In the late summer of 1773, a young Genoese farmer named Antonio Molini stood at the port of Leghorn and made a decision most men of his time would not have dared to consider. He turned his back on everything he knew: his village, his language, the terraced hillsides where his family had grown vines for generations. He boarded a ship called the Triumph, bound for Virginia.
He was, by most accounts, around twenty-three years old.
Philip Mazzei, the Florentine merchant and visionary who chartered the Triumph, had spent years recruiting skilled Italian farmers to carry a dream across the Atlantic: the first wine company in America. He had hoped to find fifty men. He found fewer than a dozen. Many potential recruits had been held back by fear and rumor. According to family historians who compiled the record of this voyage, it was said in the Italian provinces that in the Colonies the stars would fall out of the sky and kill the workers in the fields below. Antonio Molini was not among those who stayed behind.
The manifest of the Triumph was modest. Antonio Giannini, a farmer from Lucca, traveled with his wife and infant daughter. Francesco Modena, Giannini's brother-in-law. Giovanni Strobia. Vincenzo Rossi, a tailor from Piedmont. And Antonio Molini, noted in the historical record simply as a Genoese farmer, distinguished even among this small band by the word used to describe him. Not peasant. Farmer.
The Triumph sailed September 2, 1773. When the ship arrived in the James River, the Virginia Gazette took note.
"The Lucy, Driver, from Salem, and the Triumph Frigate, Rogers, from Leghorn, are arrived in James river; in the latter, we hear, many gentlemen came paffengers, in order to fettle and cultivate V I N E S in this colony."
Virginia Gazette (Rind), December 2, 1773, p. 2, col. 3 (Source)
Mazzei had secured land in Albemarle County, Virginia, two miles from Monticello. The estate was called Colle. The venture drew thirty-one prominent colonial leaders as investors, among them George Washington, George Mason, and the Royal Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore.
The work that waited for Antonio and the others at Colle was relentless. The hilltop had to be cleared. A fence built around the entire property. Gates constructed wide enough for a loaded wagon to pass through. A road prepared. A large house built for Mazzei, along with four outbuildings. Ten thousand vine cuttings planted. Four thousand olive trees. Silkworm eggs tended through Virginia's unpredictable spring. All of this by a group of four farmers, one tailor, and one woman.
Isaac Granger Jefferson, an enslaved man who worked at nearby Monticello and observed the Colle operation closely, later recalled that the Italian workers raised an abundance of vegetables and cooked more food than any people he had ever seen. He remembered the house they built, the saplings they felled to construct it, the life they made on that hillside.
"The Italian people raised plenty of vegetables, cooked the most victuals of any people Isaac ever see."
Isaac Jefferson, Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, as dictated to Charles Campbell
By January 1779, writing to George Washington from Colle, Mazzei was convinced that Virginia was better suited than any country he knew for the production of wines. Washington replied that summer that he had always believed the climate and soil of Virginia were well suited for vineyards, and that wine would become a valuable article of produce for the region.
Washington was right. He was simply two and a half centuries early.
The wine company at Colle did not survive the Revolution. A late frost in 1774 damaged the young vines. Mazzei left to support the war effort. The oversight he had arranged fell away as the demands of the new republic consumed everyone around it. And the Italian farmers themselves, Antonio Molini among them, enlisted. Mazzei later reflected that his undertaking to make wine at Colle was broken up by several of his people engaging in the army.
Antonio Molini enlisted as Private Anthony Mullins in the 3rd Regiment of Light Dragoons, Virginia Continental Line. He served under Captain Barrett. He fought at the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, one of the pivotal engagements of the Southern Campaign. He was discharged on August 21, 1783, in Richmond, Virginia, after four and a half years of military service.
He never returned to Italy.
On November 2, 1784, in Albemarle County, he married Polley Clark. He then moved west to Tennessee, where he farmed and raised a family. He died in Lincoln County, Tennessee on November 3, 1836, at approximately eighty-six years of age.
But before he left Virginia, he had put down roots that Jefferson himself took note of. In February 1808, Jefferson wrote to his farm manager Edmund Bacon from Washington, directing him to look into a purchase from a neighbor still farming the land between Monticello and Blenheim.
"mr Higginbotham wrote me last month that mr A. Mullins between Monticello & Blenheim had 70. barrels to sell at 10/. you might purchase this if to be had at 2. & 3. months' credit."
Thomas Jefferson to Edmund Bacon, February 23, 1808
Founders Online, National Archives (Source)
Fifty years after the war, a letter arrived at Monticello from Antonio's son William, asking whether anyone there could speak to his father's military service. The reply confirmed what the record already showed: he had been known, he had been remembered, and the name he carried into the New World had not been forgotten.
"I remember well your father Anthony Mullins, or little Anthony as he was called, his Italian name being Antonio Molini."
Thomas Jefferson to William Mullins, June 24, 1824
Founders Online, National Archives (Source)
In 1981, the owners of Mazzei's original property at Colle replanted the vineyards. Under the guidance of winemaker Gabrielle Rausse, the hillsides Antonio Molini had cleared by hand more than two centuries before were brought back into cultivation. That property is now Jefferson Vineyards, producing wine within sight of both Colle and Monticello.
What was planted here in 1773 survived a revolution, two centuries of change, and every circumstance that might have ended it. It endured because the land was right, the belief was genuine, and the work was done with care.
Molini Studio is the continuation of that story. Rooted in the same lineage. Guided by the same conviction that Virginia hospitality, offered with precision and warmth, is among the finest experiences this country produces.
Some things, tended well, only deepen with time.