Robert Stites Crapsey was feeling pretty sure of himself when he saw Carole Jacqueline Coleman at a June 2017 committee meeting for the Pace Center for Girls Miami.
He had just spent a few months in San Francisco and learned about wine, Ms. Coleman’s favorite subject, on treks through the Napa Valley. “I thought I knew everything about it,” he said. Ms. Coleman, who goes by Jacqueline and is a wine consultant and wine columnist at the Biscayne Times, was amused. He wasn’t quite the oenophile she was, but she thought he was cute.
“I figured we might as well become friends,” said Ms. Coleman, then the chair of the young professionals committee at the Miami chapter of Pace, a school for girls who have experienced trauma. Romance was not on her mind; a cordial relationship with the man who would be taking over her seat on the board she created at the nonprofit school two years earlier was.
Ms. Coleman, 37, grew up in Coral Gables, Fla., a city her great-grandfather, Charles Francis Baldwin, helped develop and finance in the 1920s. She graduated from the University of Miami in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Her entree to the world of wine happened when, shortly after college, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work as a program coordinator for the Medicare diabetes screening project at the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.
“There were great wineries out in Virginia, so on the weekends I just kind of discovered wine country,” she said. Before she moved back to Miami in 2013, she had started a wine blog called History & Wine.
Her involvement with Pace happened at the suggestion of Sherry Thompson Giordano, the executive director of the Miami chapter, when the two met in 2015 at a benefit. Once Ms. Coleman toured the school, she was ready to pitch in. “What struck me is, I grew up in Miami, and these girls had grown up in Miami, but we grew up in very different Miamis,” she said. “I wanted to help my city better help young girls.”
By the end of that year, she had formed the young professionals board. For the first two years, she held the chair. In 2017, it was time to hand it off to someone new. Mr. Crapsey, whom she was first introduced to in 2016 at a Pace luncheon, was a good candidate.
Mr. Crapsey, 33, is the director of business development at Trivest Partners, a private equity firm based in Coral Gables. He grew up in Cincinnati but spent winters in Siesta Key, Fla. In 2012, he graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in finance. A year later, he earned a master’s degree in finance there.
In 2014, he moved to Miami to accept a job as a financial analyst at Wells Fargo. He was just getting to know Pace and figuring out how he might contribute when the bank sent him to San Francisco for a six-month executive training program. He and Ms. Coleman loosely kept in touch via text about Pace while he was there.
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After he returned, and days after he was showing off his Napa knowledge back in Miami at the 2017 committee meeting, he and Ms. Coleman sat down for a first glass of wine together at Happy Wine in the Grove, a local wine bar. He had been named committee chair, and she was there to show him the ropes. But “it felt very casual,” Ms. Coleman said.
Later that night, she said, “we were both like, maybe we’re kind of interested.” They had a lot of excuses to keep getting together that summer, including the planning of a fall Pace fund-raiser. A first kiss came at a Florida State football watch party at American Social Bar around the time of the benefit. That December, they attended Art Basel in Miami Beach as a couple.
Their age difference had been weighing on her when she suggested they become exclusive. “You have to remember, I was 32 and he was 28,” she said. “In female years that’s a big difference.” Mr. Crapsey’s reluctance to make it official himself was mostly an oversight: “I was just a kid,” he said.
At the end of 2018, Ms. Coleman moved into Mr. Crapsey’s apartment in the Brickell neighborhood of Miami. A few years later, “I felt it was time to take the next step, to put a ring on it,” he said. On Sept. 9, 2022, during a getaway to South Africa, he did just that, with a custom, cushion-cut diamond ring. Ms. Coleman said yes.
On May 20, Ms. Giordano, a Florida notary public, married the couple in an intimate ceremony with only three guests at her Miami home. The pair held a wedding reception for 45 guests on June 8 at Chateau L’Hospitalet in Narbonne, France. The region was chosen for its wine, while the chateau was chosen for its owner and winemaker, Gerard Bertrand.
“He’s a big personality in the wine world, and he throws a great party,” Ms. Coleman said of Mr. Bertrand. Three days of celebrations around the vineyard culminated with a June 9 “La Vie en Rose” party at the restaurant L’Hospitalet Beach.
At the couple’s request, guests dressed in pink.
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