The Aperitivo Without the Alcohol with Melanie Masarin
Everything is the Best
Dear Media, Pia Baroncini
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week I sat down with my long-time friend Melanie Masarin, the French-born founder of Ghia, the non-alcoholic aperitif that quietly changed the way we think about drinking. Melanie is someone I've turned to for advice over the years, and getting to finally sit down and go deep with her on how she built one of the most aesthetically singular brands of our time was something I've wanted to do for a long time.
Melanie grew up around the ritual of the aperitivo, summers near the Mediterranean where a drink before dinner was never really about alcohol. It was about slowing down, gathering, being present. When she stopped drinking, she couldn't find anything worth holding in her hand. So she made it herself.
We talked about what it actually takes to build something from scratch, the 55 formulations before she landed on the one, the $900k she raised from her own network before anyone else believed in it, and how she turned sobriety into something genuinely aspirational rather than a compromise. Ghia was never a mocktail brand. It was always a worldview.
This is a conversation about taste, restraint, obsession, and what happens when you build something that didn't exist yet.
Produced by Dear Media
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify |
| 0:05.0 | is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes |
| 0:10.8 | that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping |
| 0:15.5 | solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scaleups, in-person, and on the go. Shopify is made for |
| 0:22.8 | entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. |
| 0:30.3 | The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Okay, I just want to give everybody context that Melanie and I met up. How many hours ago? |
| 0:51.0 | We've been yapping for two and a half hours ago to do this podcast. And there was a studio mix-up so we've been walking around Soho and yapping for the last two and a half hours. So it's going to be funny to transition into it. I'm like, what didn't we cover in our social? Like, what are we going to talk about? Also, I'm really caffeinated now. I know. That shot of espresso really. Yeah. I know. |
| 1:11.8 | Do you drink a lot of coffee? |
| 1:12.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:13.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:13.8 | Same. |
| 1:14.6 | But not on, |
| 1:15.1 | do you drink going on an empty semi? Do you know better? Oh, no. No, a few days a week, I'm like, I know I can handle it. I love take me to space, you know? I know. I know. I love that feeling. |
| 1:23.5 | I love that time. |
| 1:24.4 | And then for two days, I'm like, |
| 1:25.6 | Rocky's marcher, Rockies mantra. |
| 1:27.7 | It's my redemption matcha. |
| 1:29.6 | But then, you know. |
| 1:30.1 | People love Rockies. |
| 1:31.1 | It's the best quality. That's so nice. Yeah. Well, we've been friends for many years. And, you know, we often talk about work, but we don't talk about work. And I honestly don't really like to talk about work on this podcast that much. Like, when we do founder interviews, I'm always like, I don't want to talk about it. But I have, I do have like so many questions for you or just things that I think people should know because we have spent the last two and half hours being like, I don't think people really understand how hard it is to be an entrepreneur and like what a nightmare it is and like the logistics that you deal with And like literally right before you turned the mic on, she was, we were talking about like shipping costs. |
| 2:04.7 | And like you don't think about the fact that like the price of oil has gone up. |
| 2:08.1 | So the price of like shipping your goods is going to be, you know, it's like it's this constant influx. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dear Media, Pia Baroncini, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dear Media, Pia Baroncini and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.