Every wine tells the story of a place. This one tells the story of a family.
How Two Italian Bloodlines Became One Wine
There are millions of descendants of Italians across the Americas. Entire cultures, communities, and identities were shaped by those who left Italy in search of opportunity, survival, or adventure. Their stories crossed oceans and generations.
I am one of them.
Like many Brazilians of Italian descent, I grew up carrying names, recipes, and memories that were never quite mine — inherited, borrowed, half-understood, but deeply felt.
My name carries two branches of that history: Peccinini from Veneto and de Chiaro from Campania.
Two families, two regions, two traditions.
Each side of my family emigrated to Brazil for different reasons, at different times, following different paths. Eventually those paths crossed, and generations later, here I am.
Like many descendants of Italian immigrants, I grew up hearing fragments of those stories — names of towns, recipes, habits, and values that traveled across the Atlantic and quietly survived in another continent.
The question that eventually came to me was simple, but profound:
How can I truly honor my ancestors?
Ancestry is about genealogy.
Heritage is something deeper.
Heritage is culture.
It is memory.
It is the invisible thread that connects places, people, and traditions across generations.
Today I live and work in Italy as the founder of The Wine Partners — a global buyers’ club built on a simple belief: the best way to understand a wine is to connect with the people and stories behind it.
Members don’t just taste — they learn. Each dinner and masterclass-style event is a small journey into a region, a grape variety, a family history. Only after that journey do they decide what to buy — directly from the producers, with no predetermined shipments and no middlemen.
What we’re really after are the hidden gems: the small, independent producers whose wines rarely leave Italy, made by people whose names deserve to be known. We built this club to bring their stories, their knowledge, and their bottles to an international community that cares as much about authenticity as they do about what’s in the glass.
In many ways, my professional life has become a bridge between Italy and the global community — not unlike the journey my ancestors once made.
And yet something was missing.
If my identity were a wine, that wine did not exist.
So I decided to create it. If I were a wine — what would I be? That question became the seed of this project.
The HERITAGE Project was born from this idea: to transform a personal story of migration and identity into a physical expression — a wine that represents both sides of my Italian bloodline.
To make it possible, I partnered with two extraordinary wineries that embody the regions of my family origins.
From Veneto, the winery PuntoZero, representing the land of the Peccinini family — my mother’s side. Fittingly, PuntoZero is run by a team of women, a detail that felt like more than coincidence: it is her lineage, carried forward by women who shape the wine with the same quiet strength that shaped my own family.
From Campania, the historic estate Salvatore Molettieri, representing the roots of the de Chiaro family — my father’s side.
Guiding the final composition were two respected figures in Italian wine, Matteo Altare and Francesco Altare, who helped oversee the blend and the bottling process.
The concept was clear from the beginning: each grape variety had to represent a part of my heritage.
From Veneto, we chose Garganega, a grape known for its elegance, minerality, and longevity.
From Campania, we chose Fiano, one of southern Italy’s most noble white varieties, celebrated for its depth, aromatic complexity, and aging potential.
Two grapes.
Two regions.
Two family histories.
The resulting wine is not simply a blend — it is a conversation between North and South, between past and present, between memory and creation.
In the glass, the wine opens with bright, saline notes of citrus and white flowers — the freshness of Garganega leading the way. On the palate, Fiano brings weight and depth: notes of ripe stone fruit, almond, and a mineral backbone that lingers. Neither grape overpowers the other; instead, they meet the way two family histories meet in a single bloodline — distinct, yet inseparable. It is a wine of tension and balance, built to evolve and improve with time, much like the story it carries.
One choice mattered more than any other in the cellar: the wine was left unfiltered. It was not a technical decision — it was a personal one. Filtering polishes a wine, smooths its edges, makes it more predictable. I did not want that. I wanted something closer to the truth: a wine with its own texture, its own imperfections, honest about what it is. If this project was ever going to represent me, it could not be dressed up. It had to be real — a little rustic, unrefined in places, but never disguised. Unfiltered, the way I hope to be.
The label itself carries its own piece of this story. It was designed by my oldest daughter — her first time taking on a challenge like this, and I could not be prouder of what she created. The color is no accident: it speaks to the wine’s freshness, but also to the happiness of this particular moment in my life, one where I get to spend my time doing what I love, with people I admire. The style is more playful, more jovial — closer to the labels of the New World than to the old, classic codes of European wine. And that felt right, because in many ways, I am a product of the New World myself. Look closely and you’ll find the two grape varieties coming together at the center, with the mountains of both regions rising behind them — the Dolomites and Vesuvius, standing side by side, just as my two family histories now do.
The HERITAGE Project is therefore more than a wine.
It is a tribute to the journeys that shaped my family.
It is a bridge between the Italy my ancestors left and the Italy I work in today.
And it is a reminder that sometimes the best way to honor the past is not only to remember it, but to create something new from it.
If heritage is what flows through our veins, then this wine is simply its expression in the glass
Mauricio Peccinini de Chiaro
Founder, The Wine Partners
