Ashley Graham Wants to Change the Way You Think About Italian Wine

Ashley Graham has been drinking lambrusco for more than a decade, but the idea of making her own wine didn’t hit until she was having dinner at Bestia in Los Angeles. She and her business partner ordered a bottle of the sparkling wine and started talking about how hard it was to find the kind of lambrusco she loved—crisp and not overly sweet. 

“We said, why don’t we just make this ourselves? We can’t find it except at trendy restaurants or at little niche wine stores,” says Graham, known for her work as a model and TV host. 

Within weeks, she had messaged a winemaker in Emilia‑Romagna, Italy, booked a flight, and kicked off the process that would lead to building her own brand, Lucci.

The result is a dry, sparkling red launching this month, made from two of the region’s classic lambrusco grapes—salamino and marani—part of a broader family of six traditional varieties. Graham wanted a style that leaned crisp and dry rather than the sweeter versions that once dominated the U.S., something authentically Italian but easy to drink chilled.

Lucci ($20) also lands on the lower‑ABV side of the spectrum, another reason she likes it as an easy, anytime kind of red. Traditional lambrusco styles often sit well below the alcohol levels of bigger reds, which helps keep the whole experience lighter.

“I wanted to make sure that I didn’t make anything that was too sweet,” she says. “I really did end up staying purposely on the super dry side, but not so dry that it makes your tongue too dry that you can’t eat anything.”

Part of the appeal for Graham was bringing back a style of wine that once had a huge foothold in the U.S. She points out that lambrusco was very popular in the 1970s and ’80s before the market shifted toward sweeter, mass‑produced versions that tarnished its reputation. Her goal with Lucci was to bring back the drier, bright profile.

For anyone trying lambrusco in this style for the first time, Graham says the reactions tend to land in the same place. “One of them is, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t think that I liked red wine.’ Or another one was, ‘I didn’t know I wanted bubbles.’” 

Chilled and fizzy, it tends to catch people off guard. “They try it and it’s so refreshing,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like you’re drinking red wine.”

She also loves how easily it fits into a meal. “There isn’t anything that Lucci really can’t pair with,” she says. Italian dishes are the obvious match—“lasagna, Parmigiano, pizza, prosciutto”—but she’s tested it far beyond that. “We just had Korean barbecue the other night, and my God, it was perfect. The other night we had Mexican, too, and it was really good with tacos.”

Getting Lucci on store shelves took persistence. “We were told no for a long time,” she says. Wine distributors weren’t sure about taking on lambrusco. Investors wondered whether people were drinking less. But she kept pushing. “We pushed through and prevailed, and here we are launching. It’s crazy—we’re gonna be on a billboard in Times Square.”

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Away from the meetings, the relentless pitching and the uphill sell, wine is woven into her actual life in a much quieter way. She and her husband, filmmaker Justin Ervin, open a bottle most nights—sometimes as part of a date night, sometimes after the kids are asleep, sometimes just to mark the end of a long day.

In the interview, she laughed about how simple their ritual really is: no big production, no elaborate pairing, just the two of them catching up over a glass. It’s the part of wine she loves most—the ease, the connection, the way it fits into the rhythm of her home rather than the other way around.

“An off‑duty night, an on‑duty night, a night alone—when doesn’t wine fit into the picture?”