Lindsay Marie Morris

Wine has always been a part of Ottavio Angelico's life. He grew up amid generations of winemakers in Grammichele within the Province of Catania, Sicily. While he chose to embark on a different path, studying robotics engineering in Canada and finding work in the packaging industry in the United States, those roots drew him back. 

Three years ago, he and his wife, Lily, opened Angelico Winery in Lambertville, New Jersey, near the banks of the Delaware River. Visitors can pull up a chair at the 50-person tasting room and sip wines from familiar grapes, such as Barbera, Sangiovese, Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, and Riesling, as well as more unique varieties, like Baco Noir and Traminette. All are picked by hand from the couple's vineyard. The wines are produced using low-intervention, natural winemaking techniques that embrace the unique microbial environment of the Angelico vineyard, in contrast to the more technical, controlled winemaking approaches common in the United States. 

Lily and the two Angelico sons oversee most operations for the team of 10, while Ottavio continues to work as a full-time packaging manager for L'Oréal. Thus, the winery is truly a family business.  

Ottavio and I discussed his journey, unique winemaking process, challenges, rewards, and what he hopes to share along the way.

 

 

How did Angelico Winery get its start?

I'm an engineer in L'Oreal's packaging department. I would buy grapes from a local supplier and make wine at home. It was, for me, a passion, a hobby, something that expressed my culture.

 

I was buying equipment to the point where I had a mini lab in my basement. I read books, and my winemaking improved. One day, I just said to myself, "The wine here, in the United States, honestly is just waking up." I felt like it was missing somebody who could share some background or maybe share what the culture means for wine.

 

So it started from that, and I told my wife one thing we could do: stay working for a corporation for the next 20 years and retire or spend the next 20 years doing it on our own.

 

My wife is from China; it's a different culture, and she was born in the city. She told me, I see that you have the passion you spend every weekend or during your hobby time. She knew what I had in the basement. We had a cellar with over 2,000 bottles of wine, something crazy, all kinds from 2002 when I started until now.

 

She said, "This is your passion, so why not work for another winery instead of spending money on a winery?"

 

And I said, "Let me try to work for somebody and see if it's just a temporary fever that I got."

So I went to work for a local winery, went straight to the owner, and said, "I'm here just because I want to open my own winery."

 

He told me, "You know what? I see you have a passion. I see you want to open a winery, and I need somebody who works a little bit everywhere."

So I ended up working for 11 years, making wine with his staff members. I spent my vacations and my weekends working with them.

 

Six years ago, my wife and I said we were ready. We sold our house, and with all our savings from selling the house, we purchased this 10-acre land that we have here today with all the things you see here when you come to visit us: vineyards, the winery, and all the landscaping. And it was done by my family. 

 

Sons Antonio and Giulio started helping at a young age. 

 

Tell us about your unique winemaking process.

I started simply with Old-World tradition. I planted Italian grapes. When I purchased the vines, I selected Italian grapes that would adapt here in New Jersey. If they die because they're not comfortable in the environment, I try to replant different ones.

 

Our wines are, firstly, grown with New Jersey soil, on the original vine, so they're Italian. The second thing is what we call a low-intervention winemaking style. We try not to overkill the wines using sulfites. And my wine does not travel. I am not bringing my wine out of the state. I'm not bringing the wine across the world, so I don't have any necessity to buffer the wine with any preservative. Years from now, I don't know where we will be with my winery, but so far, I'm just embracing all the European techniques we used to do.

I met someone who makes wine here. They have a lot of equipment. They spend a lot of time making impeccable wine, trying to control the process. I agree with that. But if you look at the Europeans, they start from a basic winemaker style. The most important thing is to have the cleanest and healthiest fruit. Yes, we do sanitize. But when we splash the wine on the floor or when we splash the wine on the walls of the winery, we like to have the flavor left there.

 

When you ferment the wine from your own grapes, from your own wine in itself, it builds that kind of microbial step with the environment inside. Those microorganisms that might stay around the winery add a unique flavor or identity to our wine. We embrace what we call the natural fermentation of the wine, the natural yeast.

When you are a local producer, if you're making 5,000 bottles and you want to represent your local place, you better find out what kind of yeast your grapes catch from the environment where you live and if it is a good one. You want to embrace that yeast. 

 

Lily has roots in China. How have your combined cultures influenced the winemaking process and winery experience?

The culture of wine in China is not as well-known as in Italy, of course. My wife, Lily, has spent the last 20 years learning to enjoy wines, recognizing the quality of the product, and pairing it with food. She offers huge support to the family business today since her culture is really wired for running an effective and profitable business. She is a perfect combination that adds value to our winery.

 

She runs marketing and sales. I take care of the quality of the product, bringing my background and experience. She provides unbelievable hospitality and service to our guests, boosting the sales of our products.

 

I can make all the great wines in the world, but Lily can connect with people and deliver the product to their minds and hearts. She is an awesome hospitality guru!

 

Angelico wines: Grown, produced, and bottled in New Jersey.

What were your biggest challenges along the way?

The first and possibly the only major challenge is the "People Mindset." New Jersey has a reputation for having no wine at all or fruit wines. A lot of people need to be educated about what wine truly is, and that's one core value of our winery.

 

Great vines grow in any region of the world, producing unique grapes that represent the territory/area (terroir) where they are grown, so great wines can be produced with such grapes. It will take another five to 10 years to recognize New Jersey as a great AVA (American Viticultural Area) with great wines—a lot of tasting, a marketing campaign, and education. 

 

What are your goals for the future of Angelico Winery?

Based on our core values, we have determined our goals. Our core values are education, quality of the product, and outstanding hospitality for our guests.

 

One of our sons is studying and will soon graduate as a winemaker and viticulture expert. He is studying for an associate's degree at the Finger Lakes Community College and, hopefully, for a bachelor's Degree at Cornell University next year.

 

I've personally been taking classes as a winemaker, winery designer, wine connoisseur, etc., at Texas University and UC Davis.

 

Our team, led by our tasting room manager and Lily, focuses on wine education for the whole staff so they can relay their knowledge to our guests.

 

Lily is continuing to network and take classes/lectures about hospitality.

 

We keep investing in more sophisticated equipment, machines, and buildings to improve the quality of our wines and hospitality.

 

Overall, we still want to remain a small winery; we prefer small but unique with our own identity. We believe that once a winery becomes big, it starts losing contact with its guests and fails to deliver excellent hospitality.

 

The Angelico sons have first-hand experience in viticulture.

What do you hope to share?

Italians, especially Southern Italians, are all about hospitality and connecting to people. I am already doing it. When people come to see us, it's more about what we express in our wine, who we are, and how the wine can embrace in that little cup who we are, what I have, and what I'm trying to do here: talking about wine and sharing how it was made and what it's about.

 

This is what I know, and this is what I make for you, and you can be proud of it because I put in part of who I am and part of who you are, because this is coming from your own soil. This is coming from New Jersey; this is coming from the United States.

 

I also want to teach people and eliminate skepticism about making wine in New Jersey. I want to tell them that grapes, wines, and human beings adapt wherever they go. For every region in the world, there is always a wine grape that is the most suitable for the soil and microclimate.

 

My wife and I are really, really into hospitality. Hospitality is not just a service for us. Hospitality is more about embracing culture between people. That's what I'm trying to do.

 

Everyone who comes to our place does not leave until they have met us and the team. We don't just shovel a cup of wine and walk away. We don't want that. We want people to come, experience the place, and experience the wine as a good time, while somebody pays attention to them and educates them, telling them about what we're trying to do with the wine.

 

Wine is more like a chain of connection between our culture and the world and their culture. So that's what I'm doing. This is not a rich business. It's more of a passion and labor of love.  

 

 

 

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Mike Elgan has a secret. He and his wife/business partner, Amira Elgan, are hosting their first Gastronomad Experience in Sicily. He can tell you that you'll spend a week "living as a Sicilian aristocrat." You'll enjoy authentic cuisine and wine enriched by Mount Etna's volcanic soil. But the rest is largely under wraps. 

It's part of the fun—and the highly exclusive experience. Drawing from their own gastronomist lifestyles, the pair offers behind-the-scenes access to local food, wine, and cultural experts that typical tourists cannot access in Italy's Venice and Prosecco Hills, France's Provence, Spain's Barcelona and nearby cava wine country, Tuscany, Morocco, Mexico's Oaxaca, Mexico City, El Salvador, and now Sicily.

Amira has worked as food and beverage director for hotels in Los Angeles and New York City, including Mondrian, the Bonaventure, the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel, and the Doral Hotels in Manhattan. A board-certified holistic health counselor, she is also the creator of The Spartan Diet and has written about food, nutrition, and health for decades. Meanwhile, Mike is a technology and culture journalist and the author of Gastronomad: The Art of Living Everywhere and Eating Everything.

Mike shared more about the Gastronomad Experience, why they chose to include Sicily, what makes their offerings unique, and what he hopes participants will take away.

 

 

What inspired the creation of the Sicily Gastronomad Experience?

Around 2006, Amira and I took a vacation with our kids, and I'd been reading all the stuff about digital nomad people, and this idea that you could travel while working was really great. I decided to do an experiment for a column I was working on for Computerworld.

The experiment was that I would be in remote areas of Central America, looking at ancient Mayan ruins with my family. I wasn't going to tell my editors or anyone else that I was doing this.

I went to meetings and did all this stuff. Nobody noticed that I was not in my home office. And so there was this revelation: "We're going to travel full time."

 

My wife was working for AT&T at the time, so we decided to take a vacation. We went to Greece and loved the life so much that my wife called and quit. We just stayed in Greece, traveling on islands for six months, and we're like, "OK, we're doing this. That's it."

 

Over time, we got rid of our house and put all the stuff in storage. With the exception of two years when we lived in Petaluma, Sonoma County, we've been traveling full time.

 

Fast-forward to 2014. I was always posting on Google Plus. My wife's a food person. She's headed food and beverage departments for high-end hotels like Mondrian. She always connects with chefs and winemakers. She goes to the farmers market, makes friends with farmers, and is fascinated by organic farming. 

 

We're tasting wine in winter in Provence and chilling the rosé in the snow—beautiful stuff. People were constantly saying, "Gosh, I wish I could do that. I wish I could join you and do what you guys do."

 

At some point, my wife said, "What if we took six months of really fun stuff that we did and did it all day in one week?"

 

We had all these friends in these specific places. So, in 2017, we did the Barcelona experience, which was the first one. And it was amazing. We had this really beautiful apartment in Barcelona. Nowadays, we stay in the wine country and drive into Barcelona, but back then, we stayed in the city, and it was just a cool group of people: self-selecting super foodies who love traveling and wine.

 

We offered the most amazing peak-life experiences three or four times a day for a week. It's an incredible concept, and it works great. So we've been doing that since then, and we do between five and 10 of these a year in a bunch of locations.

 

An exclusive dining experience near Oaxaca, Mexico

 

How do your experiences differ from other culinary travel offerings?

