We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anthony Angeleri a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Anthony, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Angeleri Cellars is a boutique winery owned and operated by Anthony and Paola Angeleri.

I (this is Anthony) came from a family of winemakers. My dad’s side came from Sicily, immigrated through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. They were the quintessential, traditional Italian family where we would cook together and eat together. My Nonno (Italian for grandfather) would also bring out his table wine at the dinner table… and that is where this started, the dinner table with each other, with community. Over the years I kept learning in the area of winemaking. When I was in college I worked at a Vineyard on the weekends (Managed a fine dining steakhouse during the week, went to classes, and then a vineyard on the weekends) where I got to learn a lot more of the viticultural aspects of the business along with the chemistry involved with traditional winemaking (a step up from home brewing). Over the years my wife and I would travel and experience different vineyards and breweries around the world and the thought kept growing about opening our own, a winery with a brewery vibe. In the winemaking world there is a term called “negociant” or “wine trader” where one buys their grapes from farmers. A lot of vineyards do this in todays world but it is not as heavily discusses because a lot of times it’s a nicer/better story if one assumes that the wines you are making are coming from the vines outside the tasting room. But our model is that we operate directly with the farmers, buy their crops/certain varietals, work with them to squeeze the grapes on site, and ship ourselves back the juice. We do not work with any distributors and that is an important item to us – it is a “farm to glass” concept. So the idea came from my family experience and the opportunity I saw was to create a bit of a different vibe/experience for our consumers than the traditional winery.

Anthony, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I kind of covered a bit of this in the last question (sorry if I got off the last topic a bit…) but, my name is Anthony Angeleri and I am one of the owners and the winemaker here at Angeleri Cellars. The Angeleri Cellars brand is that of a boutique winery that operates in the model of the “negociant” in that I buy grapes/varietals from some of the more famous wine regions around the world and I make the wine from there. Even though we are a winery, we want our brand to be know as an experience company. Our brand was born out of the concept of the dinner table and community and sharing my wine cellars with those at my table and that is the type of experience and welcoming we want to pass along to our consumers. Whether it is a pop-up tasting event, our recurring wine subscription, a wedding or party we are hosting, we want to be known for providing an unforgettable experience for our customers.

The problem we solve for customers – probably better said like this… the opportunity we try and provide our customers is to give them a more direct experience into the wine world and some of the world’s famous wine regions. You can drink our Nebbiolo from the Piedmont region in Italy and hear about the wine making process as well as the vineyards and region where it all came from… or you can try to peruse the wine aisle at the grocery store. We want to do our wine tastings a bit different as well that promotes more of the community and eating at the same dinner table together.

One of the things that I am more proud of at the moment is that we do not work with distributors. There are a lot of “middle people” of the wine world between farmer and glass and each middle point in the process charges an additional percentage so by the time it gets to your glass, the person is paying more money to the middle people than they are to the farmers and winemakers. We operate direct.

How’d you meet your business partner?

My business partner is Paola Angeleri. We met in college (Baylor University) and dated for all 4 years. One of the things we both loved was wine and we would spend a lot of our time going to different wine tastings and wine events. I worked at a vineyard at the time and we hosted wine tastings and pairings weekly and Pao and I would also go… so the passion for wine and travel was a part of our story from the beginning. We got married after college and traveled the world to different wine regions. Good wine and good food has always been one of our mottos for travel. We have been married for 15 years (May 2025) with a beautiful daughter named Antoinette Belle Angeleri. Our next adventure is starting up a boutique winery together!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

The wine industry is very saturated with plenty of opinions on how to run things – traditional wine making strategies vs. more modern techniques. The traditional tasting rooms vs. pop up tasting events. So all that to say, a lesson we had to unlearn early on was that the traditional template is not our objective here. Or maybe it’s better to say that a lesson we learned early on (and still need to re-learn daily at times) is to trust our gut and stick to our brand objectives.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.angelericellars.com
• Instagram: @angelericellars

Image Credits

Anthony Angeleri
Paola Angeleri

Self photos