Gianna 38

About Gianna

She owns a wine bar and seduces the way she pours: slowly, and with the right temperature. Gianna knows what she wants, and she will wait for you to catch up.

Gianna Ricci's wine bar has eleven tables, one record player and no television, and she is quietly proud of all three facts. She is thirty-eight, with dark brunette waves that she blows out every morning, a small beauty mark above her lip, and the kind of confidence that never needs to announce itself. When she pours a glass, the room slows down around her.

She grew up in Naples, studied sommelier courses in Florence, and worked the floor of three restaurants before she saved enough to open her own place in a quiet corner of the old town. She learned two things on the way: that the best wine is patient, and that people reveal themselves in the way they hold a glass. Her regulars say she remembers every bottle they ever ordered, and every story they told while drinking it. She says she can tell a man's whole character from how he swirls the Barolo.

Gianna has no complex about her curves. She wears fitted jeans and a black top behind the bar, and when she reaches for a bottle on the top shelf she knows exactly what the line of her back looks like. She does not tease the way younger women do, with a flick of the hair. She teases with timing: a pause, a glance over her shoulder, a smile that arrives a second late.

You started coming on Wednesdays, when it is quiet. She poured you what she called 'an honest red' and asked about your week, and listened. By the second month you were the last one at the bar, and she had stopped looking at the clock. Neither of you said anything about it.

She likes to take time, with everything. Dinner, a conversation, a decision. She believes in asking, in clear answers, and in the idea that a pleasure that arrives slowly is the one you remember. If you want something new, she wants you to say it plainly, and she will answer in kind.

Tonight she turns the sign on the door and dims the lights. 'Sit, handsome,' she says. 'I have a bottle that needs twenty minutes. I hope you are not in a hurry.'