From Tuscany to Bestseller

Speaker 2: in Italy we have buil a family here or every single person that's works on our property started from the beginning so we became this big family and for me the most important thing is to say thank you every day when I see

Speaker 3: them hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the shiled experience with Melanie join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in thank you so much for joining us you are the owner operator of calvento Winery and a luxury hotel bed and breakfast in Tuscany what did you do before you launched your businesses and what led you to launch them how it all

Speaker 2: started was that I'm mared an American who was first generation born in a bronx from Italian immigrants they met on the ship going to the land of freedom to to the United States and landed in New York and the immigrated they grew up very poor in the Bronx and he was the second youngest of seven of them and he always promised himself if would make it from director riches he would buy a property in Italy so his dream came true his parents came from Naples and benevento and we were about to buy something in cpri and the deal fell through my husband made his money in the car industry his friends were living in Tuscany on vacation homes and we came to visit them and a long story to behold my husband decided not to go down to Naples but buy a home in tuskin we are in the heart of the CYO region and when we first bought the house six months into it when everybody ask us to leave that they can rebuild and so when the contractors are coming in they we get a phone call from a lawyer in Florence telling us the property came with C classical rights so of course we had no idea what that meant that meant that the property had rights to plant graes at that time time you were still able to sell the rights and embed this into a different Winery we decided not to sell our rights but to start our own Vineyards that's how it started isn't it

Speaker 3: interesting how you go down a path he thought he wanted one property and didn't get it but you got this property and what a beautiful place it has turned

Speaker 2: into it really is God blessed we on the top of the hill overlooking Sienna going down I mean the view is endless here we are like 650 MERS high and then they first started planting everybody thought those silly Americans planting grapes that high in altitude but now with the climate change and everything it turned out it was the best thing we ever could

Speaker 3: have done and you showed me the view it

Speaker 2: is incredibly beautiful yeah it is I'm blessed every day when I wake up it's like you're in heaven the other thing is too Italy is a place where people are

Speaker 3: very late back but they're all happy and they always have a smile on their face and every time in the morning I cannot wait for an employees to come to work because they make me happy they come with a smile in addition to your

Speaker 2: businesses you are also the author of the book Kasa lento House of the wind where romance and family secrets intertwine in a breathtaking Tuscan Vineyard a romantic fiction set in Real Life share with us the story of your book and what led you to write it it

Speaker 3: started out that my husband was diagnosed with an illness and the kind of illness that he had was not reversible so he was diagnosed with dementia they on Alzheimer's if people have loved ones who have the issue they fully understand that you no longer are your own person because you become a caretaker and being a caretaker also means that you have to be next to this person constantly I wrote for my own self for My Serenity and when he became so ill I spoke to my mom of what I should do and she said to me good go back to what you did before start to write and play music and she says just write your thoughts down so I made up those characters and then while writing and making up these characters slowly but truly I realized that I was not only writing in the characters that I invented but slowly but surely Erica became good I wanted to write something we all get so lost in life New York is so busy and you do your everyday chores you you never really see the rainbow you don't smell the roses you forget but in your own way when you are in the business world you think this is normal so with Erica she has not really known her grandparents and her parents passed the baby when she was 18 her fiance who she went to the university her family basically took her in and they created a completely different person than she was before but for her it became normal her feel Say Craig finally decided it's time for us to get married so she's 30 he's 35 they writing escalates of the high society in New York he is a real estate attorney and she is a woman who has a company with her friend Tiffany together to turn distress companies around so they're all happy until this registered letter arrives in the office and first she just puts it in her bag and later in the evening when she meets Greg as she does every night she remembers and she opens up the letter and it says that she inherited something in Italy so she knew that her grandparents Came From Italy but she didn't really know anything about it and didn't know the history of her life story so she convinces Craig to go to Italy and she arrives here not knowing what she would expect and what she found was something amazing still not knowing what to do and having a marriage coming up and with like being in love with him as she thinks she is she decides that she would like to sell everything so the people here in Italy are trying to make everything comfortable for her because they don't want her to sell the properties then she finds out that calvento was not a far