We are so obsessed with exclusivity that on many of these experiences, participants don't even see a tourist. For example, we do Prosecco Hills and Venice. Typically, you'd go wine tasting at a tasting room. We go to the home of the winemaker. We have very close friends there who are winemakers, and one of them is an absolutely brilliant winemaker whose home is on the top of a hill, and the whole hill is her vineyards. We spend four or five hours with her talking about wine, the history of the region, and drinking and tasting wine.

 

We have friends in the same area who live in a beautifully restored 400-year-old farmhouse way up in the forest. The husband in this couple happens to be a brilliant chef.

 

The people we bring are treated like family; they're just incredible experiences you can't buy as a tourist. We often find ourselves in situations where if you do see tourists, they're like, "Why do they get to do that thing?"

 

It's very common for a chef to open their restaurant just for us when the staff has the day off, and he'll serve the food himself. These are famous restaurants.

 

One key and interesting differentiator is that everything's a secret. So when people sign up, they don't know what we're going to do, except in the vaguest of terms: We will do food stuff.

 

When they get up in the morning, we tell them, "Make sure you bring your sunscreen, sunglasses, and swimwear." They don't know what we're going to do until we're there doing it.

 

We find that people love this aspect of it. There are no decisions to be made. It's like all the good things with travel without a single bad thing. If people have an allergy or dietary restriction, there's no fuss about it. Everything that they are exposed to is within the realm of their dietary restrictions. It's just easy, super fun, and beautiful.

 

We do this in the most beautiful places imaginable. I'm a professional photographer, taking pictures the whole time. And then they end up with this incredible album. They can put their phones away, forget about the world, forget about politics, forget all stuff, and just live the way they would live if everything were exactly how they wanted it.  

 

Gastronomad Experience takes guests to Mount Etna's wine country.

 

You offer experiences in several places. Why Sicily?

We selected Sicily for the same reason we selected all the other places: It's a place we love and where we know some really wonderful people. We've been going to Sicily once, twice, or three times a year for years, and the experience kind of formed itself.

 

We are great friends with this biodynamic winery on Etna; they love us, and we love them. We realized there were enough things that we could do there that we should have an experience.

 

The first one is in May. It was so popular that it just sold out instantly. Then we added another one, and that's selling out.

 

We travel around a bit, but the star of the show is the Etna wine country and that half arc on the eastern side. We don't go to Palermo. There are a whole bunch of places in Sicily we're not doing, and there are a whole bunch of beautiful things in Sicily that we're not doing for various reasons.

 

Luxurious accommodations are important for us. In the case of Sicily, they're both in vineyards. You can't find that kind of thing in Palermo or many other places. There are many beautiful places with amazing little villages, and you can find good food, but there is really not enough there to do four or five peak-life experiences a day. So we don't do that. My wife and I enjoy those places, and we will linger there. We love them, but we need a combination of incredible scenery, incredible luxury accommodations, and high-end restaurants.

 

For example, there are Michelin ratings in Mexico City, so we'll do the best restaurant in the Americas, the highest-end, most luxurious, highest-rated restaurant. And we'll have high-quality street food. So we do the range. We want the very top, but it amounts to home cooking.

 

I won't go into any details, but we do super high-end and super-real stuff. For example, in Oaxaca, Mexico, where half the population is Indigenous, there's no phony anything. We are in an Indigenous community with people who speak Zapotec in their homes. And so we do that, but then we do super high-end stuff as well.

 

Guests of the Sicily Gastronomad Experience enjoy haute cuisine.

 

What do you hope participants take away?

About 90-plus percent of our guests are Americans. We live in an industrial food system, and this is what we know very well. So, the degree to which we really understand what makes good olive oil or natural wine good and all the details not really known even to foodie-oriented people, by the end of it, they've gone through a very pleasurable but detailed masterclass in these details. When they go home, they're just throwing stuff away and starting over. And now, with the newfound knowledge and appreciation for the best things, they become snobs about that—not in a bad way, but they just have much higher standards because they have the knowledge.

 

Another thing is just peak-life experiences. We are on this planet for a very short period of time. If you want to experience Sicily and have one week, we want you to see the most magnificent landscapes, try the most incredible food, and get to know local Sicilians who are not in the tourism industry.

 

Travel is on the rise. Most people who go on vacation never speak to somebody who hasn't been paid to speak to them. The conversations they have with the people they meet are products. A tourist is a consumer who consumes the products and services of people who cater to tourists and travelers.

 

We live predominantly outside of that. So people spend a lot of time talking to locals who are just our friends, not in the tourist industry, and they get to know them really well.

 

How many Americans, for example, have had extensive conversations with Mexicans? The country's right there. We know Mexicans as migrant workers and immigrants or their children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants, and we really should know them much better.

 

When our guests go to Sicily, they'll meet our friends. Sometimes, the friends are cheesemakers or chefs or people like that. But we often know people we just invite to dinner. So our group is there plus one or two or three of our local friends. We just have a dinner where there's lots of conversation, and they get to know people.

 

You've really been Sicilian for a week. You've lived as a Sicilian aristocrat for one week. And that's quite an experience. That's not tourism; it's very different. You're not just buying goods and services from people. You go straight into the inside of the culture. It's really a life-changing experience.

 

 

Raise a glass of biodynamic wine from an Etna winery.

 

 

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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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Rachel Villa was living in Oxnard, California, working for a military child care program, and going through a divorce when a counselor asked her how she was feeling.

 
"Well, I'm feeling pretty crappy," she remembers saying.

