You focus exclusively on wines from Piedmont through The Piedmont Guy. What is it about that region that keeps your attention?

Well, I guess I started out with all the areas and have sort of whittled it down. Earlier in my career, I bought wine from everywhere…from the U.S. to Germany to South America. At this point, if anything, I miss maybe working with some of those other areas.

But Italian wine has always been my thing. Try to convince me that there’s a better wine country in the entire world and you will have a fight on your hands. I mean, I’ll drink French wine, but let’s be real…Nebbiolo for the win!

Piedmont is incredibly diverse. It has everything from table wines to Barolo, serious sparkling wines, Moscato d’Asti, great whites, rosés, lighter reds, and then, of course, Nebbiolo. There are also so many great little varieties — Barbera, Dolcetto, Ruchè, Grignolino — all these cool things to discover.

I honestly don’t think there’s another wine region in the world that offers the same combination of variety and economic potential. And beyond the wines, I was really impressed by the importer network The Piedmont Guy had built. You can have great wines, but you also need great distributors.

What’s something you learned outside the wine world — maybe from music, travel, or life — that turned out to be essential to your success?

Honestly, learning Italian.

I had always worked in restaurants on and off in my early days. Then when I was opera training full-time, I started working again in fine dining in New York City. Then I moved to Italy and got to live there for eight years because I was studying opera, and I kept that connection with me. Then I got into wine. So I would say it was a combination of learning Italian — not just for singing, but for living there — and already being in the restaurant world, then migrating over to wine. That really created the opening.

Boxed wine still carries a bit of a stigma. What made you confident enough to move forward with Giovese Family Wines?

I don’t think I had any doubts.

The initial stimulus came from my friend Melissa Saunders at Communal Brands — she makes her own great boxes wine and is now a Master of Wine — who was writing her thesis on retail impressions of alternative formats, specifically boxed wine, and I read a draft of it for her.

I didn’t know how sustainable boxed wine was…that a three-liter box has about one-tenth the carbon footprint of a single glass bottle, that it contains four bottles, and that it stays good for a long time.

At the same time, I had this alter ego, “Sandy Giovese.” I lived in Florence, and when I speak Italian, I speak with a distinctively Tuscan accent, which Italians find both hilarious and charming…because that accent happens to be very gregarious and very correct Italian. And they are also very funny people. So Sandy Giovese started as a joke, because it’s just kind of funny, and I would usually just use it to make my sister laugh!

After I read Melissa’s thesis, it clicked that Sandy Giovese would make a great boxed wine brand. I knew it had to be Sangiovese, or it wasn’t funny. But I wanted it to be lighter and more chillable, so I blended in some Trebbiano. I called producers in central Italy and got samples from Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, and Le Marche. I landed on a winery in Le Marche on the Adriatic side, where the wines tend to be more approachable. They’ve been incredible partners…super into sustainability and really supportive.

This year, we imported close to 4,000 cases into the U.S. We added a rosé right away, then a white, and now we have a little trifecta.

Bonus: If you were hosting a dinner with people who didn’t know each other, what would you pour?

I’d start with something sparkling…Champagne, or something from northern Italy.

Then I’d probably serve a white. I drink a lot of white wine, and sometimes I like to do something different…maybe an Austrian white. I kind of like any whites from Austria.

And then I’d have to serve Nebbiolo, mostly because I have so much of it in my basement! I have some older bottles, and that’s fun. It might not even be Piedmont. You never know what’s going to emerge!