Lindsay Marie Morris

With two parents from Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, Gina Montalbano's upbringing was rooted in tradition. Part of that was recognizing that her family had ties to viticulture. Her father had worked in vineyards, and she always heard about her mother's family wineries and vineyards. 

After a career in education for Gina, who holds a doctorate in educational leadership, and in the Army for her husband, Bryan Zesiger, a retired Major, the Kansas-based couple found themselves drawn to winemaking and decided to pay Gina's Sicilian family a visit in December 2018.

"We were driving down this road with Gina's cousin, and there are vineyards all on both sides," remembers Bryan. "We're in this little Fiat, and I'm like, 'Hey, when are we going to see your vineyard?' Because I was thinking he's got a little section. He goes, 'Oh no, these are all of our vineyards.'"

It was an eye-opener. "We were like, 'What we're doing in Kansas is small in comparison,'" says Gina. 

Their former home operation has evolved into Z&M Twisted Vines Winery and Vineyard, which has a Lawrence, Kansas, vineyard and tasting room and a Downtown Leavenworth, Kansas, winery. 

Gina and Bryan remain resourceful, turning mistakes into opportunities and waste into treasured products. It's part of learning and growing but also core to their identities.

"That's part of my heritage," Gina says. "And so that pulls through with Bryan's military endeavors. He's lived around the world where people don't have what we have. We're always thinking of how to repurpose and reuse things and make the best of a bad situation. That's how we ended up just trying to build variety within what we do."

 

Gina shared more about the journey, influences, challenges, and Z&M's sustainable practices. 

 

 
Z&M opened its vineyard to the public in 2020 and hosts regular events.

How did you get started?

Bryan had served 26 years in the Army, and I was an elementary principal. We were both at a point in our careers where we could do something different if we wanted and retire from what we were doing. So, we decided to get started on the endeavor and make wine, not just as a hobby.

 

People were very encouraging, saying, "Hey, you guys should do this. Your wine is really good. I think more people would like it."

That's when we bought the building in Downtown Leavenworth, which is a three-story building, but the cellar is where we were producing. And then it has a back garage, so it was kind of like seriously old-school wine-making. We were crushing grapes in the back garage, carrying them down in big totes into the cellar, and making wine in that location—literally handcrafting. 

We had about 300 six-gallon glass carboys; you get about 28 bottles out of a carboy. But as we continued, we were like, "There is no way we can keep up this way with just the two of us, but also in such small quantities." We needed to be able to do larger batches. So we were like, "OK, we need some land. We're going to be farmers. Let's grow our own grapes."

We bought the property with the Lawrence address in 2019 and planted our vines. They're on year six, so we get our own harvest and work with other vineyards that don't have wineries attached to them. Now that we're big enough and making enough product, we contract with other growers and use our grapes plus theirs, and then we also do lots of other fruit wines. 

We've added our own personality and twist to everything. We hope people enjoy hearing our story through the labels of the wine and the flavors we're putting together. At this point, we craft about 50 different wines: reds and whites, traditional drys, and a little semi-sweet. Those are all Kansas-grown grapes. Everything is made here, from this area, and on our property. 

At the vineyard, the building that we are currently in is a big Quonset. Our harvest center has a wine-making side; we can invite guests for tastings. And so it's a labor of love, but at the same time, it's our opportunity for growth. We are adding an automated bottling line. That will change the trajectory of the amount of time it takes us to hand-bottle everything and help us be more efficient with our time and opportunity for distribution.

 

Gina with her family in Sicily

 

How has your Sicilian heritage inspired you?

The very first wine that we made came from my grandfather's recipe and wine-making techniques, and it's called Harvest Moon. The label is a throwback to a vineyard with a big harvest moon. It's one of my family's white wine recipes. We leave the skins on the grapes, which is kind of an old-school Sicilian tradition because the flavor comes from those. Here in the States, whites are typically just pressed and crystal clear. 

