It was, as now, a matter of taxes, wine and happiness. The Florentine Philip Mazzei embodied the definition of winemaker given by Hugh Johnson: "Farmer and artist, dreamer and worker, hedonistic and masochistic, alchemist and accounting." At the end of the '700 brought European vines in the New World, he became friend and fellow politician Thomas Jefferson and contributed to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

Two hundred and forty years later the heirs of those Mazzei and Jefferson are found in Virginia: July 3, at Monticello, where it all began. It will create a new vineyard, with plants from the estates of Mazzei: Fonterutoli (110 hectares in the Chianti Classico, 36 biotypes of Sangiovese) and Belguardo (Maremma).

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Source: America-Italy Society of Philadelphia