 

At that moment, she was facing an existential crisis. She'd been a military wife and put her career on hold, and now she faced living on her own. She didn't know what she wanted to do with her life.

The counselor asked Rachel where she might want to take a vacation, to which Rachel responded, "You know what? I've never been to Europe, so I'm going to Italy."

The counselor told her to put it on her dream board, something Rachel had never heard of. Soon, she was clipping a cartoon picture of Italy from a magazine and tacking it on a board. That push-pin dream board evolved into a Pinterest page. Eventually, thanks to a chance encounter with a friend of a friend, she found herself facing a whole new world of possibilities in Sicily: a husband, a vineyard, and a family.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Rachel about how her dream board became a reality and how she helped launch Catania-based Gimmillaro Family Vineyards.

 

 

What brought you to Sicily?

In another life before my ex-husband, I was in Pensacola, Florida, where my dad was stationed. Pensacola is the cradle of naval aviation and where the military trains all the pilots that we have agreements with.

 

During my college internship, I got a job on base that provided housing. I was there with all these other girls; we were with the officers and all these Italian Navy pilots. And man, that was fun. Every weekend, we would pile up in my Jeep and go to Pensacola Beach.

 
I stayed in touch with one guy (Ruggiero)—totally platonic—over email for 20 years. While dealing with this dream board, I decided to message him and tell him I was looking to come to Italy.

He said, "Where are you going to go?" And I said, "I don't know. There are a couple of jobs available. One of them is in Naples." He said, "You do not want to go there." And I was like, "Well, if it gets me to Italy, that's better than nothing!"

I applied for the job, and I got it. There were over a thousand applicants, and out of seven people, I was one who got this training position to be a manager with a child youth program.

Before I went to Naples, they wanted people to do some temporary assignments. So they sent me to Sicily at Sigonella Naval Air Station, where my friend was stationed in the Italian Navy. So I messaged him and told him when I was coming. And he said, "Actually, I'm on an assignment with the Italian Navy for the beginning of that time, but I have a friend who I can hook you up with to show you around."

I got a message from this guy named Marco, and I could hear his accent through the way he wrote, "I hope I do not disturb you."

I was like, "Who is this?" I started looking at his pictures, and he seemed to be in the military. And I was like, okay, so this is probably Ruggiero's friend. So I told him when I was arriving, and he offered to pick me up. And I was like, "No. My boss is picking me up, but just meet me at the residence." And he was waiting for me there. He was there every single night for the next 90 days.

Apparently, I had a boyfriend. Within 10 days of meeting this guy, he took me to meet his mom. And after 90 days, I had to go back to the States, and I was like, "I have a boyfriend in Italy. What am I going to do?"

I was not looking for it at all. I just was looking for an adventure. But gosh, I found a man.

He kept saying that he was a farmer and worked as an agricultural scientist, which was his degree. He was telling me some things about that, but I didn't ask many questions. I was not taking him seriously. I wouldn't say I didn't care. It was about me. It was me-time.

So, I came back to Oxnard and realized, "Wow, if I don't go back to Sicily, I don't know what we're going to do. This is going to be a crazy long-distance relationship. I'm going to have to go back and forth from Naples to Sicily every so often to see this guy. Is that even a relationship? Do I want to do that?"

During this training period, which took about a year, I ended up going to Key West, Florida, and everywhere else except Sicily. I finally decided to take him seriously as this relationship was progressing.

 

I had no idea that every time he went to a vineyard, it was his. I came to visit, and it was in October of 2017, and he took me to one of his locations where he was going to be doing a vendemmia, which is a grape harvest; our mutual friend came down, and his sister was there, and all these people he knew came. And I was like, "So whose farm is this?" And Marco was like, "It's mine." And I was like, "We have been together for a year. How did I not know that you had a vineyard?"

He said, "I don't come here very often. We just came for the vendemmia, and I trim the branches throughout the year and tend to the soil, but this is my vineyard."

 

I suddenly felt really out of my league and started getting emotional. And I said, "Marco, I don't know if this is going to really work because I have been a military kid my whole life. I move a lot, and I'm going to go to Naples, and you're here, and that's a lot of back and forth, and I just don't think I can do it. I need somewhere where I can plant my roots."

 

He literally bent down into the dirt. He picked a little bit up, held my hand, and said, "Plant your roots here with me."

 

Tell us how the vineyard evolved.

It was just a plot of land he was making patronale with, like garage wine. It's what the locals make for themselves.

 

As a Californian, I had a little knowledge of what people want when they go to a vineyard, especially somewhere like Santa Ynez Valley or Temecula. We're expecting meals, a beautiful wine tasting, and sometimes just a flight and just sitting there and enjoying the view. But definitely some customer service and a learning experience.

One of the things I noticed while doing some reconnaissance wine tastings around here was that nobody was having people come and do the harvest just for fun. There were opportunities to do a grape stomp, but nobody was being allowed to do real hands-on. And I thought, "Why is there some legal reason?"

Marco looked it up and said, "Actually, there is a legal reason. There need to be 'tutors,' and the work must be declared."

And I was like, "Well, how do you declare this work?" Marco explained that it would need to be a "demo."

 

I said, "So, we can do it. We're not going to get in trouble if we have people come, and we could even give them a barbecue." He said, "Correct, because the product is separate from the main production. Then they've done the work, and we can show them how to make a patronale."

 

I was like, "Oh, Marco, Americans would love that!"

And so we've come up with this from the reconnaissance and knowing nobody else was doing any kind of meaningful hands-on at the level people really wanted. Having a tour of a beautiful vineyard and a beautiful winery with all this professional equipment isn't educational. It's a tour of something already established and expensive. But people who want to know how to grow and produce wine are not really learning how to do it. So we came up with a year of vinification, a year of wine, which is all the processes.

