Two Brothers, One Cellar, Zero Idea It Would Work

Every wine brand claims a founding story. Most of them involve a grandfather, a vineyard at golden hour, and a violin somewhere in the background. Ours starts in a restaurant kitchen in Florence, and it doesn't have a violin — it has our father, pouring wine for a living, long before either of us thought to make our own.

Before it was a brand, it was a restaurant

Ristorante I Tre Pini, tucked into Villa Alinari, was where we grew up watching our father, Libero, work a room. He wasn't a winemaker by training — he was a host, in the fullest sense of the word: the person who knew what to pour before you'd finished deciding, who made a Tuesday night feel like an occasion because he treated it like one. Somewhere along the way, doing exactly that, he had an idea nobody in the wine world had tried seriously: what if a sparkling wine looked as much like a celebration as it tasted like one? What if it was blue?

That idea didn't become a brand overnight, and it wasn't obvious it would work at all. A blue wine breaks every visual convention the category has ever had. But it also does exactly what our father spent a career doing at that restaurant table — it makes people look up.

From family restaurant to something we didn't expect

We — Lorenzo and Matteo — took that instinct and pushed it further than a restaurant wine list ever could. What started as a small, little-known family winery became Saraceni Wines: a brand built on the same principle our father worked by, minus the wine-speak. No vintage lectures, no "notes of" paragraphs nobody asked for. Just wine that's easy to choose and hard to forget, and the same restlessness that made him put a blue bottle on the table in the first place.

We still think of it as a family project, not a corporate one — one bottle at a time, the same way it started. Our Libero wine line carries his name on purpose: it's less a tribute and more a way of keeping him at the table, since that's where all of this actually began.

Where it's going

We're not trying to be the biggest wine brand in the world. We're trying to be the one people reach for when the occasion — big or small — deserves more than "whatever's on sale." That's still, at its core, two brothers running a cellar, mostly making it up as they go, years after it started at a restaurant with three pines out front.

Read more of the story on Our Story, or shop the collection that started it all.