MINUTES-01
families can drive you nuts. And if you`re bold or crazy enough to go into
business together, beware. A recent study found only fifteen percent of
family businesses survive past the second generation, meaning if the whims
of the marketplace don`t get you, familial rivalry or plain old-fashioned
greed will; which makes the Antinori family of Italy all the more
remarkable.>
BILL WHITAKER (voiceover): Our story tonight takes us into the secretive, illegal, and lucrative world of insider trading. Our guide is a former stock market analyst named Roomy Khan. She made a fortune in illegal profits before she was caught and became a government informant in one of the biggest insider trading busts in American history.
ROOMY KHAN: Two people knocked on my door and they flashed their badge and my heart sank because I just was like, "Oh my God.``
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NORAH O`DONNELL: You are a senior advisor to the president, but you are also his best friend. I can`t think of another example in a White House where there`s been that kind of relationship since Bobby Kennedy and President Kennedy. It`s a very unusual role.
VALERIE JARRETT: It is.
NORAH O`DONNELL (voiceover): Valerie Jarrett is the only White House advisor who, at the end of the day, regularly joins the President in the private residence. She says she keeps the personal and political separate, but she earned the unflattering nickname, "Night Stalker," because some at the White House felt she could influence his thinking.
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MORLEY SAFERS (voiceover): It`s harvest time in the great vineyards of Italy, none greater than the five thousand acres farmed by the Antinori family. They`ve been in the same line of work for six centuries now. The Antinoris make wine and the family story reads like something a wine critic might write about their product--complex, stylish, sophisticated with a bouquet both elegant and earthy.
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LESLEY STAHL: I`m Lesley Stahl.
SCOTT PELLEY: I`m Scott Pelley.
BILL WHITAKER: I`m Bill Whitaker.
NORAH O`DONNELL: I`m Norah O`Donnell.
STEVE KROFT: I`m Steve Kroft. Those stories, including one of Morley Safer`s favorites, as we remember our friend on this edition of 60 MINUTES.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
STEVE KROFT: We lost Morley Safer early Thursday morning. He slipped away barely a week after he announced his retirement from 60 MINUTES. All of us here are saddened by the loss of a friend, colleague, and mentor. But we are grateful that Morley was able to watch last Sunday`s tribute with his family and to be reminded of how much we admired and loved him. We`ll rebroadcast that hour-long look at Morley`s life and career on a future Sunday. Tonight, we`ll salute Morley with a toast: one of his favorite pieces shot in his favorite country, about one of his favorite things. This is how Morley told the story back in 2008.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
MORLEY SAFER: As anyone who`s sat through a Thanksgiving dinner can tell you, families can drive you nuts. And if you`re bold or crazy enough to go into business together, beware. A recent study found only fifteen percent of family businesses survive past the second generation, meaning if the whims of the marketplace don`t get you, familial rivalry or plain old- fashioned greed will; which makes the Antinori family of Italy all the more remarkable. They`ve been in the same line of work for six centuries now. The Antinoris make wine and the family story reads like something a wine critic might write about their product--complex, stylish, sophisticated, with a bouquet both elegant and earthy.
(Begin VT)
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): It`s harvest time in the great vineyards of Italy, none greater than the five thousand acres farmed by the Antinori family. Until recently Italian business--especially the wine business--was pretty much for men only.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: Girls, normally, in families like ours, ended up to be married, possibly, happily, and that`s it. No-- no need to work.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): But Albiera Antinori and her two sisters are the first women in twenty-six generations to play a major role in the family enterprise. Allegra Antinori:
ALLEGRA ANTINORI: I feel part of the land, you know. I think I-- I`m owned by that land. It`s something very, very strong.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): From the fields to the cellars, you`ll find the Antinori women at work, hoping, as vintners have for centuries, that this year, the balance of sun, soil, and rain will produce a vintage for the ages. Alessia Antinori:
People use these wonderful words to describe taste. There`s personality, what else?
ALESSIA ANTINORI: The elegance. The wine has to be elegant. And so you`d say how do you describe elegance? You can`t. It`s like an elegant woman. How do you describe her? It`s-- it`s personal.