 
So we have a harvest. It starts with that. We bring people out, they harvest, and we separate, we squish, and then we transport to the place where we do the vinification with those people, and then we give them a barbecue.

 

 

The next process is turning the grapes, the maceration. When it's in the containers with the skins, you can't just let it sit there; you have to move it around. Could I make an event out of that? Possibly. We haven't yet.

Then, the next process is moving the liquids to the travaso and then bottling, and it still has to sit in the bottle for a while. So, I thought, "I'll have another event where we do a wine tasting, and we invite the people that came to the vendemmia and say, 'Let's go bottle your wine, and we'll have a party.'"

We had a wine bottling event, and about 12 people showed up. Five of them had been to the vendemmia before. They absolutely loved the thought that their effort had gone into the bottles and the liquid they were bottling.

 
We let them do the hand bottling because we didn't have the machine. We just filled it up with a tap, and it dripped everywhere. It was such a mess, but everybody had the best time!

After the fact, I thought, okay, what do people really like the most? Did they care about the food? No, they cared about the experience they weren't getting anywhere else. And I was like, "How can I turn this into a moneymaker?"

 

What challenges have you faced along the way?

It's been a process of trying to find out how I can market this because if I deal with just Italians, there's a lack of interest around here. The foreigners are where I am focusing, especially the people from the base here, who speak English, and I know what they want. The problem is they require things that most tourists or expats wouldn't because they live here and they have to deal with the roads. And some of them are very homebody. So I was like, "Well, I have to rent a van or get a bus and have an event. And I've got to calculate that into the cost of the whole thing."

 

I did a vendemmia with 60 people. I had a 30-person van and another 30-person van. I had to eat the cost because 15 people didn't show, and I still had to pay for that or otherwise ask the other people to pay more after the fact. And that was like, "I'm not going to do that." I'm learning on the job.

 
We finally have a vintage. We have a 2022, and we lost all of our grapes at our primary vineyard in 2023 due to a fungal blight, but we had a secondary vineyard that we bought grapes for as an experiment, so we technically have a 2023 as well. We are not going to label it. We're going to keep it a patronale because, legally, it's not registered on our land, so we can't sell it that way. We can sell it as a patronale, though.

 
So we technically have two vintages, and this year, we're going to have a white. And I'm trying to stick to the guns here and be a completely bio vineyard. It makes your job exponentially more difficult. You're highly volatile. Your processes have to be dead on. There are certification processes and criteria that need to be adhered to in order to qualify.

 
White has been very hard. We've lost it every year for the last five years. It gets skunky so fast. The summers have been unusually hot. We don't have a temperature-controlled environment, and we are off-grid, which is again part of our process of having a bio vineyard. This year, we are working with a nearby cantina to be sure to follow the white properly.

We could get a business loan, dredge the land out, get some water flow from the city, have a sewer line put in, and do some irrigation, as well as all the things we need to have what the other big vineyards are doing. But we're trying to be off-grid to show people that it can be done and can be done well. A lot of times, when these producers grow their production, they just abandon those simpler ways in favor of the more efficient industrialized vinification styles. And while those are great, we're just trying to be as authentic and practical as possible.

 

 

What are your plans for the future?

We are working up to more events as we develop different wines. For instance, we want to do a sparkling wine in the future. Of course, we want to keep the demo vendemmia. The best way to teach people about wine is to let them help create the basic/patronale wines and also let them work on the vineyard.

 

We have hosted several groups from the Sigonella base to volunteer their time for community service credits with their command. They come on weekends and prune or plant cover crops on the terraces. Not only is this helpful for the vineyard, but it's also a way to get our name out there as a place where you can really learn about the wine industry.

 

 

What experience do you hope to share?

The ups and the downs. I want people to see that it doesn't mean you're wealthy to have a vineyard. It just means you're putting effort into something and trying to make it great. And sometimes, it fails. And what is the outcome? I'm going to try to pull myself up like they say, "by my bootstraps," get back up, and start going and keep it going. I'm not giving up.

A lot of times, people just think that every year, the wine's going to taste the same as last year, even though you have these wine tastings, and everybody says, "This is 2022. It has more berry flavor; these are the same grapes on the same land. This is 2023, and it tastes woodier, blah, blah."

It does taste different. I can't even explain why it tastes so different from one year to the next or why we have the same grape varieties. They're separated by three miles and taste completely different.

 
It's a beautiful thing, and I can see why people get so wrapped up in wine and everything about it. It's a challenge, and it's unbelievably rewarding. It is a science and an art. And then again, it's farming, so it's extremely volatile.

 
People have so many little experiments up on Etna. We are friends with this neighbor, and he's trying to make a sparkling out of a grape that nobody would've made a sparkling out of before. And he is like, "I'm going to do it. It's going to be amazing." And I love that positivity.

 
So when I have people come, and I am showing them all the work we've done, I'm not here for the applause. I'm here because it's like when I was a teacher, and I had a child that was very difficult, and other people were just constantly giving up on this child. How cruel is that to just give up on a child? It's finding that path out and finding another direction to do something. And that's what makes wine special: everybody has a different process.  

 

 

 

 

 

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When you think of Italian wines, your first thought may be northern Italy or Tuscany. But Emilia Aiello is on a mission to challenge that instinct and educate wine connoisseurs on the virtues of southern Italy. 

