Part IThe Story
On March 29, 2005, Robert Mondavi sat in a second-floor conference room of the winery that still carried his name and no longer belonged to him. He was ninety-one. Nearly four months earlier, in a sale his family had not wanted and could not stop, the Robert Mondavi Corporation had passed to Constellation Brands, a conglomerate based in Fairport, New York. The price was roughly $1.36 billion in cash and assumed debt. Across from him sat Julia Flynn Siler, a former Wall Street Journal staff writer who would spend three years and more than five hundred hours of interviews reconstructing his family. That afternoon she conducted the last formal interview he ever gave. For the first time since the 1930s, Robert Mondavi was not in the wine business.
It was, Siler would write, "a sad spring." She left the room with the feeling that he was already beginning to slip away.
Below the conference room stood the building he had commissioned at fifty-two: Cliff May's Mission-style arch and bell tower, placed on Highway 29 in Oakville so that travelers driving up from San Francisco could not miss it. The silhouette of that tower was printed on bottles of Reserve Cabernet that sold for $150. It was also printed on bottles of Private Selection that sold in supermarkets for about $10. The name above the tower was the same on both, and it was his.
Nothing about Mondavi's life fits neatly into the arc of rise and fall, though nearly everything written about him has tried to force it there. He was the son of a Sassoferrato peasant who spent his life trying to persuade the French that Americans could be civilized at the table. He shared his trade secrets with his competitors and sued his own mother. He built a name, attached it to everything, and gave so much of the company away that he could not save it. And at the very end, a few months after that conference room, he made one barrel of wine with the brother he had punched forty years before.
The barrel is where this story ends. It also, in a manner of speaking, is where it began.
By the Numbers
The House That Robert Built
52Mondavi's age when he opened his own winery in 1966
11.6Acres of To Kalon vineyard in his first purchase
$24,000Price of a 12-bottle case of Opus One at the first Napa Valley Wine Auction, 1981
$481MRobert Mondavi Corp. revenue in 2001, across 80+ countries
$35MRobert and Margrit Mondavi's 2001 gift to UC Davis
$1.36BConstellation Brands' acquisition price, December 2004
$400,000Price paid for one barrel made by Robert and Peter, 2005
Liquid Food, and a Woman Who Said Wait
The rumor in Virginia, Minnesota, was that the Mondavis had a cellar full of wine. Someone told the authorities. One day, when Robert was not yet ten years old, police officers arrived at his parents' house, a place that also served as a boarding house for Italian immigrants who mined iron ore on the Range. They went down to the cellar and raised their axes to the barrels.
Rosa Mondavi stopped them. Her son recalled the scene in his 1998 memoir, Harvests of Joy, and it is worth quoting exactly, because it is the first time a Mondavi defended wine in the language of rights:
— Rosa Mondavi, as recalled by Robert Mondavi in Harvests of JoyNow just you wait a minute. We have a right to have this wine. It isn't all for us; we have boarders here and we're housing most of this wine for them!
Robert was never certain how she persuaded them to leave. The barrels survived. Prohibition law allowed each household to make 200 gallons of wine for its own use, and Cesare Mondavi had used that allowance liberally, if not always strictly by the letter.
Cesare himself fits into a few lines. He was a son of peasants from Sassoferrato, a farm town in the Marche. He passed through Ellis Island in 1906 and found work in the Minnesota iron mines, then went back to Italy to marry Rosa Grassi and brought her to the Range. There he became, in sequence, a miner, a grocer, a saloon keeper, and a man the neighbors respected. When Prohibition threatened the saloon, he looked carefully at the 200-gallon loophole and saw a supply chain. Every Italian family on the Range wanted grapes, and someone had to get them there from California. In the early 1920s he moved the family to Lodi, at the time the center of American grape growing, and founded C. Mondavi and Sons. The company packed grapes and shipped them east to home winemakers in the Italian neighborhoods of Baltimore, New York, and the Midwest.
The wine Cesare made for his boarders was earthy and eccentric: mostly zinfandel, with some muscat and carignane. Robert later called it "liquid food," a phrase that sounds romantic until you remember that the boarders were miners and the wine was part of their dinner in the most literal sense. "My mother served me wine and water from the time I was 3 years old," he said decades later. Those who grow up drinking wine with meals tend to have trouble believing it is dangerous. Mondavi carried that conviction into the 1980s, when American public opinion began to turn against alcohol and he found himself defending, at length and with real feeling, what his mother had said in the cellar.
Lodi made him an American. He attended St. Anne's Catholic School and then Lodi Union High. Before he turned sixteen his father taught him to drive a Studebaker so he could get to the packing shed after classes. The list of his high school activities reads like a résumé assembled by a boy who meant to be noticed: senior class president, honor student, swim team captain, yearbook staff, Chemistry Club, and fullback on a championship football team, at 140 pounds. He was named most valuable player in the regional championships. Even then, nothing about Robert Mondavi was small except his body.
He and Peter, his younger brother, nailed fruit crates together for years. "My brother and I had saved $15,000 by working many years nailing fruit crates together," he said. It is the kind of figure a man remembers to the dollar for the rest of his life, and it would matter later that the brothers had earned it jointly.
He went on to Stanford and graduated in 1936 with a degree in economics and business administration. On graduation day he was photographed between Cesare and Rosa, and the picture is now in the UC Davis archives. That summer he took what he called a "crash course" in viticulture and enology and went to work at Sunny St. Helena, a bulk winery in the Napa Valley in which his father held a stake. By 1937 he had built a small laboratory there to run quality experiments. The economics major was teaching himself chemistry. He never got much formal training in winemaking, and he would not let that stop him from anything.
The Price of a Mink Coat
The war gave him his first strategic insight, and it came from a regulation.
In the early 1940s the federal government put price controls on bulk wine, along with most other farm commodities, but not on bottled, branded wine. Sunny St. Helena had no bottling line, so it was stuck selling a capped commodity while other wineries sold a product they could price freely. Robert felt the constraint keenly. The lesson he drew stayed with him for the rest of his career: the money was in the label.
In 1943 he heard that the Charles Krug winery north of St. Helena was for sale. It had been founded in 1861 and was the oldest winery in the valley, still impressive in scale and badly run down. He persuaded his father to buy it from James Moffitt. Cesare agreed on one condition. Robert and Peter had to run it together.
The arrangement lasted twenty-three years and was strained for most of them. The roles split along temperament. Robert handled management, sales, and public relations. Peter made the wine. Robert traveled, and each time he came back he pressed his brother to adopt whatever technique he had seen on the road. Peter, the more conservative of the two, began to resent the travel, the spending, and the steady pressure to move upmarket. In Peter's view his older brother was extravagant. In Robert's view the wine was not good enough. Each was partly right, and the fight was about that.
Some progress was made anyway. The brothers set stainless steel cooling coils inside wooden fermenters to keep white wines fresher and fruitier, a practice that later spread across the state. In 1955, worried about foreign imports, Robert proposed an association of quality producers, which became the Premium Wine Producers of California. In 1962 he made the trip to Europe that changed his ambitions. He came home with a clear picture of the gap between what California produced and what California could produce, and he began to aim beyond what the family business could hold.
Cesare died, and once he was gone nothing restrained the brothers. The final break came over a fur coat. Robert's wife, Marjorie Declusin, his high school sweetheart, needed something to wear to a dinner at the Kennedy White House. Robert bought her a mink. Peter accused him of paying for it with winery money. In Harvests of Joy, Robert reported his own reply: "Say that again and I'll hit you."
Peter said it again, and Robert hit him twice.
That was November 1965. Siler, working from other accounts, describes the two brothers rolling in the dust at a family gathering, with Robert throttling Peter. Afterward Peter went to their mother, and Rosa asked Robert the question every brother eventually hears in some form: "What did you do to my babe?" The family backed Peter, and Robert was put out of the business his father had bought on his advice. One account says the banishment was meant to last six months. "When it was all over," Robert wrote, "there were no apologies and no handshake."
He did not stop fighting after he left. Convinced that his mother, brother, and sisters had tried to cheat him out of his stake in Charles Krug and other family holdings, Robert sued them. Mondavi v. Mondavi went to trial in 1976 and became famous in California. Siler found an account of one night during the trial from Peter Ventura, Robert's nephew, who was sleeping at Robert and Marjorie's house on the Charles Krug compound. Robert still lived on the property, among the people he was suing. Ventura heard a thumping in the hallway and lay awake trying to work out what it was. Eventually he realized his uncle was pacing outside the door and hitting the wall with the soft part of his fist, saying the same words again and again.
— Robert Mondavi, pacing a hallway during the 1976 Mondavi v. Mondavi trial, as recalled by his nephew Peter VenturaOnly the strong survive, only the strong survive, only the strong survive.
He won. In Siler's words, the judge's decision gave him "a complete moral vindication." The brothers did not reconcile until the 1990s. Peter went on running Charles Krug carefully and well, and he outlived nearly everyone. He celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday at the winery where the trouble had started and died in 2016. Charles Krug still belongs to his sons, Marc and Peter Jr.
The same year as the trial, 1976, nine French judges in Paris tasted California wines blind against French ones and picked California. Robert won in a courtroom and a Napa Cabernet won in a tasting room in the same twelve months. He spent many years trying to separate the family's quarrels from the industry's progress, and it never really worked.
A Cathedral on the Highway
He was fifty-two, unemployed, and in the middle of a family feud when he started the venture that made his name. Most men at that age are counting down to retirement.
He raised money from investors and borrowed what he couldn't raise, ignoring a long line of people who predicted he would go broke. In America at the time, as one obituarist put it, people seemed content to eat tuna melts and meat loaf and wash them down with Coke. Most Americans barely knew their country made wine. "Fine domestic wine," in the Los Angeles Times's phrase, was considered an oxymoron.
His first land purchase was 11.6 acres of the To Kalon vineyard in Oakville. H.W. Crabb had planted it in 1868 and named it from the Greek for "the beautiful." Mondavi was always alert to good marketing, and it was not lost on him that the most famous dirt in the valley came with a philosophy already attached.
The location of the winery building is the most revealing decision he made, because it tells you he thought like a salesman before he thought like a farmer. A Guardian obituarist noted that Mondavi did not pick the site to fine-tune his exposure to the valley's many microclimates. He picked it because people driving north from San Francisco would see it. He hired Cliff May, the California architect known for ranch houses, and May gave him a Spanish colonial building with a wide arched entry and a bell tower. Visually, the building sold the wine before anyone tasted it. It opened in July 1966 as the first major winery built in Napa since Prohibition, and it was soon printed on the label. It remains, by most accounts, the most photographed winery in the valley.
Hugh Johnson attended the opening. Arlene Bernstein, a young tour guide who later founded a winery of her own, photographed Robert presiding over a grape stomp at the first harvest: an Italian peasant ritual staged for the press in front of a building that suggested the Spanish missions. It was a calculated piece of theater, and also a sincere one.
Then he began renaming things.
In 1968 he made a dry Sauvignon Blanc and aged it in oak. The grape was unpopular in California at the time and associated with sweet, flabby wine. Rather than fight that reputation, he gave the wine a new name, Fumé Blanc. The name was French-sounding, a little smoky, and had no prior associations. The wine sold. The category it created is now credited with getting Sauvignon Blanc recognized in America, and it all came from a word Mondavi made up.
More broadly, he pushed to label wines by grape variety (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay) rather than by borrowed European place names such as "Chablis" or "Burgundy" printed on California jugs. Varietal labeling became the standard for wines across the New World. It also gave American wine a vocabulary of its own, one that did not depend on imitating somewhere else. He introduced flange-top bottles and argued early for stainless steel fermentation tanks, then later for wooden fermenters, and for aging wine in French barriques. He experimented with nearly everything. Years later he admitted that his enthusiasm for technology had gone too far, which was about as close as he came to apologizing for anything.
He judged other people by whether they could taste what he tasted. In May 2002, a writer named Layne sat down with him in Richmond, Virginia, and found him hard of hearing, stooped, and bowlegged. Before the interview could start, the writer had to pass a test. Mondavi poured two Reserve Cabernets, each selling for $150, made ten vintages apart, and asked him to explain what the winery had done differently between them. The writer guessed lower yields in the vineyard. Only then did the conversation begin.
The Maestro and the Missionary
The most important technical influence on the young Robert Mondavi was a White Russian who stood four feet eleven inches tall.
André Tchelistcheff was born in Moscow on December 7, 1901, into a family that had owned land west of the city for eight centuries. He was a sickly child and was tutored at home. As a teenager he fought for the White Army in the civil war. In 1921 his unit was machine-gunned during a snowstorm in Crimea, and he was left for dead on the field. He survived, followed his family into exile in Yugoslavia, studied agronomy in Czechoslovakia, and then studied enology, fermentation, and microbiology in Paris at the Institut Pasteur and the Institut National Agronomique. In 1938 Georges de Latour of Beaulieu Vineyard came to France looking for a French winemaker and hired the Russian instead. Tchelistcheff arrived in the Napa Valley that September with a microscope, which at the time was almost unknown in a California winery.
Robert met him in 1940. Tchelistcheff and a group of other producers soon formed the Napa Valley Technical Group, dedicated to lower yields, better harvest timing, and more disciplined fermentation and aging. With Maynard Amerine of UC Davis, Tchelistcheff is credited with bringing California winemaking back from Prohibition, which had nearly destroyed it. He pioneered cold fermentation, reduced the use of sulfur dioxide, and established malolactic fermentation for red wines. He also thought the industry had made a basic structural error in letting the vineyard and the cellar drift apart. "The winemaker should be living much closer to the wine grower," he said.
The two men make an obvious pair: the aristocratic scientist and the peasant's son with an economics degree. One was an exile who found a home in a valley that had no particular need for him. The other had been exiled from his own family's winery and made the valley need him. Both were small men, and both seemed tireless. Tchelistcheff was still consulting at ninety. When a corporate owner rehired him that year, in what was widely seen as a public relations move, he said, "I am not looking for a new career, but I still have work I want to do." Mondavi was still traveling the world as a wine ambassador into his nineties.
One detail in Tchelistcheff's history foreshadows Mondavi's. In 1969 the de Latour family sold Beaulieu to Heublein, a Connecticut wine and spirits company. Tchelistcheff said later that his relationship with the corporate owner was never the same as it had been with the family. Thirty-five years later Mondavi would experience the same thing.
Mondavi took from Tchelistcheff, and from UC Davis, a conviction that knowledge was something to spread around. "UC Davis did a tremendous amount of research work that was unique in the world, and we followed that religiously," he said at eighty-eight. "It was really the university that set me on the right road." He did not keep what he learned to himself. Richard Arrowood, then a lab technician at Rodney Strong, received advice from him in the early 1970s and later described Mondavi's reasoning: shared knowledge "would come back to him ten-fold." The Los Angeles Times wrote that he set "a standard for cooperation that he insisted others follow." The word insisted is the accurate one. His generosity often came with conditions.
His winery became a training ground for other winemakers. Warren Winiarski worked there, and so did Zelma Long. Winiarski left to found Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, with Tchelistcheff advising, and in 1976 his 1973 Cabernet scored highest in the Paris tasting that embarrassed the French. Mondavi had supported Steven Spurrier, the British wine merchant who organized it. Spurrier later said: "His uniqueness lay in the fact that from the very beginning he wanted success for the whole Napa Valley – he was never just in it for his own operation."
The quote most often used about Mondavi's generosity came from the Maestro:
— André Tchelistcheff, on Robert MondaviHe wanted everyone to make it. He wanted all California wines to be world-class.
He pursued this with an evangelist's intensity. He served lunches at which guests might taste up to two dozen of the rarest French wines, opened to show they were no better than California's best. "He always had a bottle of wonderful French wine on the table, Mouton or Latour," Hugh Johnson recalled. "He wanted to show everyone the wine he was making was just as good." Johnson also called him "an amazing, seamless talker – unstoppable. He was always asking questions, trying out new theories on people."
He took his employees on long tours of Europe to see how great wine was made. He set up blind tastings in Napa, putting his own bottles against famous French ones, a gamble that would have embarrassed him badly if he had lost. He did not lose. In 1972 the Los Angeles Times named his Cabernet the top wine in California. By 1975 his wines were distributed nationally. By the late 1970s the Baron came looking for him.
Business in the Bedroom
The story of how Mondavi met Philippe de Rothschild exists in two versions, which seems appropriate for a man who knew the value of a good story.
According to the winery's own chronology, the two first met in 1970 at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, where the Baron proposed a collaboration. Mondavi told Newsweek a different version, more European in its setting. In that account they first met at the château in Bordeaux. The Baron was dressed casually in a Mexican serape and was working on his bottle labels. "Like me," Mondavi said, "he took great pride in his labels." Dinner was quail, "no butter, no cream," served with a hundred-year-old Mouton. Nobody mentioned business. At the end of the evening the Baron said: "Would you mind?... I do business in my bedroom."
The next morning Mondavi was shown into an enormous bedroom. The Baron sat up in bed in a silk robe, and his golden retriever, Rajah, lay at the foot. "Their agreement," Margrit Mondavi added, "was written on a yellow pad and sealed with a handshake." Other accounts date that Bordeaux visit to 1978.
Rothschild owned a first growth, ran his business from a bed, and named his dog Rajah. Mondavi was the son of a man who had nailed crates together for home winemakers. That the Baron had approached him was the essential point. Vic Motto, a wine industry consultant, compared it to "Goliath coming to David to learn how to throw stones."
The first vintage was made in 1979 at the Robert Mondavi Winery by Tim Mondavi, Robert's younger son, and Lucien Sionneau, Mouton's winemaker. Tim had grown up among redwood tanks and used brandy barrels at Charles Krug and was still young. Sionneau was a veteran. The two men disagreed about style in a way that mirrored their families. Tim leaned toward richer, rounder wines. Sionneau preferred structure and austerity. The Mondavis were willing to take risks, and Mouton was more conservative. Opus One was filtered, Mouton-style, while the Robert Mondavi wines were not. Under the rules of the venture, Opus One could draw on any lot in the Mondavi cellar but take no more than half of it, so that the Mondavi wines kept their quality.
For the first vintages the wine was called Napamédoc, a hyphenated nationality. In 1982 it was renamed Opus One, a musical term for a composer's first masterpiece, which set expectations very high. The partnership was announced in 1980. That year Mondavi sold the venture 35 acres of To Kalon, part of the original property. At the first Napa Valley Wine Auction in 1981, an event Mondavi helped found, a twelve-bottle case of Opus One sold for $24,000. When the wine reached stores it cost $50 a bottle, a price no California wine had commanded. It became the first ultra-premium California wine sold in France, Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. Between 1989 and 1991 the venture built its own winery across the highway from Mondavi's, a low limestone building designed by Scott Johnson.
Not everyone was impressed. Rivals began calling the winery "O Pious One." Some said Mondavi took too much credit for building the valley, and others said he took too little blame for the elitism and commercialism that later afflicted it. Both complaints were fair. Both also confirm what Mondavi wanted most: that the conversation about American wine now revolved around him.
The same year the first Opus One went into barrel, 1979, he moved in the opposite direction. He launched inexpensive Robert Mondavi White and Red table wines, which became the Woodbridge brand, made at a winery he bought on Woodbridge Road north of Lodi, a few miles from the packing shed where he and Peter had nailed crates. In one year he started the most aristocratic wine in America and one of its most ordinary. The Rothschild deal got the attention. The Lodi wine paid for most of what followed.
The Artistic Touch We Lacked
Margrit Kellenberger was born on August 2, 1925, in Appenzell, Switzerland, and grew up in a house above Lake Maggiore in Ticino. She credited her love of art to her mother and to Orselina, the hillside town she called bohemian. In 1946, while at a teachers' college for young women, she met Philip Biever, a captain in the U.S. Army. After a short courtship they married in the Church of Madonna del Sasso above Locarno and moved to his posting in the Dakotas. She had three children and moved several more times, and in the early 1960s the family settled in the Napa Valley.
She volunteered to help organize a concert at Charles Krug, and the winery hired her. She became the first woman to lead tours in the Napa Valley, working for the Mondavis before she knew who Robert really was. When he left Krug, many of the staff went with him. She joined the Robert Mondavi Winery in 1967 as director of public relations.
Her early work was improvised. When the regular chef was unavailable, she cooked for winery guests, and later she kept cooking because guests asked for her. In 1969 she started the winery's Summer Music Festival as a benefit for the Napa Valley Symphony, and it ran every summer afterward. Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Lena Horne, and k.d. lang performed on the lawn of a winery that a few years earlier had been a pasture with an arch. She brought in painters: Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Nathan Oliveira. In 1977 she started cooking classes, which grew into the Great Chefs program. Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Daniel Boulud came to Oakville to cook, and Child later wrote to Robert. Her 1997 letter is now in the archive at UC Davis.
"Like painting and music, wine and food speak to the heart," Margrit said. "By honoring the world of the senses, of memory and emotions, the rites of the table express our humanity."
The romance between them is described simply in the record, with dates and without euphemism. They had a long affair. Both were married. Marjorie had been Robert's high school sweetheart and was the mother of Michael, born in 1943 (the year his grandfather bought Krug), Marcia, born in 1947, and Tim, born in 1951. Robert and Marjorie divorced in 1979. In his autobiography he blamed the end of that forty-year marriage on his single-minded devotion to work. It may be the most honest sentence in the book, and also the one that most conveniently leaves things out. Margrit and Philip Biever divorced too. Robert and Margrit married in Palm Springs in 1980. He was sixty-seven. Michael and Arlene Bernstein, both former Mondavi tour guides, ran into the couple on their first date and remembered it for decades.
The second marriage changed him, and he said so publicly and often. "My wife taught me the importance of living well," he said. To Newsweek: "Margrit's invaluable. She added another dimension to my life and gave our business the artistic touch we lacked." In Harvests of Joy he credited her with making "the marriage of fine wine, fine food, and gracious, healthy living" a lasting hallmark of the winery. Friends told Siler he seemed decades younger than his age. He swam forty laps almost every day into his seventies. He never took up golf because it was too leisurely. He drove faster as he aged, until his family and colleagues insisted the winery give him a car and a driver. Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner joined him for a sunset cruise in Hawaii. Danielle Steel visited the couple's house on Wappo Hill.
He also needed the moral argument she gave him. In the late 1980s, troubled by what he saw as neo-prohibitionist sentiment in the press, he launched what he called the Mission Program, a campaign to establish wine as a mealtime staple. A gala dinner menu from 1988 survives in the archive. On November 28, 1989, he appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, in an episode that also featured the record producer Daniel Lanois. Decanter named him its Man of the Year that same year. He was arguing, in public and to a much larger audience, what Rosa had argued in the Virginia cellar: wine belongs with dinner, it is part of family life, and it is legitimate.
Not everyone liked her. Some longtime Napa residents remembered the affair. Others saw in the music festivals and cooking weekends the start of the valley's eventual turn into a theme park. But a winery that hosted Ella Fitzgerald and Julia Child was no longer competing only with other wineries. It was competing with the idea of France as the place where people knew how to live, and on a summer evening in Oakville it occasionally won.
One Tower, Two Prices
The Woodbridge purchase changed Lodi. A local columnist would write that it "helped transform Lodi from a century old grape town to a modern day boutique winery destination." The dozens of small wineries around Lodi and Woodbridge, the Stockton Record wrote after his death, "are grafts from the industry he planted." It also changed the company, because Woodbridge was the part of the business that made money.
By 2001 the Robert Mondavi Corporation was selling about 10 million cases a year in more than 80 countries, with $481 million in revenue. Woodbridge was the best-selling label. The portfolio had grown with acquisitions and joint ventures: Vichon in Oakville in 1985; Byron and Arrowood; Seña in Chile, introduced in 1998; Luce with the Frescobaldi family in Tuscany; a stake in Ornellaia; and in 2001 a venture with Australia's Rosemount Estate. In 1998 he formed an alliance with Disney, and his Cabernets and Chardonnays were sold by the glass at a theme park. In 2004 the documentary Mondovino used the family as its central example of globalized wine, and they did not come off well.
In 1993 he took the company public on NASDAQ under the ticker MOND, to raise money for this expansion. The family structured the offering to keep control, holding 92 percent of the voting stock while selling a much larger share of the equity. It looked secure. Every family that sells stock this way thinks so.
Underneath the growth was a brand problem. The tower appeared on every label. The cheap wines and the expensive wines both carried the words Robert Mondavi. Years later Siler poured a bottle of Private Selection Cabernet in a public radio studio, about a $10 wine with the tower rising through clouds on the label, and gave it a thumbs down on air. "It tastes thin to me," she said. She explained the problem simply: the finest wines, which embodied what Robert Mondavi stood for, "have the same elements on their label. They also have Robert Mondavi. They also have the tower. People got confused." She noted that Harvard Business School had written at least five case studies about what happened to the company.
The man who had learned during the war that the value was in the label had put his own label on everything. He had spent decades building a name to stand for the idea that Americans could make wine as good as France's. He then licensed that name, in effect, to his own grocery brands and expected it to keep its meaning.
He said he understood the risk. At ninety he told Newsweek that the family had "tried everything—the family operation, the corporate idea." In 2003 he publicly criticized his sons for a strategy that put the inexpensive Coastal and Woodbridge lines ahead of the premium wines and let the family name lose its association with fine wine. Of course the strategy had begun with his own decision in 1979. A man who said he had no rearview mirror could not see that he had made the turn himself.
The Storm at Ninety
The sons are part of the father's story, and they were difficult in the ways he had been difficult.
Michael, the elder, was the businessman: expansive, outward-facing, the one who went on Charlie Rose with his father in September 1998 to promote the memoir. Tim was the winemaker who had made the first Opus One with Sionneau, a careful stylist who preferred wines with roundness. Marcia had left active work at the winery by the late 1990s. The brothers fought over control of the company for decades. Their personalities were so different, and so tangled with the business, that Robert once brought in a therapist to sort out the family and business conflicts between himself and his three children. His former employees told Siler they had never seen loyalty like the loyalty he inspired. Other accounts describe a man who could be quick to criticize, sometimes in public, and who by his own later admission did not see his own faults.
Michael tells a story about his grandmother, Rosa. In the winery's first decade he took one of its most acclaimed wines, the 1974 Reserve Cabernet, which "just got all these accolades," and asked her what she thought. "Nonna, what do you think?"
"Michael," she said, "you need to make wine that tastes good."
He panicked and asked if she disliked it. She said she liked it. "But make wine that tastes good." He asked what she meant. The transcript of his oral history moves on before he explains her answer, if he ever did. The woman who stood between the axes and the barrels knew what wine was supposed to do at dinner, and she had little interest in accolades.
Robert gave day-to-day control to his sons in the 1990s. The trouble came early in the next decade, from several directions at once.
First the critics. Robert Parker called the 1998 and 1999 vintages "uninspiring" and wrote that Mondavi was producing "too many wines lacking flavor intensity." Wine Spectator agreed. When Parker praised the 2000 vintage, he credited new oak fermenters and the Bordeaux consultant Michel Rolland, not Tim, the family winemaker. The damage was done. Mondavi had built his reputation on a restrained, food-friendly style just as the market moved toward bigger and louder wines. "It is not a competition for power, but a search for finesse," Robert told the writer in Richmond. The critics preferred power.
Then the glut. In 2002 California's oversupply came to a head, and a supermarket wine called Charles Shaw went on sale for $1.99. More than three-quarters of the company's 9.4 million annual cases were Woodbridge, priced at $5 to $8. "Woodbridge is being decimated by 'Two Buck Chuck,'" a Wells Fargo analyst said. Woodbridge was 74 percent of volume and 57 percent of profit. In the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2003, the company lost $1.6 million, against a $7.6 million profit a year earlier. On June 13, 2003, five days before Robert's ninetieth birthday, a UBS analyst downgraded the stock, and it fell 8 percent to $24.78. Rumors of a takeover were everywhere. Foster's and Diageo were mentioned as buyers.
Then his own generosity. On September 19, 2001, eight days after the attacks on New York and Washington, Robert and Margrit announced a $35 million gift to UC Davis: $25 million for an institute of wine and food science and $10 million for a performing arts center. The faculty gave them a standing ovation. "We're just lucky to be able to be a part of this," Robert said. Two months later, in November 2001, Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts opened in downtown Napa. It was the $55 million project he cared about most, built on a site Margrit had helped secure. It was meant, he said, to show that "Americans are more cultured than foreigners perceive us to be. The image of the ugly American abroad bothers me."
He paid for much of his philanthropy by giving away stock. By mid-2003 he owned about 10 percent of the company's shares and had said he planned to donate the rest. By at least one account, the pledges were made in shares at a time when shares were worth more. Then came the downturn in luxury spending after September 2001, which hit premium wine. The family still held 88 percent of the voting stock but only 42 percent of the equity. The gap between those two numbers was the gap between how much control the family had and how much exposure it had, and that is the kind of gap boards and bankers look for.
He did not withdraw. He returned to work at ninety and took a direct role in the wines that carried his name. During the 2003 Napa Valley auction, which he had founded twenty-two years earlier, he threw a dinner for ninety guests and afterward claimed to have kissed every woman there. Frank Prial of The New York Times titled his July 2003 profile "With Head Held High, Mondavi, at 90, Faces a Storm." In the piece Robert said the most important thing he would say in public about his company's last years: "We've got to get our image back, and that's going to take time."
There was not enough time. He stepped down from the board in 2003 and took the title chairman emeritus. Jayson Woodbridge, who made the cult wine Hundred Acre and whose surname had nothing to do with the Lodi brand, assessed the company bluntly: expensive long-term grape contracts, and a costly bottling line that ran once a day. "That can kill you," he said. Then he added the remark that best describes the old man in the middle of all this: "Robert Mondavi is more formidable in his 90s than most men are in their prime."
Ancora Una Volta
The board moved in the autumn of 2004.
In October the company announced that it would sell its luxury wines, including its half of Opus One, the Oakville winery, the vineyards, and its stakes in Seña, Ornellaia, and Luce, and concentrate on cheaper brands: Woodbridge, La Famiglia, and Private Selection. Michael resigned as an officer and vice-chairman "to pursue private interests." The chief executive, Greg Evans, told employees the high-end wines would do better in private hands, away from the pressures of the public markets. The New York Times estimated the value of the Oakville winery alone at about $400 million.
On October 12, 2004, the company sent Tim a letter now filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It ends a family career in the language of a benefits office. His employment had ended September 30, after a six-month sabbatical. His fiscal 2004 salary had been $477,360. He would receive a departure payment of $1,193,400 over thirty months, a $50,000 bonus, and 1,035 restricted stock units worth about $36,300. His car allowance of $478.26 per pay period would stop. He would resign from the boards of Ornellaia, Luce della Vita, and Viña Seña. Because "you have had no limitations for personal time off, you have no unused Personal Time Off." He could select up to fifty cases of wine. The son who made the first Opus One received a wine allowance from the company that bore his father's name.
On December 22, 2004, Constellation Brands completed the acquisition. The deal made Constellation the largest wine company in the world, ahead of Gallo. The Rothschild estate negotiated with the new owner to take control of Opus One's marketing, vineyards, and administration. In effect the Baron's heirs took back the joint venture. The Mondavi name now belonged to a company in upstate New York.
What came next followed the pattern Mondavi had set at fifty-two. In 2005, with Tim and Marcia, he started a new project to make a single wine from a single estate at the highest level. They called it Continuum and later built it on Pritchard Hill. Michael started his own family venture with vineyards on Atlas Peak and in Carneros. Late in 2013 the family's three branches held three separate celebrations on one weekend: Peter's ninety-ninth birthday at Charles Krug, Tim's dinner for the new Continuum winery, and Michael's lunch for his estate. They were all still family, celebrating separately.
The sale proceeds, Siler noted, allowed him to meet his philanthropic pledges. The Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at UC Davis opened in October 2008. He did not live to see it. Copia, the project he loved most, ran from 2001 to 2008 and then closed. Its attendance never matched his ambitions for it.
He died at home in Yountville on May 16, 2008, a month before his ninety-fifth birthday. He had been frail and in a wheelchair in his last years. People in the valley still called him Mr. Mondavi, though he had always asked them to call him Bob.
On June 18, his birthday, 1,200 people gathered on the back lawn of the winery he no longer owned. It was 95 degrees. Some wore flip-flops and some wore suits. Thirteen local restaurants set up tents, and a twelve-piece band played Dean Martin's "Volare," said to be his favorite song. "He had the ability to egg us all along," Marcia said. "You could feel the pulse here, feel everyone's desire to excel." Tim, holding back tears, toasted a father who had changed not only the world of wine but "our world through wine."
Years later, after a three-year restoration costing about $200 million, the winery reopened to visitors on April 17, 2026. By then Constellation had sold Woodbridge and Private Selection and kept the Oakville estate. The cheap wines had been cut loose and the cathedral on the highway preserved. A block of To Kalon had already been renamed Robert's Block on his hundredth birthday.
Before all of that, in the spring of 2005, two months after the conference room and the sad interview, two brothers in their nineties did something they had not done in forty years. Robert and Peter made wine together. They took grapes from Peter's Yountville vineyards and from Robert's To Kalon and blended a Cabernet, half from each brother's land. They made one barrel, which sold at the twenty-fifth Napa Valley auction for $400,000.
Eighty years earlier, in a cellar in Minnesota, their mother had stood in front of the barrels and told the men with axes to wait. The label on this one was in her language: Ancora Una Volta. Once again.
Part IIThe Playbook
Robert Mondavi is too often remembered either as a saint of California wine or as a cautionary tale about family companies, and neither version teaches much. The useful lessons come from the specific decisions: where he built, what he named things, whom he copied, what he gave away, and what he failed to protect. What follows is a set of principles drawn from that record. Some are things to imitate. Several are things to avoid, and they cost him heavily.
The principles
- 1.Sell the valley before the bottle.
- 2.Put the cathedral on the highway.
- 3.Rename the category you mean to own.
- 4.Borrow the incumbent's crown.
- 5.Let the university be your laboratory, then pay it back.
- 6.Make the table the product.
- 7.Hire the maestro; be the missionary.
- 8.Never let the flanker wear the flagship's face.
- 9.Treat exile as working capital.
- 10.Don't pledge what the market prices.
- 11.Voting control is not control.
- 12.Settle succession while you still have the stage.
Principle 1
Sell the valley before the bottle
Mondavi's most counterintuitive move was to treat his competitors as allies in a larger fight. He shared viticultural and enological research with other wineries. He promoted other Napa vintners wherever he opened a market for his own wine. He trained winemakers like Warren Winiarski and Zelma Long who went on to compete with him. Steven Spurrier's judgment, that he "wanted success for the whole Napa Valley," describes a strategy, not just a temperament.
The reasoning was simple. In 1966 his real competitor was not the winery next door. It was the American assumption that domestic wine was cheap jug wine. No single winery could overturn that assumption alone, because no single label is big enough to change how a nation thinks. A region can. When the Paris tasting in 1976 crowned a Napa Cabernet, the prestige went to the whole valley, including the man who had insisted on its potential for a decade. "Napa's wineries would rise or fall together," the Los Angeles Times summarized. Arrowood put it more cynically and more accurately: what Mondavi shared "would come back to him ten-fold."
There is a limit to this. A rising regional reputation also brings in rivals who learned the playbook, and by the 2000s the cult producers Mondavi had made possible were taking the critics' attention from him. He accepted that cost. Most founders won't.
Tactic: Before competing for share, work out which shared belief is keeping the whole market small, and spend real money changing it, even though competitors will benefit too.
Principle 2
Put the cathedral on the highway
According to the Guardian, Mondavi did not choose his site for its microclimate. He chose it because people driving up from San Francisco would see it. For a winemaker that is close to heresy. For a marketer it was the most important decision he made. Cliff May's arch and bell tower made the building a billboard, a logo, and a pilgrimage site all at once. It went on the label. It became, by most accounts, the most photographed winery in the valley, and Constellation spent about $200 million restoring it decades after the founder's family had lost it.
The lesson is about physical presence as brand equity. In 1966 nobody in America knew what a serious California winery looked like, so Mondavi showed them, in stucco, at a location they couldn't miss. The building made a claim of permanence and seriousness that a young company could not yet make with its wine.
Tactic: If your category has no recognizable image, build one in the physical world, and put it where your future customers will see it without trying.
Principle 3
Rename the category you mean to own
In 1968 Sauvignon Blanc was an unpopular grape in California, associated with sweet, flabby wine. Mondavi did not try to rehabilitate the old name. He made a dry, oak-aged version and called it Fumé Blanc. The new name carried a hint of French sophistication and none of the variety's bad history. The wine later became the main reason Sauvignon Blanc gained respect in America.
His wider push for varietal labeling worked the same way. California jugs labeled "Chablis" and "Burgundy" kept American wine permanently dependent on Europe, an imitation identified by someone else's geography. Naming wines by grape gave the New World a vocabulary of its own, and Mondavi helped establish it.
Tactic: When the existing name of your product carries baggage you can't overcome, stop arguing with the name and introduce a new one that you get to define.
Principle 4
Borrow the incumbent's crown
Opus One was a legitimacy transaction made to look like a joint venture. The Rothschilds of Mouton were the established European elite. The Mondavis were, as one critic said, "a hardworking, up and coming family with roots in central Italy." By putting a Mouton winemaker in a Napa cellar and printing both names on a $50 bottle, which no California wine had commanded before, Mondavi turned the incumbent's prestige into his own. De Rothschild's involvement, Wikipedia notes, "added an air of respectability to the burgeoning Napa wine region."
His lunches worked the same way on a smaller scale. He set up blind tastings in Napa against famous French wines and served Mouton and Latour to guests, not to praise the French but to show that his own wine belonged in the same company. Each time he did it, it was a bet. He had to win.
The risk, which showed up later, is that borrowed prestige can be taken back. After Constellation bought the company in 2004, the Rothschild estate negotiated control of Opus One's marketing, vineyards, and administration. Mondavi had built the venture, and the partner kept it.
Tactic: Find the most prestigious incumbent who has a reason to partner with you, structure the deal so their name sits next to yours, and write terms that still protect you if your circumstances change.
Principle 5
Let the university be your laboratory, then pay it back
Mondavi said plainly that he did not invent the science behind his wines. "UC Davis did a tremendous amount of research work that was unique in the world, and we followed that religiously," he said. "It was really the university that set me on the right road." He traveled through Europe and borrowed techniques from its great houses, but he concluded that California's public research went further than what he saw there.
This is an underrated advantage: a founder with an economics degree and little formal winemaking training running a technically advanced operation by adopting publicly funded research faster than his competitors. He used the Napa Valley Technical Group and the work of Tchelistcheff and Maynard Amerine as his R&D department, and he did not have to pay their salaries.
He repaid the debt late and generously: $25 million for the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science, $10 million for the performing arts center, and his papers, donated in 2011. The gift also tied his name permanently to the institution that had given him credibility.
Tactic: Find the public or academic research your industry undervalues, put it into practice faster than anyone else, and then fund it visibly so the relationship becomes part of your brand.
Principle 6
Make the table the product
Margrit Biever's Summer Music Festival began in 1969 as a benefit for the local symphony. Her cooking classes started in 1977. Over time Ella Fitzgerald, Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Wayne Thiebaud all came through Oakville. None of this was strictly about selling wine. All of it changed what Mondavi wine meant, from a beverage to an entire way of living, what the family called "the good life."
That repositioning protected the brand when American attitudes toward alcohol turned in the late 1980s. With the Mission Program, Mondavi could present wine as "the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage" because his winery had spent twenty years showing it at the table, alongside food and music. Robert said Margrit gave the business "the artistic touch we lacked." He was being generous, and he was also describing a strategy.
Tactic: Surround your product with the experiences it naturally belongs to (food, art, community), so that customers buy a way of life and your product comes with it.
Principle 7
Hire the maestro; be the missionary
Robert ran sales and public relations at Krug, and Peter made the wine. At his own winery the technical work rested on a series of skilled winemakers: Tim, Sionneau, Winiarski, Long, and Tchelistcheff's teaching behind them all. Robert's role was to spread the message. He traveled constantly, talked to anyone who would listen, served comparison wines at lunch, appeared on Fresh Air, and wrote a memoir. Hugh Johnson called him "unstoppable."
The division was effective, but it carried a weakness that had already shown up at Krug. The person who promotes and the person who produces will disagree about money, about pace, and about who deserves the credit. At Krug that disagreement ended in a fistfight. In the corporation it showed up when Parker credited Michel Rolland rather than Tim for the improved 2000 vintage.
Tactic: If your strength is selling, partner with the best technician you can find and agree from the start how credit and spending will be divided, before the arguments start.
Principle 8
Never let the flanker wear the flagship's face
In 1979 Mondavi went upmarket and downmarket in the same year, launching Opus One and the cheap table wines that became Woodbridge. As a financial decision it worked. Woodbridge became the top-selling label and by 2003 supplied 57 percent of the profit. As a brand decision it was a slow disaster, because the cheap wines carried the same name and the same tower.
R
The Mondavi Portfolio, circa 2003
One name and one tower across a price range of roughly 50 to 1.
| Wine | Approximate price | Role | Brand effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opus One | $50 at launch; $325 for 2014 vintage | Prestige joint venture | Builds |
| Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet | $150 | Flagship | Builds |
| Robert Mondavi Private Selection | ~$10 | Supermarket premium | Dilutes |
| Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi | $5–$8 | Volume engine; ~74% of volume | Dilutes |
Siler's thumbs-down on the $10 Private Selection, "It tastes thin to me," sums it up. The consumer who tried the cheap bottle and found it thin associated that thinness with the name on the $150 bottle. When Two Buck Chuck arrived in 2002, the flanker brand was hit just as it had become the company's main source of profit. Mondavi said himself in 2003: "We've got to get our image back." It's telling that Constellation eventually sold Woodbridge and Private Selection and kept the Oakville winery.
Tactic: If you have to sell at a lower price to fund the business, give the cheaper line its own name and visual identity so that its failures can't damage the brand you spent decades building.
Principle 9
Treat exile as working capital
The Robert Mondavi Winery exists because of a fistfight over a mink coat. If Rosa had sided with Robert in November 1965, he might have spent the rest of his career trying to push Charles Krug upmarket from the inside, against a skeptical brother, without the freedom to place the building on the highway, rename a grape, or approach a Rothschild. Being expelled, painful as it was, gave him complete independence and something to prove.
He used both. He was fifty-two, without a job, and borrowing money, and he built the most significant new winery in the valley in a generation. The 1976 lawsuit, with its "only the strong survive" pacing in the hallway, shows how much fuel he got from the grievance.
There is a cost. The brothers didn't speak for decades, and when Robert's sons repeated the pattern a generation later, the outcome was the sale of the company, not the founding of a new one.
Tactic: If you are pushed out of an organization you helped build, treat the break as the freedom to do what you couldn't do there, and put the anger into building rather than into the fight.
Principle 10
Don't pledge what the market prices
On September 19, 2001, eight days after the attacks, Mondavi announced $35 million in gifts to UC Davis. Copia, a $55 million project, opened two months later. By mid-2003 he had given away so much stock that he owned only about 10 percent of the company and planned to donate the rest. At least one account says his pledges were made in shares that later lost much of their value when the luxury wine market fell after 2001.
His generosity was real and admirable. Making those commitments in a volatile asset was a mistake. It tied his philanthropic promises to a stock price he could not control, while giving up the ownership that might have protected the company. In the end, according to Siler, it was the forced sale that let him honor the pledges.
T
From Lodi to Fairport
The key decisions that built the house and the ones that ended it.
1943
Robert persuades Cesare to buy Charles Krug, on the condition that the brothers run it together.
1965
The mink coat fight in November; Robert is expelled from Krug.
1966
Robert Mondavi Winery opens on Highway 29 in Oakville.
1968
Fumé Blanc renames Sauvignon Blanc.
1979
First Opus One vintage; inexpensive table wines that become Woodbridge launch the same year.
1993
IPO on NASDAQ; family retains voting control.
2001
$35 million UC Davis gift announced September 19; Copia opens in November.
2003
Woodbridge hit by Two Buck Chuck; Robert leaves the board.
2004
Board moves to sell the luxury wines; Michael resigns; Constellation acquires the company December 22.
2005
Ancora Una Volta: one barrel with Peter; Continuum founded.
Tactic: Fund long-term commitments with assets whose value you control, or diversify before you pledge, so a market downturn can't force you to choose between keeping your promises and keeping your company.
Principle 11
Voting control is not control
The family believed the 1993 IPO was safe. They held 92 percent of the voting stock in 2001 and 88 percent in 2003, when they owned only 42 percent of the equity. Analysts still called the company "a takeover target because of the assets they have." The board was adding independent directors and in 2003 considered, then rejected, a sale. Within eighteen months it pushed out the founder's sons and sold the company. U.S. News called the story "every entrepreneur's nightmare" and said it showed "just how vulnerable even the most 'takeoverproof' company can be."
Super-voting shares protect against hostile bidders. They don't protect against a board that has a legal duty to shareholders, a stock trading below book value, a family divided against itself, and a founder who has given away his equity. Robert had seen this coming: "The corporate way looks at the bottom line; we look at the future." Seeing it did not stop it.
Tactic: Before you take money from public markets, test your governance against the worst case, a divided family and a falling stock price, not just against a hostile outsider.
Principle 12
Settle succession while you still have the stage
Robert handed day-to-day control to Michael and Tim in the 1990s without settling who was in charge. The brothers fought for control for decades. He had brought in a therapist. He criticized their strategy publicly in 2003, after it was too late to fix it. A father who had been expelled from his own family business repeated, perhaps without seeing it, the arrangement his father had imposed in 1943: two brothers, one company, and no clear head.
Cesare's condition that Robert and Peter "work together" lasted until Cesare died, then failed. Robert's version lasted about a decade after he stepped back, then failed in the boardroom instead of in the dust. The pattern repeated across a generation, and the second time there was no new winery to show for it.
Tactic: Name one successor with clear authority while you still have the standing to make it stick, and do not rely on siblings to share power just because you asked them to.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Robert Mondavi, interview in Richmond, Virginia, May 2002It is not a competition for power, but a search for finesse. More family wineries over corporations.
— Robert Mondavi, Mission Program statementAt Robert Mondavi, we view wine as an integral part of our culture, heritage and the gracious way of life. We believe wine is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage. Wine has been praised for centuries by statesmen, philosophers, poets, and scholars. Wine has been with us since civilization began and will be with us indefinitely. Now it is up to us to educate ourselves about what wine really is.
— Robert Mondavi, to Newsweek, 2002We've tried everything—the family operation, the corporate idea—now we're back to the family way. The corporate way looks at the bottom line; we look at the future.
— Robert Mondavi, interview with California Country, 1998It's not interest alone, you have to be passionate. I say, you have to be passionate about what you do. If you want to really have an enjoyable life, too many people just take interest but that's not enough, you have to be passionate and put your heart and soul into what you do.
— Robert Mondavi, Harvests of JoyWine to me is a passion. It's family and friends. It's warmth of heart and generosity of spirit.
Maxims
- Fight the category's reputation first. No single label can change a country's mind, but a region can, so build the region.
- Place is a message. Put the building where your customers will drive past it, and let its architecture make claims your company is too young to make.
- A new name can replace a bad one. If a product's history works against it, stop defending the old name and give it a better one.
- Borrow prestige, then protect it. An incumbent's endorsement is worth a great deal, but write the contract with your own decline in mind.
- Adopt public research fast. The best R&D may already exist at a university, waiting for someone to put it into practice.
- Sell the whole table. Surround the product with food, art, and music until buying it feels like joining something.
- Give the cheap line its own name. A flanker brand that shares the flagship's name will eventually damage the flagship.
- Use the anger. Exile can fund a better company if you put the grievance into building.
- Keep pledges independent of the stock price. Generosity paid in volatile shares can end up costing you the company.
- Name one heir. Two siblings told to share a business tend to end up fighting over it.