MORLEY SAFER: You know it when you see it.
ALESSIA ANTINORI: Exactly. Exactly.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): Their domain stretches from the legendary vineyards of Tuscany and Umbria to their property in California`s Napa Valley. Antinori is, perhaps, the oldest family business on earth.
PIERO ANTINORI: The first document which we have, which proves that an ancestor of mine was involved in the wine production, dates back to 1385.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): The patriarch and still the godfather is Piero Antinori. He`s seventy and bears the noble title of marchese. He works behind an antique desk that dates to the Renaissance.
PIERO ANTINORI: When we have to take some decision regarding the family, we have them here and my father used to do the same thing.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): And in his birthplace, Florence, the city that gave birth to the Renaissance--that flowering of art, science, and the good life--he leads a visitor to a small window to the past.
It looks like a confessional.
(voiceover): Hundreds of years ago an Antinori cellar master sat waiting for customers to knock.
PIERO ANTINORI: The cellar master would pass a bottle of-- of Chianti wine, and it would receive the money back. This has been in operation until a couple of centuries ago.
MORLEY SAFER: Recent history by your standard.
PIERO ANTINORI: Yes.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): For six hundred and twenty-three years various Antinori have kept the business going, despite war, plague, political intrigue, and the shifting tastes of consumers. The family tree shows a bumper crop of Antinori who made their mark not just in wine but in every aspect of Italian life.
PIERO ANTINORI: In business, in politics, in church.
MORLEY SAFER: So the family always made sure back then that all bets were covered, correct?
PIERO ANTINORI: I think it was a bit the concept, yes.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): There were poets and priests, rogues and rascals. In 1576 Francesco de` Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, had one Antinori strangled for his undue attentions to Bianca, the duke`s wife. In the 1700s, another Antinori cultivated Pope Clement XII as an important customer. The pontiff, who commissioned the building of Rome`s Trevi Fountain, decided to throw a few coins the Antinoris` way.
PIERO ANTINORI: We have some correspondence saying that the Pope used to like very much the wines of our family and he wanted to order more.
MORLEY SAFER: Pretty good recommendation, correct? Especially, in the eighteenth century?
PIERO ANTINORI: Yes. No doubt.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): But the family history, lining the shelves of the marchese`s office, says precious little about the wives and daughters in the Antinori family tree--a fact not lost on Albiera, Allegra, and Alessia.
Are there any interesting women in those twenty-six generations?
ALBIERA ANTINORI: I`m sure there are some women. But women in history, in the past time, even if-- unless they were special, they were not really--
ALESSIA ANTINORI: Considered.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: --considered to be mentioned.
ALESSIA ANTINORI: Yeah. It`s exact. It`s true. Because when I went to agricultural university in northern Italy, in Milan, we were two women. And the rest were all men. Very lucky.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): For six centuries command of the Antinori Empire was passed from father to son. But with no male heir, the marchese, some years ago, sold a major stake in the business to Whitbread, a British company whose fortune was based on beer-making.
PIERO ANTINORI: It was the period when I didn`t know exactly if my daughters would be interested or not to be involved in the business. And so for me, that was a way to guarantee a continuity also to the company.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): But the partnership produced mainly grapes of wrath. It was a vintage clash between the foaming suds of quick profits and Piero insisting he`d sell no wine before its time. This marriage of inconvenience ended when Piero bought back the shares, keeping Antinori all in the family.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: I think he saw us interested and said why not, what`s wrong with girls? And so, he took his chance, expecting his daughters to-- to fall in love with the business.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): And that they did. Now all three travel the countryside and the world helping to grow, promote, and market Antinori wines. They sold seventeen million bottles last year, two hundred million dollars worth, making a healthy profit. And though the business now involves spreadsheets and science, the basics still come, as they have for centuries, from down on the farm.
Even with all this tradition and history and everything else, the family still regards itself as-- as farmers, yes?
ALBIERA ANTINORI: Yes. Absolutely. This is our origin. Still now in modern times, we are basically-- basically farmers.
