Hi! I’m liz — former wine bar owner, bubbles enthusiast, product leader (for restaurants), and co-founder of Pizza Wine.
I hated wine until I tried a fancy dessert bottle at a friend’s parents’ NYE party. I’d never heard of it, but I kept that bottle through 5 years and 3 apartment moves. I was obsessed.
From then, my interest was in the wonder of it — how could one fruit (grapes) make so many types of wine?! My friends and I started tasting and playing with wine, eventually opening Fortnight Wine Bar in Providence, RI in 2016. We filled the bar with well-made wines by our favorite winemakers, many of whom we had visited at the winery or helped in the vineyard.
A few years in, I was invited to a wine dinner in NYC for a sparkling wine producer that we love. Running late, I ran 20 minutes through the Lower East Side to walk in as the only woman, and the only person not wearing a suit (except for the winemaker). That’s when I realized that wine culture “in the real world” was a lot different than what we had built at Fortnight.
Fortnight was specifically designed to make people feel welcome. It was casual, intentionally a little chaotic, but never condescending. We had a $6 white and a $6 red that you could order knowing that it would have a story, that it would taste good, and that it would be responsibly made with no weird stuff added.
Rob is my fiancé and Pizza Wine co-founder; we met when he walked into Fortnight, notebook in hand, to work on the wine list for his new restaurant. He spent years cooking in fine-dining kitchens, joking that chefs on meat station make friends because they have the best snacks. His wine moment came when he traded a crispy lamb end for a sip of red wine from the sommelier, and the two together (this lamb and this red) were so much better as a pair than they were apart. Since then, wine has been a part of Rob’s work and passion.
For Rob, fine dining felt as exclusive as that wine dinner I went to in New York. He moved back to RI to open Pizza Marvin (now a two-time James Beard nominee!), then Club Frills, then Rollers, all a reaction to the often inaccessible world of fine dining. The concepts are casual, fun, and irreverent but with the same attention to quality and sustainability that he learned working in high-end kitchens.
The tension between taking wine seriously and not taking yourself too seriously is what led us to Pizza Wine. We wanted a wine that could live in both worlds: something made with intention but built for real life. Why can’t something that’s snobby and exclusive (like wine) pair with something that we all know and love (like pizza)?
Sparkling red was the answer. It’s playful, a little unexpected, and impossible to overthink. Italians have been drinking it with pizza for hundreds of years. We couldn’t find one that tasted the way we wanted, so we made it ourselves.
