Not a theorist.
An operator.

Greg Martellotto is an Italian-American kid from Dallas — his father's family is from Puglia, the heel of Italy — who grew up in a house that smelled like stewing tomatoes, onions, and garlic, everyone bickering over the last piece of bread to mop the sauce. When his dad got sick and the homemade cooking gave way to freezer food, Greg, the baby of the family, started shadowing his mom at the stove so he could eat well again. By high school he was throwing dinner parties; at Stanford he ran the student dining hall and once cooked for 125.

A public-health master's pointed him toward medical school. He skipped it — and spent years and 50-plus countries chasing the best meal and bottle he could find, once camping on a hill outside Florence just to afford a single Michelin lunch. He turned that obsession, and a lifelong love of gathering people around a table, into Big Hammer Wines.

Twenty-plus years later he owns the Martellotto winery in Santa Barbara County, imports direct from wineries around the world through One Vine, and tastes up to 5,000 wines a year. He built Big Hammer into a serious national DTC platform — so when he talks about email revenue, club retention, or what actually converts an online wine buyer, it comes from live operating data, not a slide.

Today he puts all of it — production, ecommerce, wholesale, brand, AI, and two decades of palate — to work for wineries and associations navigating a market that no longer rewards tradition alone. His line is love plus time equals mastery; after all of it, he'll still tell you he feels like he's snorkeling in an ocean he'll never fully know.