ALESSIA ANTINORI: We appreciate the nature and the countryside more than the glamorous city life.
MORLEY SAFER: You`re three country bumpkins.
ALESSIA ANTINORI: Yes.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: Yes.
ALLEGRA ANTINORI: Yes. Yes.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): Well, hardly.
Salute.
PIERO ANTINORI: Cheer.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): Elegance is the rule at Palazzo Antinori, the family home in Florence. Since the family`s wines must be sampled often to ensure quality control, every lunch at the palazzo is a kind of business lunch. The marchese, his wife, Francesca, their daughters and sons-in-law and the grandchildren all may have a say.
Any family arguments at this table? Come on, secrets-- a lot of secrets to reveal here.
PIERO ANTINORI: Yes. Sometimes we start with an argument, but after three or four glasses of wine--
ALESSIA ANTINORI: Everything disappears.
PIERO ANTINORI: This palazzo has been in the family since 1506. Both the headquarters of the business and also the residence of the family.
MORLEY SAFER: When an Antinori wishes to seek solace or a place for quiet contemplation or even a place to confess his earthly sins, it`s hardly difficult. Just leave the Palazzo Antinori and, traffic notwithstanding, cross the Piazza Antinori. And within minutes, arrive at the Capella Antinori, the Antinori family chapel, where they might visit the tomb of Alessandro Antinori, one of the founders of the dynasty, and perhaps a nod to any number of Antinoris buried beneath the chapel floor. If wealth and history can buy one lasting pleasure, it is convenience.
(voiceover) Marchese Antinori, for instance, commutes by air to his most famous vineyard, Tignanello in the Tuscan countryside, south of Florence. Here the family developed the red wines for which they`re famous. At his villa here, this is the view the marchese wakes up to every morning.
PIERO ANTINORI: We have the vineyards and the landscape.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): But as the experience with the British partners showed it`s no business for the impatient or for those who have a taste for the quick buck. Ten years can pass from the time a new vine is planted until its wine comes to market.
PIERO ANTINORI: You have to be patient and to wait until the wine is good enough, the vines are old enough to produce a good wine.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): Tignanello is but one of the Antinori postcard- perfect estates. Castello della Sala is another, halfway between Rome and Florence. Here Albiera went to work after high school, living at the family`s grand fourteenth-century castle, but learning the wine trade from the bottom up as a field hand in the vineyards.
you got her hands dirty.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: Yes. I got my hands dirty. It was the first place where I really started to understand what was going on. I mean the whole-- the whole process.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): But it`s not all dirt and business, there`s that other estate, Guado al Tasso on the Tuscan coast.
ALLEGRA ANTINORI: I did my own stable, my own training track in the middle of the vineyards.
(Allegra Antinori speaking foreign language)
I go riding every morning. It`s beautiful. I love it.
MORLEY SAFER: It`s a very good life you describe. Are you spoilt?
ALLEGRA ANTINORI: Yes. I am very spoilt. But I think we appreciate what we have.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): And they are constantly reminded that in this line of work, nature always has the last word. The Antinori found that 2002 crop wasn`t up to par, and didn`t bother bottling most of it.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: You cannot force things. You cannot force nature. If you have a bad vintage, tough luck.
We can wake it up for a second before we put it back to sleep.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): Every few months, they check on the progress of their wine, fast asleep in the cellars. The verdict: let it sleep a while longer.
ALBIERA ANTINORI: You see, it`s still very young, very rough, very-- has to stay in there for-- for a little while.
MORLEY SAFER (voiceover): Another family meal, another bottle of wine or two. Every once in a while someone offers to buy them out. But this farmer and his daughters politely decline, on the theory that if family ownership was good enough in 1385, it`s good enough today.
PIERO ANTINORI: It is really our intention to remain a family business because we think that this is the best solution for us.
MORLEY SAFER: For at least another five hundred years.
PIERO ANTINORI: At least.
(End VT)
ANNOUNCER: To see last week`s Morley Safer tribute as well as additional interviews and classic Safer stories, go to 60MINUTESOVERTIME.com, sponsored by Lyrica.
(ANNOUNCEMENTS)
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