It's just been a lot of fun because we've done some very traditional things as we started our farm winery and utilized some of my grandfather's recipes.

 

Z&M crafts about 50 different wines with Kansans-grown grapes.
 

What challenges have you faced along the way?

Bryan and I didn't grow up as farmers, and we're not from Kansas. I know elementary lingo/education talk, and Bryan knows the military, so we're learning a new language. 

When we both retired, we lost our communities. It's like, who are our people? Who's the go-to person we ask questions? And we're both very driven to learn as much as we can. We joined as many things as possible to get involved in and learn more. We watched a lot of YouTube videos, and we talked to other people.

 

There was the hurdle of becoming farmers or owning a vineyard in Kansas, a state that hasn't been super well-known for grape-growing and wine-making since prohibition, and alcohol laws in the state have been slow to change. 

 

Hurdle two was the upscaling of recipes, going from six gallons at a time to 250-gallon tanks and then 500-gallon tanks. There was a point where wine got messed up, and Bryan came back to me, saying, "We have about 500 gallons of wine that I don't think is going to be OK." And I'm like, "What do you mean? That's a lot of money. That's a lot of time. We've got to fix it."

 

And so I said, "Don't dump it out. We're not going to make vinegar. Let's come up with a new plan."

 

American brandy is cognac, and cognac is made from white grapes. And so it's essentially distilled wine that is aged. Bryan learns all this through studies, and he and I are looking stuff up. Before we knew it, we were like, "OK, we can take this wine and distill it and then age it and make it brandy." 

In our research, we learned we could add brandy back to our wine and make what's called fortified wine, which becomes an American version of port wines.

 

It allowed us to transition and make a product, so there's a whole line of wine through this adversity that we now call Double Tap. They are all at 20% ABV and made with our own in-house brandy. It turned out to be a good accident in disguise. 

 

Bella Vino soaps and Twisted Lips 

Speaking of resourcefulness, tell us about your Bella Vino line.

It started with the home wines we were making. I love coffee, just like every Sicilian. So, the concept of "Let's make a coffee wine" came into play. 

We made our first coffee wine using real coffee beans and ground coffee. One day, we were bottling the coffee wine. We had filtered off and racked off, and a lot of residue was left from the coffee grounds. My stepdaughter Aspen was YouTubing videos while we were working in our basement. 

I had promised her that when we finished, we would do something that she wanted to do. Well, she wanted to make a body scrub. She was looking up recipes for making homemade body scrubs, and we were listening to her videos while we were bottling. And Bryan was like, "Hold on: exfoliant. These coffee grounds are rich, rustic, and scratchy. Maybe we could use those and make our own recipe based on one of these videos you're looking at."

 

So, it became the family project that night to make this scrub, and that was the birth of Bella Vino. It didn't come to fruition as an actual LLC or company until 2019. We had opened the doors, and we were making wines. And we were like, "We should not forget what we were doing with the leftovers." And so we started the Bella Vino line. There are little chapsticks, sugar scrubs for your lips, and body scrubs. Then we said, "Well, if we make this, we can surely make other products." 

We found a local farmer's wife making soap, and I asked, "Do you think you could make soap with the other leftovers I have?" And so we went through that process and figured out how we had to dehydrate things or whatever, but then we could use those fresh leaves from the tanks. And so we started making soaps, body scrubs, and what we call Twisted Lips. (I got to design a little container that looks like a wine glass. And so when you twist off the top of the little wine glass, it's your chapstick inside.)

 

When we bottle, we end up at the tail end with four or five bottles of what was still left in the lines and the tanks. We didn't want to put it in a box and tape it closed with only four bottles, so we had all of these boxes with random wines in them.

 

We said, "We should make these into jelly," and then we started making our wine jelly. So, every single bottle of wine left over from when we finish up those extra bottles becomes jelly. 

