Sometimes, stories appear to have a red thread joining them together!

We purchased Mastrojanni because we had liked it for thirty years.

It was 1980 and I had just started drinking wine.  I lived in Switzerland and every now and again I found a wine in the restaurants which I really liked and which didn’t cost the earth: Mastrojanni’s Brunello di Montalcino.
By chance, in 1982, I visited a wine estate: it was the Mastrojanni estate.

In 1997, I bought my Podere Le Ripi and funny coincidence it bordered with the Mastrojanni estate.  So I became a friend of my masters (and who knew how to make wine back then), Andrea Machetti, now Managing Director of Mastrojanni and his winemaker, Maurizio Castelli.

In this way I learnt to make wine, and when I understood that perhaps Mastrojanni would be put up for sale, I suggested that  my brothers purchase it making it part of our holding company, Gruppo Illy S.p.A.

They too had been following this magnificent producer for years and respected the quality of the work carried out over thirty-five years by the Mastrojanni family.  There was a kind of elective affinity between our way of working and that of this and we felt we were on the same wave length.

So in 2008 we made an offer and became “the ones continuing this adventure”.  

Francesco Illy

Vigneron