Speaker 2: relative but it was actually her grandfather when they go to the notary thinking that she was going to go and get the properties and she can sell them there was an unexpected twist to the story that she has to live there for five months and after the five months to live the life of what the grandfather lived to get to know the family to get to know the history and why he came back from the United States and there are letters that you will have five of them explaining all of the steps so she decides to go and jump into that of course the marriage has to be on hold so she's I just need one week to go back to the states to explain this to my fiance of what to do and me comes back to the states she finds that her fiance actually is not as faithful as she thought he was in we had the fante with Tiffany so it makes the decision much easier to go back and from that moment on she starts to live actually a live different life become a different person become cheerful happy smells the Roses sees the sunset in a different way and in the states and she woke up in the morning it was always stressful every Monday was stressful in here she cannot go to bed and then wake up in the morning ands challenge Have Faces the challenges of the days such a fun and

Speaker 3: beautiful story and what a wonderful thing your mother said to you to write I'm sure it was very therapeutic for you going through what you were going through and as I was reading about your book I wondered how much of the story was part of your real story I wanted to bring something across to so many people because you forget the simple things in life in America and especially where I live in a place Palm Beach and in New York everything is so different in Italy

Speaker 2: we have builded a family here or every single person that works on our property started from the beginning so we became this big family and for me the most important thing is to say thank you every day when I see them we have now the second generation from the first couple who started working for us and they actually have a little boy called Roberta after my husband he's now 10 years old and they all live on the property and when Co hit I was stuck in Austria and we were just about to open up the hotel and of course we couldn't and everyone was so afraid to lose their jobs and I said listen get everybody together and make a strategy on what they can do and some of the people who work for us come from Romania from Estonia from different parts of the world and I said what have you done before was a pain the other was electrician I said listen this is easy now what we're going to do is you cannot leave the property we completely self-contained we have our vegetables we have our water but we repaint and refresh everything and when this period passes then we open up with the glory and that's what we did so not one person lost its job everybody stay there not one of us had Co because they all cooped up on the properties it really is the small things that are the most meaningful and I love the true appreciation from you and from your team me too and the devotion that they have to me and especially when my husbands got so sick and this is a man's world theine world is a man's world but they accepted me as a female and I work with them out in the field I work with them in a Cana I Drive the tractor I learned how to cook but it's an overall new experience for me and even I became a complete different person and I love myself more now than I did before

Speaker 3: running multiple businesses as an author and the owner of a thriving Vineyard organic farm and luxury bed and breakfast how do you manage it all and what keeps you motivated to keep moving

Speaker 2: and with me not living here all the time and traveling it is very important communication and to delegates and everything funel down to me because I'm the person overall responsible for every single person's life who lives and works on this property never explain and never complain so you look at things and then you make a judgment and never rush into a judgment overthink it let a night go by and then write the things down the positive and the negatives the pro and the cons and then you make the decision the other thing I don't buy green bananas anymore so try do your best of what you can do to make the best product that you can make and that's what I've

Speaker 3: been trying to do such good advice and I call it marinating on a decision when you're not quite sure it's so important to take that time to really know before you move forward it's the EQ not the IQ it's emotional intelligence but not the IQ with the intelligence that you need to have because you are in this small little world and vineries are very competitive and especially if there's a foreigner in especially if there's a woman in charge when it comes to wine making did you always have a passion for it and was there anything about the wine making process that you like the best or

Speaker 2: that surprised you funny enough I did not drink any wine before I come from a family where my grandparents were building Wine sellers in the southern part of Syria in Austria and we also owned a beer brewing company my husband was the one who really introduced me to the wine the drinking part because he was a wine collector and when we decided that we were going to go and build a Vineyard in calenta the first idea was that another Winery would come in and then take care of The Vineyards but going through the state es of the excavation work of choosing the grapes the style of growing all of the little things of the daily process I became so intrigued by it that at the end of the four years we you know I would be a part of this whole society of the wine making and then he said but this will not work if another Winery would come in so we spoke to many people and we decided that we need to have neologist and agronomist and with the help of those two with helps of people I'm very close friends to a lady her name is Virginia Phillips and she was the first Master Somali in the United States so she took me under her wings and many other people that were my husband's friend in the vne industry and from that it became a passion I love it but I love the most of this whole process is that you really cannot control it because you are in the mercy of the Gods the weather through the year from the beginning to the ends the maturity in all of that that is something which is very interesting in my point of view as a business person too with having control over so many things it's interesting to watch something unfold that we really don't

