Leonardo LoCascio, CEO and President of Winebow, Inc., was born in Italy and has spent most of his adult life in the United States. He graduated cum laude from New York University with a BS in International Business, and proceeded to the University of Chicago where he earned an MBA.

He has an extensive background in business and finance, including three years in corporate finance at Rockwell International; working as a Management Consultant for McKinsey & Company; and culminating with four years as a Vice President at Citibank.

Though successful in his career in business and finance, he left Citibank in 1980 to begin the wine importing and distributing company, Winebow Inc. Says LoCascio, "I came from a family of entrepreneurs - my father and grandfather - and I grew up in that environment, so I decided to look for something that brought me closer to my roots and was also more suitable to my personality."

Today Winebow's portfolio contains 3,000+ wines from all over the world, which are distributed in New York and New Jersey. The distributorship has recently expanded into Pennsylvania and Washington DC and is continually growing the portfolio of wines in those markets. The company also acts as a national importer of Italian wines, with a portfolio of wines from 75 Italian producers, distributed nationally. Winebow has earned a reputation in the industry for representing high quality wines of good value, tenets that form the basis of Leonardo LoCascio's criteria for selecting wines to import.

According to the renowned wine writer Robert M. Parker Jr., "Winebow is one of America's most successful and well-known importers/distributors of fine wines. LoCascio, who has never been content to rest on his laurels, continues to explore Italy's backwaters, discovering increasingly intriguing wines from areas outside the two renowned viticultural regions of Tuscany and Piedmont. LoCascio has pressed his producers to move away from interventionalistic winemaking, toward more natural bottling and less traumatizing wine producing techniques. To his credit, he has never hesitated to represent producers who may have only a handful of cases to sell, recognizing there is always a healthy market place for high quality, limited production wines from unknown producers."

Awards & Accolades

In December of 1998, Parker named Leonardo LoCascio, "One of the most influential wine personalities of the last 20 years."

" ... In the arena of Italian wine, there are a handful of importers and wine brokers who play a decisive role in the choice and quality of the wines available to the consumer. Among those who make a difference, none is more important that Leonardo LoCascio, owner of Winebow, Inc." -Edward Beltrami, Wine News April/May 2000

"When it comes to Italy, no importer has had more success delivering new and exciting wines to the American market than Leonardo LoCascio..." -T.J. Foderaro - The Star Ledger, Wednesday July 28, 1999

" ... In the 1990's, Leonardo LoCascio's importing company, Winebow emerged as one of the most dynamic importers of Italian wine. " -William Nesto, MW (Master of Wine) Massachusetts Beverage Business, July 1999

"The Golden Grape awards ... Food & Wine salutes the visionaries in America who are not only changing the way we think about wine but also determining what we'll be drinking in the 21st century" -Awarded to Leonardo LoCascio by Food & Wine Magazine, October 1998

"In addition to representing top producers from the classic zones of Piedmont, Tuscany, and Veneto, this house has a great selection of up-an coming wineries from Italy's southern wine regions." -Andrea Immer, MS, Esquire's guide to Italy in America 2001

Leonardo LoCascio and Winebow named, "One of the Finest Companies in the State for the year 2002." Each year, the New Jersey's Finest programs honors 25 leading privately held companies. Winners come from all fields of business and represent the best of the best of the state's privately held companies. -NJBIZ - New Jersey Business Magazine, 2002

Fairleigh Dickinson asked him to deliver the 2002 Richard M. Clarke Distinguished Entrepreneurial Lecture. The awards ceremony for the 2002 East Coast Entrepreneur Awards Program. The previous lecturers were all well established business owners in New Jersey

June 4th 2003, Leonardo won the American Dream Award (someone foreign born who has made contributions in American society) given by the International Institute of New Jersey in Jersey City.

He is a finalist in the very distinquisted Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year Award to be held June 19th. He is up against some of New Jersey's top business people.

Leonardo has also been nominated for Fairleigh Dickinson's 2003 New Jersey Family Business of Year Award for later on this year.