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The House of Mondavi —Gotham BooksA fascinating new book by Julia Flynn Siler
Book Review
Infighting, obsession, extravagance, fistfights, child sexual abuse, greed, indulgence, philanthropy, lawsuits, and Walt Disney. These are some of the elements that make up what must be the most fascinating story of the wine industry in the New World. Master chronicler Julia Flynn Siler has titled her 450 page tome The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty and once you start reading it you will not be able to put the book down. Meticulously researched, Siler’s narrative account is based on 525 hours of interviews with more than 250 people and an examination of tens of thousands of legal documents. All the principal members of the Mondavi family involved in the events that led to the breakup of California’s most famous wine empire were interviewed. Thirty-seven pages of notes document her research. The House of Mondavi chronicles every detail in the story of Cesare Mondavi’s family from his arrival at Ellis Island in 1906 to the sale of the Robert Mondavi Corporation to giant Constellation Brands, Inc. in 2004. It’s the story of a family torn between a passion to create wine that could compete with the world’s finest and the demands of Wall Street to show increasing profitability. On a personal note, it happened that I visited the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville in 1966 when the sleek, new mission-style winery was still under construction and the rift between the two Mondavi brothers, Robert and Peter, had begun to play out. Peter was running the Charles Krug operation just up the road while Robert was vesting his new modern facility with the most advanced winemaking equipment of the time. In the ensuing years Robert would become the chief spokesperson in the world for California wine. He would enter into partnerships with the highest echalon of wine glitterati: the Rothchilds of Bordeaux, the Frescobaldis of Tuscany, and the Chadwicks of Chile, to name just a few. But, as Siler reveals, it was Robert’s visionary philanthropies that forced Napa Valley’s most revered and respected winery to go public in an effort to fulfill Robert’s wide-ranging commitments: a $35 million gift to the University of California at Davis to be used for a new performing arts center and the establishment of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science; another $30 million for the American Center for Wine, Food, and the Arts (COPIA) in downtown Napa; a large bequest to Stanford University, which named an art gallery for him; and an operating vineyard, winery and restaurant at Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim. The House of Mondavi offers not only a deep and searching insight into four generations of the Mondavi family, but to the development of the wine industry in Napa Valley, which grew during the Mondavi tenure from a quiet, rural valley with a dozen wineries to one of the world’s most important and respected winegrowing regions. Mondavi wines are still on the shelves today. But they’re no longer being made by a Mondavi. That name is now owned by the world’s largest wine consortium. As we write this review, Robert Mondavi is 93 years old and his brother Peter is 92. Robert has entered into a partnership with his children Timothy and Marcia to open a new winery to be called Continuum.
The copyright of the article The House of Mondavi —Gotham Books in New World Wine is owned by Alan Boehmer. Permission to republish The House of Mondavi —Gotham Books in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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