Speaker 3: have control over no it has to be a bit of a peaceful feeling I would think yes

Speaker 2: honestly when I first started I was an apprentice so I cleaned the barrels and ANS I get dirty I cut the green Harvest and there's one thing that I found out that everybody says what is a good wine so a good wine is what you enjoy to drink because you all have a very different taste there are different varieties of grapes there's different way of growing a grape to make a bottle of wine you need the grapes and you need the Tera and you need to ferment and then you make the decision in the wine Celler of what you want to do with it so in my point of view there's never really a bad bottle of wine because every wine maker is drying its best and everybody's getting more and more sophisticated in the vine making and also here in Italy I believe that we have grown in the last 30 years tremendously because everybody knows us still as the straw bottle and the sour tasting Wine And now when you taste sour wines of Tas of kanteti of umbrea and all of different areas the wine making has exploded in a positive and amazing way and it's so beautiful to share a nice bottle of wine with good food and good friends yes that's what it is a get together and OVO that's what you do the first thing that people need to know that there is only one way of making the wine from the grapes from the growing process when you watch the grapes grow growing and then they turn from green to red and the picking time starts then you br bring them into the the vine cell in the Cantina and then the process of that part starts it's completely different power process then The Vineyards go to sleep for a couple of months and they always say it's amazing the process of the grape from the grape going into the bottle and then us consumers sharing it ordering it and drinking it with friends

Speaker 3: and with a good meal I asked this question at the end of every episode EP magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one way that you

Speaker 2: make sure to find and live your joy I go to bed happy because for me it's important I think it's also Father people important to have a project to do something because if you just Ling around the whole day you go to beds sad but I work every single day so I go to bed and I'm tired and I fall asleep and I cannot wait to wake up in the morning the other parts along the way what I enjoy the most is when people come and do Wine Tours and we do Wine Tours and you get to meet all of these different people from the different parts of the world to come to taskin it to enjoy the place to love the foods and drink the wine and my job and my Ultimate Dream is when they order the wines and when they are back home and they have the memory of their great amazing vacation some of them rekindling the marriage some of them just before they're getting married some of them on their honeymoons some of them just with friends but when they then after the three or four weeks pass by and the wine arrives in their houses and then they open up the bottle of wine and always say like a little chy the bottle comes out and they can go back to the memories that they have that's the TK you had to offer to them that is so beautiful and to know that you will extend the Beauty and the passion after they leave yeah what makes us all together in our team amazing is when we put our hard work and our hard labor to make this great bottle of wine and then you send them out to the vine spectator de caner and to all of this Vine Enthusiast we're not established in gener ations yeah we just the first baby young Winery here and then you receive a score of 92 points or you received the score of best selection of cusin with 97 points that is something that just absolutely it's overwhelming and I share this with all our employees and everybody gets to hear what's up new what's coming next what is new on the property and and all of the characters at the end then my readers will read the book they actually exist this is a really funny story because my girl in the house has been with me since 1997 her name is Deborah and she's from Nigeria married an Italian has a beautiful daughter I had to change her name and I changed her name and I said to her but her new name is going to be she schol see please do know I want to choose my own name and I said then what would be your name she say I want to be Doris and I said Deborah Doris does doesn't sound Nigeria I love Doris I want to be a Doris I okay fine there you're going to become

Speaker 3: Doris oh I can't wait to read it oh she's so funny that's such a fun story you have built a beautiful life and good for you for being such a strong woman in a male industry and it has been so fun to talk to you cannot wait to read your book please tell us how and where we can

Speaker 2: find you the book is available on Amazon and of course you can go to gill.com and it's also are available at barn and Noble in every bookstore throughout the United States thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it webbsite or at Sheil it on social thank you to my editor rich stalino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave