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His father's son.

Everything I know about this industry started with a hotel manager in Milan who held me to an impossibly high standard and never once let me coast because of whose son I was.

Where it started​

 

I was born in Rome. My parents met behind a bar, and hospitality was never a career choice, it was the air I grew up breathing. When I was 13, I went to work for my father, a hotel manager in Milan. He was exacting, demanding, and completely uninterested in making it easy for me. One morning I would be on reception, the next in the kitchen, the morning after running breakfast service. Some guests asked if I had a twin brother.

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What he gave me was not just technical knowledge, it was a standard. A belief that if you were going to be in a room, you had better know the room better than anyone else in it. He is still in my life. He is a grandfather to my children now, and the reason I have never been afraid to walk into any room and start from scratch.

 

London

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I moved to London at 19. My English was, by my own admission, terrible; limited to hello, thank you, goodbye, and you are pretty. I started in a high-volume tequila bar in Brixton because I wanted to improve fast. I went to the same restaurant in Camden seven times on my days off until the manager had no choice but to hire me.

That's how most things in my career have gone: persistent, direct, occasionally unreasonable.

Over the following years I worked my way from bar back to general manager, opened and managed several venues across London, ran a cocktail ingredients company, and trained under some of the most respected figures in the industry.

In 2017 I won a Rebel cocktail competition that took me to Kentucky, and changed the direction of everything.​​

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​The Reina Lab

 

Before Kentucky, there was the lab. In 2015 I co-founded the Reina Lab, a company that created custom bitters, vermouth and liqueurs for bartenders, built out of a kitchen and driven by equal parts curiosity and chemistry. Over 100 experimental bitters. Years of research into fermentation, distillation, and flavour extraction. The collaboration that built it came from an unlikely place: a scientist with a PhD in nutrition from Cambridge University who wanted to learn bartending, and a bartender who wanted to understand the chemistry behind what he was making.

We made a deal. She taught me the science. I taught her the craft.

The greatest challenge of my life was creating a vermouth with no added sugar in less than six months, for a man in hospital who could not tolerate high levels of sugar. He was my stepfather.

He died two days after I delivered the bottle to his bedside. He loved it.

Mastrostefano Vermouth, named after him. is a vermouth I made to honour the man who made me who I am.

The lab has been shelved for now. It will reopen.

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Kentucky, and what came next

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The Rebel competition took me to Kentucky in 2017, to Lux Row Distillers and Limestone Branch, at the very beginning of what would become one of the most significant periods of growth in American whiskey history. I watched a distillery be built from the ground up. I shadowed master distillers across Kentucky and Indiana. I shadowed the master blender in Northern Ireland. I visited over 15 distilleries between Kentucky and Indiana. I was in Court Square for the bourbon compass ceremony when the Lux family added their name during the construction of Lux Row. For someone who had come to American whiskey as a student, being present at those moments, and earning the trust of the people behind them, shaped everything that followed.

Over the following years I built one of the most active brand ambassador careers in the UK spirits industry. I worked across portfolios covering Kentucky, Indiana, Washington DC, Mexico, and Ireland. I educated trade and consumers across the UK and Europe. I spoke on stage at festivals from London to Athens. I built the London Bourbon Experience from nothing, a community of bourbon enthusiasts that became, over time, one of the largest and most respected in the UK.

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Now

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I am no longer tied to a single portfolio. I work independently,  with brands that have something genuine in the bottle and the ambition to take it somewhere. My value is not theoretical knowledge of how brand building works. It is a decade of doing it, in the rooms that matter, with the people who decide what gets poured and what gets remembered.

If you want to understand what I can do for your brand, the best place to start is a conversation.

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