The Engineer Who Built CLINQ ZERO - Inside the Wine Industry Pt. 1-5

The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast

Antonino Librizi, founder of CLINQ ZERO, shares his journey from a Sicilian bakery background to becoming an aerospace engineer and eventual

Key takeaways

• CLINQ ZERO uses ambient temperature dealcoholization to preserve flavor and aroma, avoiding artificial additives or excessive sugar.
• The brand starts with premium wine as a base, ensuring quality even after alcohol removal.

Main topics

• Anto's upbringing in Sicily and family bakery background
• Career path from aerospace engineering to winery equipment sales

Notable quotes

"The clink, everybody knows what it is associated with positive feeling. And the zero, because nowadays with the soda world, we're already used to associate zero with the without something."

Conclusion

CLINQ ZERO represents a fusion of tradition and innovation, aiming to redefine

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:04) Welcome, welcome to the best five-minute wine podcast with Speaker 1 (0:13) Forrest Kelly. Speaker 2 (0:18) My name is Antonino Librizi. You can call me Anto, and I am the founder of ClinkZero. Speaker 1 (0:24) Okay, let's get a little background about your experience with mom and dad and where you were born and where you grew up. Speaker 2 (0:30) So I'm born and raised in southern Italy, in Sicily, to be specific, and basically spent almost all my life there. Speaker 2 (0:39) After college, I started working across the northern of Italy, so from Milan to Turin. And about 11 years ago, one of the companies I was working with told me, hey, we need you in the U.S. And so I moved to the U.S. Fast forward 11 years after, I am a founder, I am a U.S. citizen, and Dallas, Texas is home. Speaker 1 (1:00) So when I grew up, I grew up and started working when I was like nine or 10 years old, washing cars in the neighborhood, mowing lawns. I had a paper route for about five years. That was kind of, you know, middle America kind of growing up. What kind of jobs and things did you have growing up in Italy? Speaker 2 (1:16) Well, my family, especially my dad, he always used to have a bakery and also a pizzeria. So I would say after school, my free time, I was always helping him with the store. So it could be serving clients or helping on the back end to make the bread or to the cashier or serving customer. So I would say that was... my growing up and also was more like a family business also my grandfather used to the bakery so i kind of grew up across uh bread but also why my breast specifically was almost a life motive of my all my life growing up. Speaker 1 (1:57) Do you look back fondly on your childhood and doing all of those, you know, working like that? I still think Speaker 2 (2:02) that I'm one of those that feel so lucky. I had a fantastic childhood and I was in a very lovely family and plus, you know, it requires a lot to raise a kid. So I was really spending a lot of time with my family members, my aunts, my grandparents. So yeah, very happily. Speaker 1 (2:22) Is there, looking back on that now, is there something that you... miss from Italy is it? Oh don't make me Speaker 2 (2:28) start I think I think I think all all of it obviously the basic one like the food the they said but probably the thing I miss the most is our interaction with people is every second of our life. Like we live more the outdoor. I compare, for example, to Dallas. We are spending a lot of time among people, among each other. I am lucky enough that I travel very often to Italy. I'm over there multiple times a year. I still have all my family, my sister, nephews. So I'm lucky enough to not miss that too long because I just travel a lot there. Speaker 1 (3:10) So you go to school. Did you go to college in Italy? Italy or here in the States? No, here in Speaker 2 (3:15) Italy. I basically did both my bachelor and my master's in aerospace engineering over in Italy, between Rome and northern Italy. Speaker 1 (3:25) Okay, then how did you get into where you are now? No, it's just that, you Speaker 2 (3:30) know, first I went straight to the corporate career and I kind of like changed a lot of the type of businesses. I started from automotive with Fiat. I went for agriculture and ultimately I went to packaging to Tetra Pak. I don't know if you know the carton packages and that's they offer me to move to the US. And the last five years before founding ClinkZero, I've been working as... Over North America for an Italian company in the capital equipment space. So selling machinery to wineries, for example. And so that's how I entered in the wine space. And since this year, I decided to start my own company and start my own brand. And that's how I ended up here. Speaker 1 (4:16) That's funny you mentioned Fiat because I've been on an automotive binge and I've been watching the Ferrari story and I've been watching... Ford versus Ferrari, and they're both talking about Fiat buying, and it's like when I was growing up as a kid, Fiat stood for fix it all the time. Speaker 2 (4:32) Yeah, when I moved to the U.S. 11 years ago, I have to say that Fiat doesn't really, didn't really have a good reputation. Same things for Alfa Romeo. So I'm glad to see that Alfa is back to the U.S. and Maserati is picking up. Let's not talk about Ferrari Luce because I'm reading the reviews and they're pretty mixed. And so there will be a lot of talking on that. Speaker 1 (4:55) One of the first things when you reached out to me, the first thing I did was go to your website. Wow, I got to have this guy on. This website is just... Unbelievable. Let Speaker 2 (5:04) me do one small step back. Let me start saying that I love wine. For me, wine, growing up Italian, it means family, friends, socialization. So it means a lot of these things. So when a few, I've been thinking about starting this company since a couple of years. And when I was closer to get to that, it says I need a name, but I need a name that doesn't make. Everybody thinking just wine. It needs to convey the good part of that, the happy part. And so I come up with the clink zero because I want something more than inclusive and that everybody can understand. So, you know, the clink, everybody knows what it is associated with positive feeling. And the zero, because nowadays with the soda world, we're... we're already used to associate zero with the without something. And so I wanted to convey the message that our product is zero because it's without alcohol. When Speaker 1 (6:07) you kind of ran up by your friends in Italy, your childhood friends and things and said, I'm