Monticello
931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway
Charlottesvile, VA 22902
(434) 984-9857
www.monticello.org
In 1984, I grafted the vines [for Monticello], but the vines were taken care of like the rest of the orchard…they were taken care of for the people to see them, rather than to make wine. So it was a different story when I came here…I purchased a little crusher, and I was doing it in the barn down here right in a very unsophisticated way. It was very, very basic. But if you have good grapes, it’s not difficult to make good wine. – Gabriele Rausse
Gabriele Rausse came to Virginia in 1976 at the behest of his fellow countryman, Gianni Zonin, who needed a winemaker for his newest venture, Barboursville Vineyards. After a handful of years there, Gabriele left Baboursville to help establish Simeon Vineyards (currently Jefferson Vineyards), just a stone’s throw from Monticello. In 1984, while working at Simeon, he grafted the vines that were used to resurrect Thomas Jefferson’s beloved vineyard. In 1995 he pursued an opportunity to work at Monticello as the estate’s Assistant Director of Gardens and Grounds. Gabriele could not shake his passion for winemaking, however, so in 1997 he established a winery of his own, Gabriele Rausse Winery. Eventually, he was given the opportunity to make wine from the grapes grown at Monticello, a project that he carried out with historical accuracy. Today, Gabriele continues to make wine, both for himself and, when the harvest is good, for Monticello. He’s still consulting, too. For an Italian who never intended to remain in Virginia, he feet are firmly planted in Southern soil.
What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Subject: Gabriele Rausse, Assistant Director of Garden & Grounds at Monticello and proprietor of Gabriele Rausse Winery
Date: June 19, 2008
Location: Monticello - Charlottesville, VA
Interviewer & Photographer: Amy C. Evans
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Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Thursday, June 19, 2008 and I am in Virginia at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, with Gabriele Rausse. And so would you please say your name and what you do here?
Gabriele Rausse: My name is Gabriele Rausse, and I’m Assistant Director of Garden and Grounds. And I do a little bit of everything but mainly propagation of the plants. I’m responsible for that part. These are old plants, which actually are kept at Monticello; they’re not the ones that we produce for resale. And, of course, I’m responsible for the vineyard because that is my background, but I do everything they ask me to do. [Laughs]
Now I understand what brought you to Virginia was the Zonin family and Barboursville Vineyards, is that right?
Yes, I was brought over on April 1976 to start a vineyard in a farm, which was not purchased yet, actually, which the farm was purchased on April 13. It happens to be Jefferson’s birthday, so I remember that after we departed, the money in the bank, we got back—from the purchase we got back a $2 bill. And my boss [Gianni Zonin] was happy. He said, “Well, it’s a good start. [Laughs] So yeah, I was brought over by the Zonin family to start Barboursville Vineyard.
I read also that you have a degree in Agricultural Science from Italy. Can you talk a little bit about your background and what you were doing before you came to Virginia?
Sure. Well I think my father wanted me to be a lawyer, but when I went to the University of Milano to put down my name for what I wanted to do, there were 300 people in front of the lawyer office, and there was none in front of the Agricultural Sciences office, so I decide to go into Agricultural Sciences. And I was raised with a lot of respect for farming, for producing your own food and all these things, even if my father was not a farmer. He was an accountant. Actually, we had two small farms, and everything we ate was coming from the two farms, so I fell in love with what was happening there. And when I finished my university, my first job was actually in a winery, which is Tenuta Santa Margherita, which still exists, actually—the very popular wine in the United States. In the Italian restaurants you always find the Pinot Grigio from Tenuta Santa Margherita. And then I went to the military service. When I came back, I worked in Australia for a while, and I really love Australia, I wanted to go back. And the plan was really to do something in Australia, but it happens that immigration were closed for a couple of years, so while I was waiting, first, I went to France, and I worked south of Paris, actually, in a nursery. And eventually, I had the offer to come to the United States, and I thought it was a good idea to improve my English. So I accepted a trip to the States with the plan of taking off for Australia, as soon as I was getting my visa. And it took, actually, a year and a half to get the visa; I got it in December of ’77. By that time, I was sort of in love with what I was doing in Virginia. And, of course, there was no plan to be successful, so that was even more attractive to me because with the success, there are responsibilities and lots of work. And so I thought it was a nice adventure and I kept going and it ended up to be a success, whether I like it or not.
