Lindsay Marie Morris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

How did you get started?

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Gina with her family in Sicily

 

How has your Sicilian heritage inspired you?

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

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

 

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

What challenges have you faced along the way?

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Bella Vino soaps and Twisted Lips 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

What experience do you hope to share?

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

 

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

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

 

 
Z&M Twisted's Lawrence, Kansas, vineyard

 

 

If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to my newsletter for more content and updates!

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.  

 

 

 

 

 

If you enjoyed this article, consider subscribing to my newsletter for more content and updates!