Ciao Bruto was founded in 2022 by Sam Bilbro, Courtney Humiston and Thomas DeBiase; three friends in life and colleagues at Idlewild Wines in sunny Healdsburg CA. We were longing for a wine shop full of organic and biodynamic wines from Italy and France in our quaint little city, so we decided to open one and fill it with delightful wines made by wonderful people.
Along the way we've also purveyed more than one hundred selections of tinned fish and conservas, mono-floral honeys, numerous traditional DOP Balsamico of Modena and Reggio Emilia, as well as our favorite pastas made from heirloom varieties of semola di grano duro.
Some things you will not find at Ciao Bruto:
Wine Scores. The amount of effort it takes to cultivate land and farm it organically by hand, grow grapes, harvest fruit, make wine, bottle and bring it all to market is staggering. Reducing all of this hard work and effort by countless people to a numerical score is dehumanizing. We don't purchase wine for the shop based on these arbitrary numbers and we will certainly never market and sell our wines with them either.
The word "Natural." We prefer to speak of wine with a more inclusive vocabulary. Describing something as natural implicitly indicts other things as not natural. The wines we sell at Ciao Bruto are always organically farmed, and run the spectrum from zero intervention to minimal intervention, without prescriptive winemaking measures.
Our focus is always squarely on the farming, and the rich cultural traditions and history that have allowed these people and places to persevere in bringing us some of the most interesting wines imaginable.
Life is so rich... Ciao Bruto!!!