So, of course, I stayed in Barboursville six years as a Manager and Vice President of the company. I stayed a bit longer as Vice President of the company, but I eventually decided to go in a different direction for many reasons that maybe I shouldn’t go into now. Maybe I’ll write them in a book, and then you will find them after I die. [Laughs] But I decided to move forward, and I came to another farm, which is not far from here. Actually, I started another vineyard, another nursery, another winery, and I was there until 1995, when the pressure of the wine industry, the politics of the wine industry started to be too much for me, and those are things that I don’t like. And so to come to Monticello was really to take a break for all what was happening. And, well, it wasn’t so much a break because also at Monticello there were a few vines that I actually grafted in 1984 for them and so I started to dance again with my grapes and my wine. I started my own winery, because at Monticello I wasn’t busy enough, so I had to do something else. And I started to do a lot of consulting, and so now I find myself working twenty-four hours a day sometimes, but I’m happy with what I do.
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The Zonin family is one of the largest winemakers in Italy, is that right?
Yes, that is correct. They have about, I think, almost 10,000 acres in grapes. In different parts of Italy, actually. Even if the beginning was in—near Vicenza [Italy], where I’m from and where the industry started, but they decided eventually to expand and have a vineyard in eight other regions in Italy. So they are very well established, and I have to say that they were very brave to have ventured themselves in coming to Virginia. I don’t think—well, first of all, nobody was speaking any English of the Zonin family, so I was also the interpreter for their, [Laughs] you know, desire of communicating with the accountant, the bank, and lawyer—whoever we were supposed to talk to, so it was a very nice adventure, I have to say.
And how did they find you? How did they know to come to you to bring you to Virginia?
Well, we lived three miles away one from the other [in Italy], and they always knew my family, and my father was actually in the Rotary Club with Gianni Zonin, who is the person who brought me here, so I think it was a little bit—you say they conspired to bring me here, is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, I think my father could not control me, and so he decided with Gianni Zonin to put me to work and do something, which makes sense. [Laughs] So that’s, I think, how I end up here. I think they were glad that I didn’t go to Australia. It was a bit too far.
So can you remember what you thought of Virginia when you first arrived here and the terroir [the special characteristics recognized in a grape, as a result of geographical and environmental influence] and the thought of starting a vineyard here?
Yeah. Well, there is one thing, first of all, that, before we came, we looked at the climatic condition of Virginia and, you know, the average rainfall is the same of my town [in Vicenza, Italy]: forty-three inches. The average climate is the same as my town. The extremes were slightly different. The general look is what you find in colli di Berici, which are all the hills around Vicenza. So when I came, it looked like a very familiar place. And the thing, which, of course, was the most unexpected, were the high temperature, you know, some time in the summer and the cold temperature some time in winter, which end up to be not so deadly for the vines probably because they didn’t last a long time, but it was certainly scary to see the thermometer to go below zero or to go over 100 degrees for a night. So that was different.
For the rest, you know, I have to say that I was very well accepted by the community. They laughed a lot at me and—because what I was doing and they said, “Well, if it could have been done, somebody else would have it done.” And I remember when I went to visit the Commissioner of Agriculture in June of ’76 with my boss, and of course Gianni Zonin was speaking very slowly so I could translate and, of course, it was translated with my mouth but also with my hands a little bit. So the Commissioner of Agriculture, at the end of my fifteen-minutes talk, he opened the drawer, and he decided to answer with his hand, and he pulled out a box of cigar, and he said, “The future of Virginia is tobacco and not wine,” which made us to understood that it was time for us to leave his office. [Laughs] And I went back to him in 1978. Actually, he called me and asked me to go there and plan to spend a day in Richmond. And I went to his office, and there were two dozen scientists from Virginia Tech and from USDA and each of them explaining why what I was doing didn’t make any sense and could not be successful. So the plant pathologist gave me a list of all the diseases that affect the vines, and the virologist gave me a list of all the viruses which affect the vines, and when they finished their six-hour talk, I told the commissioner, “I’m sorry that you had to disturb so many people to tell me to go home, but I’m in the Land of Freedom, and I don’t disturb anybody, so I should be allowed, I think, to continue with my experiment.” And I remember that the professor of plant pathology for Virginia Tech, he stood up and he said, “As long as you throw away your money or the money of the people you work, for that is perfectly all right with us. The moment you get a Virginia farmer excited about something that doesn’t make any sense, we have the moral duty to stop you.”