Being kind of frugal is a Sicilian thing; it's just how I grew up. My dad worked, and his English was not great. He became an American citizen, worked at the same factory I can remember as a kid, and built his family of five kids. We all went to college. It's about hard work and taking pride in who you are; that's who I am because of my parents. 

I was kid number four, so there were lots of hand-me-downs from my sisters. You don't always get new things; you're always thinking of how you can repurpose and not waste stuff. 

 

Z&M Twisted serves appetizers, paninis, hot dogs, and brats with wines, ciders, mocktails, and more.

 

What experience do you hope to share?

Wine doesn't have to be pretentious; like any good Sicilian cooking, your family meal draws people together.

 

Wine is our way to draw people together. And so we serve food at the vineyard, too. The idea is to reach people of all different ethnicities and age groups. We want them to come for the wine, but it's the experience they leave with; the idea that it brings people together is part of what we do. 

Grapevine roots are like trees. The deeper the roots go, the better your vines do. So, we want to build deep roots in a community we're not from. To do that, we must invest time in our community, not just trying to sell wine. That's never been the goal. 

 

 
Z&M Twisted's Lawrence, Kansas, vineyard

 

 

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Among his fondest memories of growing up in Viagrande, Sicily, Carlo Raciti remembers days he stayed home sick from school. He'd step into his family kitchen and roll out fresh pasta or bake cookies to surprise his mother, Caterina Scuderi, when she came home from teaching. 

"I was always involved with flour and dough," Carlo recalls. "That was my passion. That's what I was supposed to do."

 

But his father, Mario Raciti, who had grown up in the bakery business, suggested otherwise. 

 

"He always told me it was too hard," Carlo says. "He said, 'Don't do it. It's too much sacrifice, and it's very little gain.'"

 

So, instead, Carlo pursued a common Sicilian career path: tourism and hospitality. He did just about everything from cooking and the front of the house to hotel management.

 

It was overwhelming and led him to drop everything and take a long vacation to Miami. There, he'd meet his wife, Rebecca Bechara, and get an invitation that would eventually lead him back to his childhood passion and opening Almotti, Miami's first dedicated gluten-free bakery, which sells cookies, pastries, celebratory cakes, and bread with nationwide shipping.

 

Carlo and I chatted about his influences, career pivot, why he's embraced gluten-free baking, advice for other entrepreneurs, and more. 

 

 

How did your family influence your passion for baking and pastry arts?

My grandma started baking bread during the war while my grandpa was stationed in North Africa. She had to feed a big family, so she started baking bread in their backyard in Acireale. They had a brick oven, and that's how everything started.

 

They opened a retail bakery, making bread, and all the family baked there. My dad is the smallest of the five kids. He helped a lot and made the bakery deliveries on his bicycle.

 

After many years, my uncle opened Panificio Raciti in Acireale, which is still there. My cousin now runs it.

 

During the summertime, when there was no school, there was no one at home to take care of me. So, since I was six, my parents used to drop me off at the Panificio at 6:00 AM. I spent those days sitting in a little chair watching my Zio Tanino with my cousin Marcello and another assistant making the bread. And that's where my passion really came in: spending that time inside the Panificio. And that's influenced me 100% for my future and career today.

 

Mario Raciti (left) grew up making deliveries for his mother's bakery, a business that inspired Carlo to pursue pastry arts.

 

How and why did you pivot to becoming a pastry chef?

I was working in hospitality back in Italy when I left my job. I decided to take a vacation with friends, and we ended up in Miami for three months. Then, I met my wife.

 

I went back to Italy for a year and then returned by myself. During those three months in Miami, I had done a lot of cooking. A friend of mine, through my wife, said, "When you come back, we'll do a catering company, and you're going to run it, or you're going to be the chef."

 

So when I came back, we developed the plan and launched a Sicilian-style catering company. That was right before the crash in 2008.

