Ode to a “Revolutionary” Winemaker

In 1760, a 17-year-old Thomas Jefferson matriculated at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. College kids back then liked to drink just as much as they do today, and over the next few years, TJ fell in with two of the most notable vinophiles in the Colonies—Francis Fauquier, the Royal Governor of Virginia, and George Wythe, Jefferson’s law tutor. Both men had expansive cellars, and introduced young Thomas to the pleasures of the finest Old World wines.

Over the next decade, Jefferson’s interest in wine intensified and he built an impressive collection of his own. Then on a fateful day in 1773, one of his wine brokers swung by Monticello with an Italian winemaker named Philip Mazzei. Mazzei had spent 18 years as a wine broker in London and had come to the New World with the intention of cultivating Old World grapes (i.e. vinifera). Indeed, he was on his way to a parcel of land in Augusta, Georgia that had been promised to him by the Brits. When he saw the land at Monticello, however, he immediately recognized it as a primo grape growing location. With a hearty “fottere Georgia!” he and Jefferson struck up a partnership.

Mazzei got some land in exchange for planting and maintaining vineyards at Monticello. Mazzei was very taken with the American cause, which was brewing underground at the time, and endeared himself to many of the founding fathers. So a year later, in 1774, when the Virginia Wine Company was born, Jefferson, George Washington and several other prominent colonists were among its financial backers. But while their ideals were unassailable, their timing was for crap. Two years after the VWC was founded, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, forcing George to spend an inordinate amount of time on the road and making life more than a little dicey for the budding revolutionaries.

By 1778 the plucky colonists found themselves in dire financial straits. Eventually it got so bad that they sent Mazzei, their bestest paisano (who had become quite the American patriot) back to Italy to rustle up some more money for the war effort from his rich Italian friends. Rather than let his estate lie fallow during this time, Mazzei rented his place out to Heinrich Riedesel, a Hessian general captured by the Americans and being held as a prisoner of war. The fact that a POW was allowed to rent out a plush Virginia plantation is just another example of how civilized war was back then. Wait, that’s wrong. Sorry, got confused. War is never civilized. This is an example of the fact that when you’re rich, you get to do whatever the hell you want.

Now this may shock you, but it turns out Mazzei Airbnb-ing his place to an opposition general was not the best idea. Riedesel, in a truly impressive a-hole move, pastured his horses in the baby vineyards Mazzei had so lovingly cared for over the previous four years, utterly destroying them. Jefferson later wrote that the “horses in one week destroyed the whole labour of three or four years, and thus ended an experiment, which, from every appearance, would in a year or two more have established the practicability of that branch of culture in America.” Which imparts an important lesson. Check that “no pets” box.

The Virginia Wine Company would never produce a single bottle of wine, setting a new standard of productivity all other government officials have tried to live up to. On the plus side, the Americans won the war, paving the way for Jefferson to succeed Ben Franklin as French minister. Jefferson was depressed over the death of his wife two years prior, and his friends thought the change of scenery would do him good. He took two major wine expeditions during his five years in France, producing important historical documentation of that period’s winemaking customs along with copious tasting notes.

Jefferson’s cultivation efforts may have failed, but he was enormously influential on American taste in wine, pushing toward the drier, lower alcohol wines favored by the French and Italians as opposed to the syrupy high-test plonk the British liked to throw back. He was instrumental in establishing European style wines as a staple at White House dinners, starting with the George Washington administration. If Mazzei had been given a few more years to get Monticello’s grapes in shape before they were trampled by Teutonic demon horses, who knows how much faster we might have started catching up with Europe on wine quality. The important thing, of course, is that we got there.

Philip Mazzei’s family has been making wine in Tuscany since 1435 and has passed down through an astounding 24 generations. To honor their legendary ancestor, they produced a special bottling, which kicks off our latest batch of reviews...