Giuliana Rancic's Giuliana Prosecco

Real Italian Prosecco for real Chicago-based Data-Driven Marketers

As a child, I always thought Giuliana Rancic was the most elegant woman in the world. She was the pinnacle of journalism to me. She always felt so natural on red carpets with E! News, asking the deeply important questions like: “did you ever pull any on-set pranks?” She also was on Fashion Police with Joan Rivers, so I naturally felt a soft spot for her.

But Giuliana, who had been an anchor on E! for almost two decades, has not really been on TV recently. She left her red carpets duties at E! last year. Nobody has given a concrete reason for the falling out, but she never really recovered from a racist comment she made in 2015 about Zendaya’s dreadlocks smelling like patchouli and weed. Oh no!

Mother mama.

But she is now onto bigger and better things: opening Italian restaurants in mid-sized American markets. Since 2012, she has owned the Italian restaurant RPM in Chicago, alongside her husband Bill Rancic, the first winner of our Cheeto-in-Chief’s show The Apprentice (as part of winning, Bill Rancic led the construction of Trump Tower in Chicago). Giuliana Prosecco was founded in 2017 essentially as a house brand for the restaurant.

Giuliana is a serial entrepreneur, which is a term I’ve heard on Shark Tank before. She started out young: as she details in her memoir, after 9/11 she put her life savings into selling “FUCK THE TERRORISTS” bumper stickers on Ventura Boulevard.

And in addition to her Prosecco and restaurants, she also has a line of HSN duster coats, and if you really want, you can shop her personal closet of $12 XXS tunic shirts. I guess starting weird businesses is the only thing to do when you are a soft-cancelled E! News host.

It’s hard to overstate how random it is that Giuliana is a successful Midwestern restaurateur. It’s like when you lose touch with someone from high school only to find out that they make custom rugs with rappers’ faces on them.

But such is life when you marry a man who looks like if American Psycho took place in a regional office in Dallas.

However random it is, RPM is successful. Bill and Giuliana have expanded to 9 restaurants in the expanding markets of West Palm Beach, Las Vegas and Washington D.C.

The original RPM is a total sexy restaurant with two floors, a place to see and be seen by the who’s-who of Chicago’s middle management community. It looks like the type of restaurant where a Love Is Blind couple would go for a big date and get into an argument that reveals they are both awful, as far as people go.

But I would kill to have a Mama DePandi's bucatini pomodoro. Everything at the restaurant is like a normal sized portion of food but on a huge plate with like a drizzle of balsamic and a leaf garnish. It is a retro-2009 type of place. Yet their restaurants randomly get very high ratings on The Infatuation, so I am happy for the Rancics.

Do you know what I mean?

Giuliana founded Giuliana Prosecco in 2017 in partnership with Terlato Wines, which has one of the larger wine portfolios in Napa. Using Glera grapes grown in Northern Italy, Giuliana described how she “wanted to create an authentic Prosecco that honored [her] Italian heritage.”

Obviously Giuliana is an Italian princess. But she’s also like actually Italian. Giuliana DePandi was born in Naples (Italy, not Florida!) and immigrated to America when she was 7. Giuliana DePandi is the most beautiful name in the world. Giuliana DePandi is a name that would make Teresa Giudice weep.

And this is not Giuliana’s first wine rodeo. In 2014, she founded XO, G, a line of single-glass wines. As the press release stated, “Rancic discovered an innovative wine package called StackTek, which consists of four prefilled, individually sealed, shatterproof, stemless wine glasses that snap together to form a perfect equivalent of a 750mL bottle.”

I love the idea of Giuliana Rancic discovering an innovative package. Did she find the innovative package on the ground and shout “Eureka”?

That wine brand debuted in 1,200 Walmarts around the country, but quickly flopped. The XO, G domain name is now some random girlie’s lifestyle blog — a “little place of heaven when I try to escape the crudeness of the world” — run by a bot named Ema. My blog is also run by a bot named Ema.

Like XO, G, I am not sure how well Giuliana Prosecco is doing. The wine’s Instagram, which has an admirable 45,000 followers, gets upwards of 24 likes per post.

It was incredibly difficult to find this wine in person. I went by myself on a Tuesday at 4 PM to the Dead Rabbit, a bar near Wall Street that claims it is the “world’s most awarded pub.” This was, essentially, the only place to get a cold glass of Giuliana in New York.

The first thing you taste about this wine is that it is sweet. And that’s also the last thing you taste about this wine too.

But it’s not a terrible version of prosecco, which just isn’t ever good to me. You definitely get notes of a crisp golden apple and pear, and it’s more complex than it needs to be for a $22 bottle of wine.

So if you ever find yourself at a regional summit for business development and leadership sponsored by Mark Cuban and the government of Saudi Arabia, I’m sure Bill and Giuliana Rancic will be there hawking this wine out of little taster cups. Try it.