And so I said, “Okay. I understand. And when they come to ask me what I’m doing, I’ll just tell them I don’t know what I’m doing,” and that was the finish—I mean the end of our six-hour conversation, if you want. And I have to say that it took a while for the people to start to believe that vinifera grapes could be grown, but because we were not successful in the first year when we planted the first vines in Barboursville, we lost about fifty percent, we decided to start our own nursery. And that’s really what changed because—the whole situation—because we started to produce grafted vines, which had no problem to go through the winter, and we realized that was certainly one of the problems that Virginia had.
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So there were a couple of wineries here at that time, were there not?
Okay. When I arrived in ’76, I think the only license which was issued was Farfelu Vineyard. I think Piedmont Vineyard got it in 1978. Meredith got it, maybe in ’78 and maybe ’77. And then there was Mountain Cove, which I think got it more or less ’77—’78. So I think we were fifth license issue in Virginia. There was also a winery in Petersburg, which was making, I call it synthetic wine, because it was made with sugar, water, and acid. And I don’t remember the name, but they were producing this, you know, wine which didn’t have anything to do with grapes? So we were certainly the first which planted vinifera in certain quantity because all the other were hybrids, you know—a few vines…So when we released our first vintage, which was the ’79 vintage, we produced 15,000 bottles, and people really started to say that we were getting the wine from Italy and putting it in the bottle. But if they knew that the regulations there are, you cannot bring a drop of wine from Italy without the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms] and ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control] knowing and without them charging for the tax on the drop of wine that you bring in. [Laughs] But anyway, that was the story in the beginning, and then people started to come. Actually, I remember when the Commissioner of Agriculture of Virginia came, and it was 1981, I think. Well, he said, “I can't believe that you have a beautiful vineyard, and I’ve heard so many stories about this place that I thought there was nothing here. And, instead, I see a lot of vines and a lot of grapes.” So there was certainly a—how can I say—a certain disappointment, if you want, that we were successful with our grapes because the people who started with hybrids wanted that to be the vine of Virginia.
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I know a lot of people consider you the father of viticulture in Virginia, and I’m starting to learn why, but do you think that it took an Italian to come here and establish the industry here in Virginia?
Well, it’s difficult to answer the question because the French people, which I run into, you know, these thirty years they always ask me the same question: “How did you find this place? How did it go through your mind to come to this place?” Well first of all, it was not my idea. It was Zonin’s idea. But I realized that nobody would ever adventure himself in something like that because everybody is so proud of his, you know, little spot, little terroir, little area; the people from Piedmont think that the best Italian wine is from Piedmont, and the ones from Tuscany think that they come from Tuscany. So I think that probably any Italian with my background would have done the same thing. I didn’t have anything special comparing to other people. And we might not know much about how to raise a buffalo, but we know how to grow grapes because that is our life. So I would say that any other Italian with my background could have been the father of the Virginia wine [Laughs] industry. It just happened that it was me, right. [Laughs]
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I wonder if, when you were a young man in Italy, if you learned in school about Thomas Jefferson?
No. I mean when I came here, I knew who Thomas Jefferson was, but in school I never learned much about what was the old American history. We learned more from the movies than from what we learned in school. I mean there was enough history in Europe that we didn’t need to go anywhere else. So they were very basic things that we learned, but I certainly fell in love with Thomas Jefferson when I started to work at Monticello and found out what kind of person he was, and that’s probably why I’m still here, you know. Every time I learn a bit more, I am more and more enchanted about this man.
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I wonder if we could talk for a minute more about your time here at Monticello? And I’m curious if you came to them or if they sought you out to work here on the grounds?
You want the story? [Laughs] Well the story is this one, naturally, that when I decided I wanted to leave Jefferson Vineyard—for many reasons, one of them was that they called it Jefferson Vineyard—I applied for a job here, and of course what they would offer me was one-third of what I was paid at the vineyard, but I realized that I had to get out of the wine industry because the pressure was too much for me. So I applied for the job, and I came, you know, many, many times to ask what was the situation, and every time I was told, “Oh,” you know, “there are more people who applied. Everybody has the right to apply; everybody has the right to have an interview; everybody has the right to whatever.” And so it was November of 1994, and I decided that I wanted to leave at the end of the year. And I mean I was supposed to give ninety-days notice, but I wanted to, you know, to close the end of the year and give the ninety-days notice. So I found an Italian company, which wanted me to work for them, and they made me a very good offer, from my point of view. And I got them to prepare a contract, which they signed, and then when they signed the contract, I said, “Give me one more chance to go to Monticello, and I will ask them—ask them if they want me or not, and they have to decide because if they say that they don’t know, I come with you.” So I came here with a contract signed, and I said, “I have to give the answer to this Italian company within a week, so you have a week to decide if you want me or not. And they hired me the following morning so—.” I don’t know. You can put it the way you want, [Laughs] but I think I definitely wanted to come here, and that proved to them that I was interested enough. They were worrying that I was staying a very short time, and they asked me to guarantee them that I was going to stay at least a couple of years, and I said, “Yes, I can guarantee that.” And based on that, they hired me, and they told me not to make any wine here, but I made it also for Monticello over and over illegally first and then legally. [Laughs]
Well was anyone paying attention to Jefferson’s vines and vineyard before you got here?