The Oakland, California, native cut her teeth in New York restaurants, serving as wine director and then leading the beverage program at Greenwich Village's Lupa Osteria Romana. Her interest in wine led her down a rabbit hole to working at a winery through a harvest season in Sicily's Mount Etna region and creating her own regional wine map. She wished to share her experience and introduce more people to the area, leading her to launch her own online wine retailer/educational resource, Cittavino & Co.

Emilia is Italian on both sides, but her passion for southern wines partially stems from her drive to reconnect with her Sicilian roots. Her paternal grandparents emigrated to Pittsburg, California, from Isola delle Femmine.

I spoke with Emilia about her background, life-altering experiences, and what motivated her to launch Cittavino. She also shared career advice for those wishing to pursue a similar path and what she hopes to provide through her wine education.

 

 

Tell us about your professional background.

My experience with wine initially was my experience in restaurants, and I don't see them as different, at least in the first part of my life. I never intended to be in restaurants or wine. Most people fall into it and find that they're good at it. Growing up in my Italian culture, however local it was, I naturally understood how things work in Italy. It gave me a one-up. I was also very curious. I was trying to dance in New York then and support myself with restaurants. I just found I liked learning about wine.

I started bartending. Also, my cousin owns a restaurant here in Oakland, and I started getting interested there, but it was just kind of an interest, not really a career option for me. Then as the restaurant industry does, it definitely sucked me in. One, it's very demanding, and two, it pays your bills.

I started venturing into southern Italy more because there was just less about it and less available, so I wanted to know more. I had already traveled to Italy in college. I took some time off school, which started my interest in the South, and it was just another opportunity to bring it somewhere and have some structure around it.

I took over the wine program at Lupa Osteria Romana. I made it my objective to organize southern Italy like we had organized northern Italy and have more representation.

I could only do so much. Not much was happening in the way of seminars or marketing campaigns. When a marketing campaign for an Italian region makes it to the United States, there's a lot of effort, organization, and money behind it. We're seeing more with Etna, but as a whole consorzio campaign, we're not really seeing it.

So, I started traveling to southern Italy, but specifically with wine as the objective, so I could learn more. I kept learning more. I felt there was space for that kind of information in the wine industry and maybe among consumers. And I did that for a couple of years while working at the restaurant. I worked a harvest, and when I left the restaurant, it happened simultaneously with COVID. I had a lot of time to think.

 

I have Italian citizenship, so I was able to get to Italy during peak pandemic, and I stayed stuck there working a harvest and thinking a lot. I now know what I do to be more niche than I realized. I thought there'd be a little bit more of an audience for it. Within New York and now California, there are two totally different wine consumers, but it started with the restaurant and having to go to the source to understand things. Nobody was coming to me to present me with information or classes or whatever. And while it's changing, I still find that to be true, especially when you look at credentials like master sommeliers and people with higher levels of certifications; nobody specializes in southern Italy—maybe Italy in general, but often it's northern or maybe Tuscany. It's still a bit of a hole.

 

Describe your wine harvesting experience.

That was my first harvest-time experience. I just needed to take a break from work and figure things out, and they let me go for a couple of months. 

When I first started being interested in wine, Mount Etna wines were really coming onto the market. So, I've been able to follow that trajectory. They really started gaining momentum around that time. There was a demand from people asking about them. I also wanted Lupa to be at the forefront, focusing on southern Italy.

 

So I had a bunch of wines, and we were talking about them as if we were talking about other more well-known regions like Barolo, but not really anybody knew what they were talking about. Even just the simplicity of needing to organize it on the wine list, I was like, "Wait a second, we're comparing these two regions, but I don't even know how to put these on the wine list."

People were asking me the difference between these sectors. I had no clue, and here I was supposed to be the professional. So, I went to Etna for my first harvest experience to learn more. And I ended up with Biondi and stayed with them for a few weeks. I just started my journey of being on the ground there and tasting wines with other producers. So, I was able to finally wrap my head around the location.

 

I met an expat who lives there and has become the Etna wine expert. He was also the first to really take an interest in the region in a more analytical or organized way, and we became friends. So, he has been a great resource to me as well.

 

I didn't quite realize how much I was gaining in the moment. I kept asking people about maps. I used to always do that: ask about maps of the region, and sometimes they would be able to give it to me, but in the Etna region, there was nothing to give. So when I went back to the United States, I thought, "Well, I'll do some research online." Nothing was coming up.

 

But that was my moment of being like, "Gosh, I learned so much in just three weeks of being there on the ground, and I get to tell my colleagues so much." I brought back a map of the geology, which everybody was very keen on looking at. I was like, "Interesting. This means something."

That started my trajectory of not just going back to Etna but also the way I approach it now, learning about other regions. I really like to work a harvest or best I can, even if it's not months' worth of time, get some kind of physical movement in there and then just get a little bit more of an inside view with the producer. It's helped me tremendously, not just to gain an understanding of the area but also to understand the human's connectedness to it, why people do what they do, and maybe why we're kind of obsessed with it from afar. So that was incredible. And it was kind of my first adventure into approaching wine that way.

 

What motivated you to start Cittavino?

Probably recognizing when I was working in the restaurant that wines were coming out of the market, but there was not representation in the same way. And then kind of asking myself questions about why and then wanting to find the answers why. So, going there to Italy and starting to talk to more people who actually live there and make wine.

 

I had already planned to take a break from the restaurant, and then the pandemic hit, and I was kind of everywhere. But I just knew that I needed to get back for a harvest because that's where things happened for me. This was also when I started questioning quite a bit.

