classroom, she does hold Advanced Certification with Distinction from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust.