It’s easy to see why former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons fell in love with Il Palazzone estate in Montalcino, Italy, with its stone walls, cypress trees and the rolling hills below. “I went to France, South Africa, Australia, Napa, Italy, but Tuscany was the place that spoke to me,” he says of the vineyard, adding jokingly that it cost him “4 billion lira, or six dollars and forty-eight cents” (about $2 million in 2000, when he purchased it). “My kids used to say, ‘Dad, what do you do? It sounds like all you do all day is have meetings.’ Here, you make a product. It grows in the ground, you harvest and vinify the grapes, make the wine.”
Parsons’ 20-acre vineyard — a few hours from Rome and Florence…