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had just delivered a spectacular beef tenderloin in black-truffle sauce, and Tony had selected the wine: a 1997 Gaja Costa Russi. He comes alive when it hits his lips. "The wine we had before this was a very good wine," he says, referring to the Gagliole Pecchia. "But this? This is a firecracker. You feel it up to your eyeballs!" The same unbridled enthusiasm is so apparent in his sons that you can almost see Nonna's wooden spoon stirring the pot through the genera- Mondavis, the Gajas, and even the Rothschilds and Contis. tions. On any given evening, John might present his three children with a dozen different burger varieties and ask them to blindly rate them. During a conversation with a friend about her favorite store-bought tomato sauce, John told her: "I can do better." He came back with his own version (again, blindly tasted against 25 supermarket brands). It was so good that he now jars the sauce and distributes it to a group of close friends by invitation only. FRUITS OF THEIR LABOR I MODERN TASTEMAKERS N ow, with a third generation of Terlatos primed for the ascendancy, this renowned taste shows no signs of disappearing—and that's exactly the way Tony wants it. If there's one thing he prizes above his appetite and his busi- ness success, it's his family's legacy. When he talks about the future, it's about how he's going to become the modern equivalent of the old-world names that have been making storied wine for centuries. "The people we did business with talked in generations," Tony muses. An oil painting of himself hangs above the fireplace. He pauses before adding, "In America in the 1950s, there weren't many generations. But in Europe there were His sons, Bill and John, share these dreams as they sally forth into the new era. "The legacy my dad, my brother, and I want to leave is as winemakers, despite what we've done as importers and distributors," John says. n an almost providential turn of events in 1996, Tony fulfilled what Mondavi had predicted 40 years before. He bought Rutherford Hill, one of the first vineyards to introduce American-grown Merlot to the marketplace. In his first meeting with his winery's staff, Tony walked into the room with a stack of magazine covers from Wine Spectator. He had Photoshopped a bottle onto them with a headline that read "#1 Merlot in Napa Valley." The date in the corner was five years into the future. "I said, 'I'll give you five years, or you're gone,'" Tony remembers. "They got us good numbers, but not good enough, so they were gone." He fired and replaced his entire staff. Over the next several years, they acquired more vineyards: Alderbrook in Sonoma, Sanford in Santa Barbara, Terlato in the Russian River Valley. But one of the jewels came in 2000 when they purchased Chimney Rock, nestled in the Stags Leap District, a narrow strip of land three miles long and a mile wide, widely acclaimed for its favorable conditions for growing Cabernet Sauvignon. In the famous Judgment of Paris in 1976, it was a wine from this region that edged out the old-world Bordeaux and clinched an American victory in a red. "What's happening in Napa right now is what happened in Burgundy," explains Fletcher. "People are recognizing that not every spot is great for every wine." The Terlatos are reverential when they talk about the volcanic soil of this hallowed ground. They nod to the terroir, a French expression for the role land plays in the taste of its produce. For Chimney Rock, this is espe- cially pronounced in its Tomahawk Cabernet, which is grown on just one plot of eight acres out of the vineyard's 130 and deemed so good that it shouldn't be mixed with grapes from anywhere else. "You can drill down into California, then Napa, then the Stags Leap District, then the specific vineyard," John explains. "With Tomahawk, it's like you're on the head of a pin." A worker at Chimney Rock drives through rows of vines. So far, it isn't just the Terlatos blowing smoke. When Robert Parker, the man with the million-dollar nose, tasted the 2007 Tomahawk, he gave it 91 points and wrote in his tasting notes that it was "a quintessential Stags Leap Cabernet to drink over the next 10 to 15 years." That's not the only Terlato wine to catch Parker's nose: He scored their 2007 Ganymede as a 92 and praised its silkiness and notes of "beef blood, crushed rocks, and earth." The Terlatos have also zeroed in on a key demographic: young millennials, who obsess over the story behind what they consume like no generation before them. The family have become regular guests on Bravo's hit series Top Chef, and of the show's 3 million viewers, 80 percent are under age 35. "That tells you who's interested in food and wine," says Bill, who judged the season finale 110 MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM families in the wine business for 29, 30 continuous generations. You would see the portraits. And I'm thinking, how do I get to be 40 generations?" Tony has already locked in his name as the American father of Pinot Grigio and as the visionary leader of the business empire that transformed the US wine industry. But he's not satisfied. He wants to leave behind a significant American wine—one that stands shoulder to shoulder with the