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In 2008, the Mazzei Vineyard in Siena, Italy, introduced Philip Cabernet Sauvignon.
Named in honor of Philip Mazzei, an Italian merchant turned diplomat in the 1700s, the vintage has received favorable reviews from critics and has been described as having a savory complexity, soft and richly textured.
The winery states on its website that the wine “embodies the ‘New World’ spirit of Tuscan winemaking, best represents the revolutionary character of Philip Mazzei, and expresses the Mazzei family’s desire to pursue life, liberty and happiness.”
Mazzei, who befriended Thomas Jefferson and became his neighbor, and who rubbed shoulders with Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Mason and other influential figures in the American Revolution, has been honored in the United States too for his patriotic service during and after the Revolutionary War. A 40 cent U.S. airmail stamp with his image was issued in 1980 to commemorate his 250th birthday.
Born Dec. 25, 1730, in the Tuscany region of Italy, Mazzei had many interests, including medicine, philosophy, winemaking and writing. He was working as a merchant in London when he was introduced to Thomas Jefferson.
“I contracted a friendship with Franklin and, through him, with other people from the colonies, which now make up the Republic of the United States. One of them was Mr. Thomas Adams, a Virginian, who, being a great friend of Mr. Jefferson, was instrumental in my becoming acquainted with him some years before we actually met,” Mazzei wrote in his 1813 memoir, Philip Mazzei: My Life and Wanderings.
The first in-person meeting between Mazzei and Jefferson took place in 1773 when Mazzei sailed to Virginia to test the growing conditions for wine grapes and other Mediterranean crops and to learn firsthand about the American pursuit of independence.
“For some time, my new American friends, and especially Dr. Franklin and Mr. Thomas Adams, had been advising me to go and live among them,” he wrote in his memoir. “I was afraid their government was a bad copy of the English and consequently that the foundation of their freedom was even less solid. However, both Franklin and Adams showed me that there was not aristocracy; that the people did not have their eyes dazzled by the splendor of the throne; that the head of every family cast his vote to elect and could be elected; that they had their own local laws; and that they adopted only those English laws that they found suitable.”
Jefferson, a wine enthusiast himself, urged Mazzei to try winemaking in Albemarle County and granted him some land adjoining his Monticello estate for a home. Mazzei purchased about 700 more acres by 1778 and named his farm Colle, Italian for hill.
In addition to grapes, the farm produced “fifty-day Indian corn and winter wheat.”
Mazzei wrote that the wine experiment started well but was doomed by a late frost in its second year. The operation was later obliterated by horses belonging to captured German general Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, who was allowed to rent Colle while his troops were held in the Albemarle Barracks.
Mazzei spent much of his time away from Colle, leaving it in the hands of people he brought with him from Italy. “I was glad my men understood my instructions and carried them out,” he wrote.
One of the people who came with Mazzei was Carlo Bellini, who was appointed the first professor of modern languages at the College of William and Mary. Another was Anthony Giannini, a gardener and vigneron. Giannini came as an indentured servant with his wife and child and planned to go back to Italy at the end of his contract. Giannini sued Mazzei and Jefferson when he was unable to leave the U.S., lost the case, raised a large family and lived out his life in Albemarle County, where he has many descendants.
Among Mazzei’s diversions from Colle was being elected to the vestry of St. Anne’s Parish in Albemarle County six months after his arrival. As a member of the vestry, a body of local elites who governed Anglican parishes, Mazzei began speaking in various churches about Jefferson’s ideas on religious freedom and signed a “petition of dissenters” — a request from various religious groups for the disestablishment of the Church of England and the taxes that supported it — which was presented to the General Assembly’s Committee on Religion.
Anglican ministers, Mazzei wrote in his memoir, “could not bear being placed on an equal footing with those of other denominations and reduced to being maintained by the voluntary contributions of their parishioners after having been up to then maintained by the State.”
In 1775, he joined the “Independent Company” of Albemarle County volunteers after the British landed at Hampton. (See our earlier story on the Battle of Hampton.)
“At the beginning of hostilities there were not rifles,” he wrote. “We had to use our hunting pieces and each of us had to have a mold to make bullets for his. But there it really proved true that necessity is the mother of invention, for in less than a year, all war instruments were being made throughout the Colonies no less well than in the London Tower, and rarely was a farmer seen that did not know how to make gunpowder.”
During the march to Hampton, Mazzei met James Madison: “Midmorning the next day on crossing into adjoining Orange County we met two young men sent by their Company to agree on a meeting place before going on to Hampton. They were the Madison brothers; the elder was James and he is now President of the United States.”
He also met Patrick Henry, who was captain of another independent company. Henry let the Albemarle volunteers know the British had retreated from Hampton and that they could return to their homes.
The march toward Hampton was as close as Mazzei came to taking up arms and by 1778 Jefferson and others thought he would be most helpful as a foreign diplomat and thus he was sent to borrow money for Virginia from the Grand Duke of Tuscany and to gather useful political and military information. The State of Virginia agreed to pay him six hundred luigi a year between 1779 and 1784 for his services.
In a letter to John Hancock about the appointment, Jefferson wrote that Mazzei “possesses first rate abilities. He has been a zealous whig from the beginning and I think may be relied on perfectly in point of integrity. He is very sanguine in his expeditions of the services he could render us on this occasion and would undertake it on a very moderate appointment.”
Mazzei’s mission got off to an inauspicious beginning when he was captured by a British privateer.
“I had a memorandum book in which I noted what I had to attend to in the various parts of Europe, the words being so abbreviated that nobody else could make out what they meant,” he recalled in his memoir. “I used the same method in transcribing therein my credentials and instructions, which I then put in a bag weighted with lead, to make sure they would not fall into the hands of the enemy.
“We left in the afternoon, and the following morning, when some thirty miles off shore, I saw an English privateer coming toward us, which seemed to have been lying in wait for us. I went down to my cabin with my little bag in hand and as soon as the privateers came alongside, I threw it overboard without anyone’s noticing.
“My captain was a Scotchman who had led people in Virginia to believe that he was on the side of the Americans. I did not like his physiognomy the minute I saw him, and he clearly proved to me that I had not been mistaken. … There surely was an understanding between him and the privateer commander, for I heard the latter say to him, ‘I expected you yesterday.'”
Mazzei eventually made it to Italy, but he was unable to convince the Grand Duke to financially back the U.S. Having become a naturalized citizen of Virginia, Mazzei returned to America in 1783 in hopes of receiving a consular post. The appointment never came and he left Virginia for the last time in 1785.
After his departure, Mazzei maintained a close relationship with many of his former compatriots, including Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Relying on his Virginia connections for material, Mazzei published a four-volume history of the Colonies in 1788 in French. The book was regarded as the truth about the American Revolution, offsetting British propaganda and French misinformation.
Upon hearing of Mazzei’s death in July 1816, Jefferson wrote to Thomas Appleton, the U.S. Consul in Italy, “Your letters … brought me the first information of the death of my antient friend Mazzei, which I learn with sincere regret. he had some peculiarities, & who of us has not? but he was of solid worth; honest, able, zealous in sound principles moral & political, constant in friendship, and punctual in all his undertakings. he was greatly esteemed in this country.”
If Philip Cabernet Sauvignon had been available then, Jefferson may have even raised a glass in honor of his friend.
The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia was a valuable resource in writing this story, as were staff at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.