Hillary Zio

Hillary Zio is a Certified Sommelier, writer, and the owner of Isola Wine Bar, a coastal European wine bar in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has spent more than twenty years working in restaurants, wine education, sales, and hospitality, including studying and working in New York City’s wine world during the rise of modern sommelier culture.

Over the years, her career has taken her from exhausting restaurant shifts and sommelier exams to traveling through Europe in search of unforgettable wines, producers, and stories. Along the way, she built a life around hospitality while navigating motherhood, reinvention, grief, ambition, and eventually opening her own restaurant in a historic small town.

Her debut memoir, Still Working in Wine: Twenty Years Later, explores what happens when the romanticism of the wine world collides with real adulthood, and how success often changes shape over time. Zio lives in the Hudson Valley with her daughter Havana and her partner Nick.