We still are in this natural wine movement, but at the time it was a new conversation. It'd been a couple of years. We were all still kind of wrapping our heads around it, asking, "Do we like it? What is this?" And I remembered drinking some wines, particularly this one from Calabria, that, as I was reading about it, hit all the criteria of what a natural wine was, but it didn't tout itself as a natural wine. I was like, "What's going on here? I need to go to the source to understand what this is." So I intended to go to Calabria, and then, because of the pandemic, I just ended up spending four months in Calabria. 

It was just a reckoning of my personal life, things happening in my career, and then the pandemic, but I mulled it over a lot. When you're in it, you don't quite realize what you're in.

 

When I got back home, things started circulating quite quickly, and I thought this was valuable to me and may be valuable to others. From the professional side of things, having a lot more information to offer people, the map, and drawing from a consumer side of things, just trying to communicate that inside view people don't get. They could connect with it more because I found for myself how enriching it was to take that time with people, as well as working outside in the vineyards, and how it grounded me. And I was like, "Well, maybe that could be grounding for others, too."

 

We're especially obsessed with wine in place, but do we really know what that means? We're just kind of obsessed with checklists and soil types as if we really know. But we're missing pieces to make it a more rounded experience. I think that about a lot of things, not just wine.

 

I started thinking I could be a resource for southern Italy, a promoter for people who don't have the funds and the Italian system to promote what they do. And there are some really excellent wines that I taste from small producers. So I am working with what you would call more natural (but I also don't like using that term), a certain type of wine that I feel is most connected to the person and the place. And that is my platform; I really only sell a particular type of wine.

Maybe because I've been there and I had the experience, but drinking that type of wine makes me feel a different way than just drinking to drink. That was the whole basis. It's certainly evolved since then. I had a very specific idea of what it was going to be, and it's taken on its own journey for better or worse.

 

I don't know how sustainable it is, but I keep coming back to what keeps me in it: that connection with the people who are making this thing and how important it is to connect with those people. I see it now as a lifestyle because of the wines I end up liking and the people I connect with who have made it their lifestyle. 

Certainly, there's business and finances involved like anything, but for them, it's their entire way of life. Maybe it's just me feeling like I'd like to give back more of that connection to agriculture and that way of life that we've become disconnected from. But that's what keeps me in the game. One could do that with other products and things. I just happen to do it in southern Italy, where I feel most connected, where I started this journey, and where that connection really is for me, that more agrarian kind of lifestyle. 

 

What sets Cittavino apart from other online wine retailers?

The focus, for sure, and the reality is now that, with being so niche, for better or worse, I can represent a lot of one region. With Italy, things are so diverse, and so much is going on. I really like being able to offer that diversity of Lazio, for example. I mean, who has a huge selection of Laziale wines?

 

My platform isn't just about drinking wine. It's trying to engage people on all levels of it and be interested in it, in the person, and in the hope that I'm giving, again, a grounding experience through wine. I'm not sure if everybody's taking it that way, but that's what I'm trying to present. And with this product that I'm giving, there's so much more in it than just your alcohol and grapes; they're charged. It sounds woo-woo, but I really believe it. And I've taken a little bit more of a clear approach to why my palate likes these wines better. And yes, there's kind of a checklist I could go down, but I just keep finding that when people have an entire lifestyle built around what they do agriculturally, their wines taste better.

I keep trying to shoot out different means of getting people to be attracted to that for whatever reason. We're so disconnected, and as we continue to advance in the new age and technology, we're getting further and further away from that. The best way I can pull us back a bit is with wine—farmer wines.

 

What advice would you give someone looking to start a career in the wine industry, especially around less-represented regions?

This might be advice for anybody regardless of what they will do. Again, as I said, things are about money, and we live in a world that constantly shows us that. Especially as we get older, we need to weigh the finances, but there has to be a why greater than just trying to get in something niche, being a figure, and being reputable. There has to be something that connects you and grounds you to what you do beyond that, or else it will get really hard, really fast. And even when it does ground you, you're constantly thinking about the way out, or should I just give this up? You hit those really hard moments. And so what is your purpose beyond money, reputation, whatever? How are you connected to what you're doing in a more fundamental way? Ultimately, what's going to keep you showing up for it?

You are definitely going to have to do things you don't like in anything. At some point, a job is a job, so being able to reconcile a bit of that is not always just going to be fun and creative. The hustle shows up everywhere. So, for me, it's been important, and it changes sometimes, but it's just getting more profound as to why I am even doing this. Would I still do this? If the possibility of making money on it was zero, what parts would I give up, and what parts would I keep? In the wine industry, it feels very glamorous, especially to the outside, and people want to get into it because there are a lot of cool perks to it, but there are a lot of things that are hard as well. And yeah, making sure you're at least along for the journey. That might also be my advice for anybody just starting a business.

 

For underrepresented regions, you're going to have less support. You're going to be doing a lot on your own. Things just come up that you can never anticipate. There's a lot of confrontation of the self for me, especially being alone. I speak Italian, and I am Italian. Still, it's not my native language, and still, every time I go, there's this jolt of getting acclimated again and being in an unfamiliar area culturally, too. It's very clear to me that I'm American when I'm in southern Italy, even if I'm hanging out speaking Italian and speaking wine language and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Especially in the places where they are unknown, and you're trying to be a pioneer in them, there's a lot of shooting in the dark and figuring out what your support system is when you go off and do those things alone.

 

What experience do you hope to offer people through your wine education?