Actually, my brother-in-law planted the vines here because he was working here when, in 1984, I grafted the vines, so no, the vines were taken care of for like, you know, the rest of the orchard and but they were taken care of for the people to see them, rather than to make wine. So it was a different story when I came here.
So was it hard for you, then, to see producing vines that people weren't doing anything with, and you had to make some wine? [Laughs]
No, I adapt myself to the situation. If I work, I’m a happy person, so it was not a problem. When I saw the grapes, I said, “Well, what do we do?” And they said, “Well, do you want to make wine?” And I said, “Yes.” So I made wine the first year and did it the first, the second, the third, and then the ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control] find out that I was making wine without a license here, and so they told me that I had to either get a license or bring the grapes to a place which had a license, which ended up, you know, that I brought them to my place. And so the grapes are processed there [at Gabriele Rausse Winery], and then I bring the wine here, and it’s sold at the gift shop, you know. In a couple days, usually. It’s not much so—.
And so before you started making the wine at your personal winery, how were you doing that here?
At Monticello? No, no. I purchased a little press. I purchased a little crusher, and I was doing it in the barn down here right in a very unsophisticated way. It was very, very basic. I mean there was nothing. [Laughs] But, you know, if you have good grapes, it’s not difficult to make good wine. If you have bad grapes because of the season, because of disease, then you need a way to make the wine, then you need a sophisticated winery, and then you need a lot of equipment. But if the grapes are good, you don’t need much to make the wine.
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So is that a welcome challenge for you to reach back in history and kind of try and recreate something that would have been here 200 years ago?
Yeah, I love to do it. I love to do it because, you know, Tuscany always had the reputation of producing the best wine in Italy, with the Piedmont, right. And do you know the reason why Piedmont and Tuscany were producing the best wine? Piedmont, because they are using mainly one variety called Nebbiolo, which naturally has a very low PH, so when you have a low PH the bacteria cannot affect the wine. In Tuscany, on the other hand, they will blend the Sangiovese with a wide variety, and the results were the same, the low PH. And that was the key thing before chemistry was, you know, where it is now to make good wine. So I love to do the same, you know, to go through the step that my ancestors went through in an attempt of making a wine which was lasting and making a wine which was tasting good.
What do you think Thomas Jefferson would have to say about your wine here at Monticello?
I’m sure he would love it. [Laughs] No, I’m sure he would love it because his, you know, approach—when he does his trip through France and, you know, through Italy, you see very well that he understands what he’s tasting, you know.
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Well tell me a little bit more about your winery [Gabriele Rausse Winery], just for the record, to clarify that you maintain your own acreage and your own winery, and your name is on your own label and bottles of wine. How long have you maintained that?
Well I started my winery in [nineteen] ’97. Naturally—and the plan was eventually to leave Monticello and take off with my winery but I—difficult to do that. First of all, because I like Monticello too much. Second, because I don’t have the money to take off with the winery with the way I should. Third, because I do a lot of consulting, and so I’m always everywhere but in my place. But I enjoy my life very much, so I don’t see why I should change something that I enjoy. And yeah, I mean I don’t grow or—most of the grapes that I use because I get them either from people I consult for, you know from neighbors, and I make a lot of different varieties that I don’t grow myself. But I love to do it and, you know, don’t ask me if I make money or losing money because I don’t know. I think I’m losing money, especially after the law change. [Laughs] But I—even if my father was an accountant, I was never interested in that part of the business. [Laughs]
Can you tell me a little bit more about the consulting and how many wineries in the area you work with?