 

Besides catering, I collaborated with an Italian association called Society Dante Alighieri, which is worldwide. They hired me to teach cooking and baking classes for Italians and Americans. Since they were learning Italian, I taught these baking classes in Italian. In the meantime, I started doing a bunch of catering and events.

 

My wife and I wanted to start a business—a bakery. That was the idea. So, in 2009, we moved to Italy and took a sabbatical there. I then returned to school to get my certification in pastry because culinary is very wide. So, I wanted to specialize.

During that year, I worked in a few bakeries, where I learned many techniques. I took different courses throughout the year with World Champion Pastry Chef Roberto Lestani and Pastry Chef Carmelo Recupero, among others. In Catania, I worked for Pasticceria Quaranta, one of the top bakeries today.  

Then, I worked alongside Giuseppe Giangreco, the master baker of the product I started making: pasta di mandorla, the almond pastry cookie that's made us so popular.

 

Carlo Raciti started selling at a farmers market. He now ships nationwide.

 

Why did you decide to focus on the gluten-free market?

These are almond-based cookies, so they are naturally gluten-free. When we returned to Miami after a year in Italy, we developed our plan to open a retail bakery.

 

Looking for places was very challenging. There was no Italian bakery in Miami. My wife said, "Pick the six easiest items," and those were cookies. We decided to sell at the farmers market. It was a $500 investment, and we sold out in about two hours.

 

Three months later, we were doing five farmers markets all over Miami. We never went back to the original plan or made a retail bakery because we saw the opportunity to eventually become a wholesaler with our gluten-free product.

 

Making it gluten-free was a business decision. I'm very attached to the community where I live, and I had feedback from people that there weren't enough gluten-free options.

 

We moved into a facility seven years ago, and I said, "We'll convert it 100% and do it the right way so there is no cross-contamination."

 

We became the first dedicated gluten-free bakery in Miami and South Florida in general. As we built up a clientele over the years, I started hearing the story about people getting sick with Celiac disease and so on. My daughter Lucia was dairy-intolerant when she was younger. Personally, I had a rash from eating too many processed products that contained gluten. And I realized that it was better for our clients and the community.

 

Many people say, "You're Italian. Why are you making gluten-free?" But this is the reason. 

 

Carlo Raciti rolling dough with daughter, Lucia.

What advice would you give budding bakery owners?

Definitely get some experience, at least two to three years working in a bakery, first to understand if it's something that isn't for you.

 

If that person is going to be a baker like me, hands-on in the operation, they need to have the passion to do it because the amount of hours going through it can be very overwhelming. 

It is very important with any profession that whatever you do, you do it with passion and love because you spend so much time that if you do not enjoy it, then it could be very challenging. 

 

What are your future plans?

We're going on 10 years, and we're looking to grow. Going national has always been our dream. I know it's very hard. It's been very challenging because taking a high-quality artisanal product to a national scale where your margin is very small almost makes it impossible. But little by little, we will.

 

We are looking at 2025 as the year to be part of a national show where we can expose our product.

 

The business is our third baby; we have two kids and don't have family around, so this has been very challenging for us. Taking care of the kids has been our first priority. And then the business. But now my son, Mario Carlo, is 13; my daughter, Lucia, will be nine pretty soon. So we can dedicate a little bit more time to the business.

 

 
A younger Mario Carlo helping his father

What do you hope to share with customers?

Because we ship nationwide, people all over the nation have the opportunity to try my products. They connect to my childhood back in Italy, and customers can experience going to an Italian bakery because our packaging is clear, where you can see through and choose the cookie you want. They may want a cookie that is a little bit more well-done or less done. So, you can choose, and it's like taking a trip to Italy, where people have a product that is clean with only a few ingredients, very high quality, made by hand. They can see that every single bite is different. And then they realize that it's not just the business, it's not just making money, it's sharing a culture that goes over hundreds of years. The main cookie that we do goes back to the Greeks. So it's a tradition, it's cultural, and we want this to continue. 



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