Thomas Jefferson and Filippo Mazzei

In Thomas Jefferson’s time it was still necessary to import good table wine, and Jefferson did so with great enthusiasm. He believed that everyone should drink wine, since “in countries which use ardent spirits drunkenness is the mortal vice; but in those which make wine for common use you never see a drunkard”.

To make European wines more affordable, Jefferson as President prompted Congress to lower their import duties. Nearly twenty years earlier, as Ambassador to France, he had taken time off to study winemaking. And earlier still, in 1773, he had undertaken a visionary program of viticulture at Monticello.

Jefferson had doubts about the economic viability of winemaking in Virginia, especially in view of tobacco’s then dominant role in agriculture, but decided that the experiment should be carried out nonetheless. He encouraged his friends and neighbors to do the same.

Filippo Mazzei, a Tuscan from Poggio a Caiano, near Florence, oversaw Jefferson’s experimental vineyards. Working in London as a wine importer and exporter, Mazzei had met Thomas Adams, a Virginia merchant. With Adams’s financial backing, Mazzei agreed to come to Virginia to establish a plantation of 4000 acres for the production of silk, olives, and vineyards. Upon Mazzei’s arrival in late 1773, Adams introduced him to Jefferson, who offered him 2000 uncleared acres as well as 50 acres adjoining Monticello on which Mazzei would build his home, Colle ("hill," in Italian). Mazzei’s crew of winemakers, ten indentured servants from Tuscany, were summoned from Williamsburg upon his acceptance of Jefferson’s offer.

The point of Mazzei’s enterprise was to "jump-start" the Virginia wine industry by making wine from vines of the best vineyards in Europe, leaving the cultivation of native grapes —essential, both Mazzei and Jefferson thought, to the future of wine production in Virginia— to the future. The project failed. Frost killed the majority of the vines the first year, and Mazzei, never a farmer himself, was swept up in revolutionary fervor and abandoned cultivation.

In 1779 Mazzei rented Colle to Baron von Riedesel, a Hessian officer recently captured at Saratoga. According to Jefferson, “Riedesel’s horses in one week destroyed the whole labor 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."

Jefferson’s interest in winemaking did not end with Mazzei’s departure and the destruction of the vineyard at Colle. One of Mazzei’s Tuscan workers, Antonio Giannini, stayed on at Monticello where, as Jefferson’s estate manager from 1778 until 1786, he continued to experiment with vines despite repeated failure. Jefferson was still importing cuttings as late as 1802, despite the fact that none of them lived for long. An 1807 version of Giannini’s vineyard at Monticello was restored in 1985.

In the end, Jefferson seems to have given up on growing European grape varieties, which he said in 1809 “will take centuries to adapt to our soil and climate”. He turned instead to the Alexander grape, possibly a chance hybrid between the American Vitis labrusca and a plant of Vitis vinifera; by 1811 his vineyards had been replanted with 165 cuttings of the Alexander. Jefferson seems to have become reconciled to the “foxy” taste and smell of American grapes, a taste that few wine-drinkers have ever liked. It may be, as Hugh Johnson has suggested, that Jefferson in his seventies was “perhaps forgetting the taste of French wine.”

Crafted by G. Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu (1687-1744), this violin belonged to Antonio Giannini. He and his sons played the violin, drum., fife, and flute for Jefferson and others.

A Jefferson-designed fruit press. Although it is known to have pressed apples, it is also possible the press was used in wine production at Monticello.

Filippo (Philip) Mazzei

Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1747-1792), He granted Mazzei permission to take "all kinds of plants, such as vine-shoots, pear, filbert and other plants, with their respective grafts and seeds, except, however, mulberry plants." In return, the Grand Duke would receive "three deer and a live rattlesnake, fifteen years old and packed in sawdust" and shipped from the American Colonies. He did not grant permission to take workers from Tuscany, but Mazzei found willing helpers in the surrounding provinces. Leopold I would become Holy Roman Emperor in 1790.

Grand Duke Leopoldo's permission for Mazzei to take people and plants out of Tuscany.

Port of Leghorn during the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Mazzei, Giannini, and the other Italian servants sailed from Leghorn to Williamsburg, September 2, 1773 aboard the large frigate, "Triumph."