I want to open doors for people, and people are traveling a lot now, and wine helps as kind of opening a door. So curiosity, definitely passion, and vigor. If I am just thinking about doing an event, it's getting people energetic again about what they do. And it's not just about listing facts on things; it's bringing in this more rounded human experience. I want people to take away the human experience from whatever it is I do. And if I can transmit that experience just by sending you a bottle, cool. If it's with an event with me, if you're in the wine club, or whatever, it's about trying to create some connectedness between all of us. That would be the best takeaway if somebody felt more curious about what they're purchasing.

 

For me, learning about wine and being with these farmers has totally bled into me. It's now a lifestyle of "I want to go to the farmers market in my local area. I want to meet that person. I want to be curious about what they do and how they do it because that's the closest I'm going to get to my consumption." And we're really missing that in pretty much everything else that we consume or purchase. So, hopefully, they'll have that curiosity and want to connect more.

 

 

 

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Antonio Bertone arrives at our interview wearing a sweatshirt that reads, "Boxed Wine Is Not a Crime." He hopes this slogan will stick and help people choose more sustainable boxed beverages like his Alileo Wines. 

Cofounded by Antonio and his wife, Alexandra Drane, the Boston-based boxed natural wine company produces award-winning West Coast Sicilian varietals in partnership with Bertone's family in Sicily and imports them to the United States, where they are distributed in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Texas. 

Antonio shared what inspired Alileo's creation, what makes his wines unique, and why boxed wine.

 

 

What is your background?

My father emigrated from Molise, and my mom emigrated from Partanna, Sicily. When I was in the second grade, my parents decided to move us back. My sister and I were born here in the United States. 

My mom was very homesick. She was the only one from her family that left and came to America. My dad's entire family ultimately ended up in the States. 

So, we moved back, and I did my second to fourth grades of elementary school in Sicily and all my summers. Then, after my dad passed, my mom kind of moved back for half the year, so she would do June to December in Sicily and then December to June back in the U.S. That went on for 30 years until she passed. 

 

What inspired Alileo's creation?

We were in COVID lockdown, and my mom was battling cancer. I think she felt this fear or sadness that once she passed, the connection to Sicily would start to degrade or disappear because I'm the last one left in America, representing the Sicilian side. 

So, my wife and I started talking about starting a wine company with our cousin Rosario, a winemaker in Sicily. 

Over the years, we have always joked about it at the dinner table and about how nice it would be. We all enjoyed those conversations in the kitchen. My kids got into it; they were like, "That could be so cool."

We came up with the name and the product's USP. We started it, kicked into making-things mode, and worked with some designer friends in London to design the packaging. We started getting ready for the first shipment, and then my mom passed. The first shipment, our first 40-foot container, actually arrived on her birthday the following year. So it was pretty magical that the wine has this eternal connection to her. 

 

What's been your goal with Alileo Wines?

For our wine, we wanted to make a low-intervention, natural wine. We wanted to make something that didn't have junk in it and sugar and all the crap that gives you headaches. And we wanted to bring a younger audience into wine.

 

Wine is as old as time. The simpler the wine-making, the better, in my opinion.  

 

Your wine is low-sulfite. Why is that important?

You're dealing with a low-intervention wine, which has a greatly reduced amount of sulfites in the wine. The grapes themselves produce a certain amount of sulfites, and for you to get some sort of shelf life, you have to work with some form of SO2. So we keep ours at the bare minimum, which is around 55 parts per million. The standard natural wine is 150 parts per million. Commercial wines are in the four hundreds and five hundreds, which sometimes causes people headaches and some of the negative side effects of wine. 

 

Why did you choose to box your wines?

I come from a consumer products background. As a marketeer, I'm better against the grain than I am with the grain. Sustainability is a key discussion to get a younger audience interested. 

Sicily's on fire right now; it's still 40 degrees Celsius daily. So it's important to put your money where your mouth is and act in a more sustainable or responsible manner. 

In my previous careers, I always drove toward a more sustainable point of view. In our product creation, our ambition is to be a B Corp, and the box in and of itself is way more functional. Once you open a box, the wine's still good for 30 to 45 days. Transport costs are a fraction. Think about the overall energy it takes to make a glass bottle rather than just a cardboard box and a bladder. 

People are like, "Boxed wine?" The rest of the world is fine with the format. It's just in America and weird days at college, slamming Franzia that has forever created this stigma. So we're here to change it.

 

How does your wine compare to other Sicilian wines?

I think my cousin has a special gift. When you hear about natural wines, people start to think funky and weird. And no knock to the really experimental winemakers, but we're making a commercial product. We're using grapes that are synonymous with our side of the island. 

Our most popular wine is zibibbo macerato, a skin-contact wine made out of a grape that's usually used to make dessert wine. Our zibibbo is very dry tasting and drinks super lovely, all because of Rosario and his skills. 

I come from farmers. My mom's side of the family were all grape and olive farmers. My dad was a farmer before he came to America. He had livestock. He had sheep, horses, and cows. So we ate incredibly well. Even though we had no money, we never knew that we didn't have any money. Because we basically produced all the things that we consumed. So to make something that's as simple but delicious and has its own profile and point of view, I think suits us. 

 

What are your future plans?

We launched boxed water as well. We were doing a lot of popups, and it was interesting to find the format. Single-use plastic, under a certain measurement, is being banned in a lot of communities around the oceans.

Right now, we're in five states. Funny enough, we don't sell in Italy. Next year, we will start selling in six European countries. 

We're trying to grow and occupy a place in the wine retail channel that serves good food. We really want to have a good connection to good cuisine.  

 

What experience do you hope people have with your wines?

I hope they're enjoying themselves, eating something nice, and having a nice conversation. That's the overall goal: bringing people together. 

 

 

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