Well, I’ve been working with a lot of wineries in the sense that probably at least fourteen wineries now which use my consulting. Some of them are on their own now, in the sense that they learned what they are supposed to do, and they don’t need me anymore. But I planted more than forty vineyards, so now I have actually five that I’m currently consulting with, and it’s more than what I need, but I do it anyway. [Laughs]
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So you’re an Italian in Virginia producing European varietals. Would you say that you make Southern wine?
[Laughs] No. I make a wine which reflects a lot of my character. Actually, now the wine industry is pulling everybody toward very heavy wine, very tannic wine, wine with a lot of structure, with a lot of flavor, and I do respect them—I mean I do respect this tradition, if you want, but it’s not the kind of wine that I want to make. My wine is very gentle, very soft. It’s not going to last for thirty years, but it goes well with food. And, instead, today, most of the people are producing wine to win the competition, and to win the competition you need the wine with all these characteristics. I cannot drink them, I’m sorry. I can taste them. I enjoy to taste them because I always enjoy to taste a good wine, but having a wine for dinner for me is a totally different story. So I have a good follow-up, and I make a wine which is very Italian and very old-style, if you want, because also in Italy, you see how everybody is going for the gold medals and not for making a wine which is a good companion with food. I shouldn’t use the word horrified, but I am very surprised when I pick up a bottle of an Italian wine that I knew very well when I was there, and today it’s totally different because they followed a new strain, you know, keep going around, right. And then people will start to go away from that and eventually go back there, and it’s—but I stay with my gentle and soft wines because I love them.
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Would you say that you’re at all able to taste Virginia in your Pinot Grigio, for example?
That’s stretching it. [Laughs] You know, I compare the ability of tasting wine to the ability of listening to a piece of music and go to the piano and find the notes without knowing anything about music. There are people who can do that, and they have an ear, which is superior, and the same thing is for the palate. I think I can distinguish a California wine from a Virginia wine, but they’ve been fooling me before, right. And so I prefer to say that I’m not sure if I can…I see over and over, you know, people that talk about wine, and they have no idea what they are talking about because they don’t have a palate which is really refined enough to be able to do that. On the other hand, I see people who don’t know anything about wine, but they pick up a glass of wine and they say, “This is good,” and they say, “This is not very good,” and “This one is bad.” And so it’s the comparison that I made with music, I think, makes a lot of sense because it is that way.
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Well what would you say is the future of the Virginia wine industry, if you had to say?
Well, you know, when people hire me or just talk to me about starting a vineyard and starting a winery, they always worry about what is happening in the world, right? Because we have, you know, Argentina, which is producing beautiful wine at a very low price. We have Chile. China planted 80,000 acres this year of grapes. They probably planted 80,000 also last year, and that would be our competition on the shelf. On the shelf, we have to compete with these people, but if you open the winery, if you start to bring people in, there is such a irreplaceable pastime in visiting a winery that the Virginia wine industry would thrive, as long as they make it easy for the tourists to go to the winery, and they help in that direction…I can see that if there was not a possibility to offer the wine to the public directly, as you can do at the winery, there would be no hope for the Virginia winery because the costs are more than in China or in South America. And, of course, you know, the climate is not as perfect as it might be in Chile, and so it’s hard to compete. But I think we can create a new Napa Valley in Virginia with no problem.
Do you recognize the role that you’ve played in the industry here over the course of the past thirty years?
No, I don’t. [Laughs] I’m just happy that everything happened. I told you that I hate politics, and now there are so many politics involved with the thing that I stay as far away as I can from all that. That really bothers me a lot. So I don’t want to think and try to recognize not what I did, but what happened.
Well are there any final thoughts—positive words—to end on or things that you want to leave with?
Well, you know, I have to say that I would encourage, you know, anybody to have their own little vineyard, even if they don’t want to go commercial because it’s a lot of fun to see what you can do with grapes. It’s a lot of fun to teach to your children how to make wine. It doesn’t mean that they have to learn to get drunk. Vice-versa, they are to learn to respect what it is. But it’s a very fascinating thing. It’s fascinating to see how every year, it doesn’t matter how much you try to produce the same product, it will always be different. It will reflect the climate that you had, the excessive rain, the lack of rain, you know, the high temperature, the low temperature; there is always something, which in the wine, can be found out about what happened that in year in the climate. Of course, when you have the sophisticated wineries in the store, you can always make good wine. But when you do it for your own consumption, it’s very beautiful to see the, you know, variation that they’ll have, so it’s a very entertaining thing.
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