Santo Stefano

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He arrived in the U.S. with a suitcase the size of a laptop. Everything else was part of the earthquake rubble in Santo Stefano del Sole — Giovanni Petretta’s hometown in southern Italy.

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The Petretta family was one of the founding families of Santo Stefano del Sole, dating back to 1525. Their connection to the land runs deep, just as the grapevines their family tended for six generations. But everything changed after the devastating 1980 earthquake. For years, the Petretta family recipes lay unused as Giovanni, his mother and brother tackled a new language and a new culture. Within this new land, Giovanni met his future wife, Kathy — a strawberry-blonde from New York. They settled in Connecticut and soon began a family.

Life there was hectic: Giovanni worked as a decorative contractor and Kathy as an early intervention therapist, while raising three children. Yet Giovanni missed the traditions of his homeland. Kathy suggested he bring something from his old world into their new world, something that could reconnect him to the land he still loved. So Giovanni started in their basement, purchasing the right equipment and the right grapes and using those old recipes that had been shaped by his family for generations. In the coolness of his American basement, Santo Stefano Wine was born.

That first year, the Petrettas invited friends to help in the wine-making process. Each year, the group of friends grew, as did the amount of wine they produced.

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Giovanni and Kathy soon realized they had created something special, something that connected Giovanni to his past and connected them both more deeply to their adopted community.

They’d created something special in another way as well: Along with his Italian wine recipes, Giovanni had imported a tradition of winemaking that didn’t rely on added sulfites for preservation. Aside from being a healthy choice, this method was also good news for those who had given up wine due to allergies or other sulfite-sensitive health issues.

In 2008, the Petrettas found 10 acres of property in the Hudson Valley and replanted the Petratta family roots — thousands of miles away from Santo Stefano del Sole, Italy. Each season, new friends and old friends visit Santo Stefano to take part in the processing of wine.

Santo Stefano wine began as one family’s way to embrace their unique heritage. And the rest of us use it to embrace our own—to celebrate weddings, births, graduations, vacations, sunsets. Santo Stefano wine: a celebration of the past and the present, the young and the old, the old world and the new.

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