Lindsay Marie Morris

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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