Cast out of Charles Krug, the family winery, Robert Mondavi faced an uncertain future. In this exclusive extract from Deals, Drama, Drive, Robert and his son Michael turn a bitter family feud into an ambitious new venture, laying the foundations for one of Napa Valley’s most celebrated wineries over Thanksgiving weekend in 1965.
It took Robert and Michael less than a week to decide to build a winery. They also decided it would be ready for the 1966 harvest – that is, in less than ten months’ time. Robert was fifty-two, bristling with energy, angry and determined. Michael was twenty-two, equally determined but also confused and worried.
After he arrived home on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, he paced up and down for twenty-four hours and thought of his future. His plans for a six-month sojourn in Europe, working at BBR and touring the great vineyards of France and Italy, were scotched. That was to have been his and Isabel’s honeymoon – their wedding date was set for June 18, 1966.
“My father and I wrung our hands. I said, ‘Dad, what are we going to do?’ and then we went for a walk in the vineyards.” That was the Wednesday. Thanksgiving was celebrated as normal, Rosa presiding, Robert and Peter treating each other warily but courteously. Then Robert got out the card table and he and Michael sat down. “I’d bought two thirty-six-column accounting pads, and we used those to work out exactly what we needed.” They used two pads so they could track cash flow for the seventy-two months necessary for aging the wine, bottling it, warehousing it, selling it to the distributor, then waiting for their payment. “Cash flow over that many years is more important than profit.” They expected to get a 12,500-case operation up and running in around ten months. “Dad said, ‘If we do this fast, we can crush grapes in September.’ And I was naive enough to say, ‘I think we can do it, yeah.’ I felt I could walk on water.”
During their walk in the vineyards, they’d talked about producing a wine but hadn’t thought of actually building a winery: “That concept germinated over the weekend.” The idea wasn’t entirely new. “Because of the ongoing friction with Peter, Dad had periodically thought of starting his own high-quality winery. He said, ‘We’re going to do something. We’re going to rattle the cage.’”
He had grand ambitions. “Dad said, ‘We know we have the soil, the climate, the grape varieties, and the knowledge to produce wines that compete with the great wines of the world. To do that, we need oak barrels. We need stainless steel. We need temperature control.’” They knew they had to have a sanitary environment, yeast control, and oxidation control. That weekend, working at the card table, their most realistic plan was to rent a facility. When they did more research, it turned out that all the available wineries used old redwood tanks, and their pumps were bronze, which could leave a residue in the wine. Stainless steel was the thing; at Charles Krug, when a pump broke down it would be routinely replaced with stainless DeLaval pumps. It was frustrating that they couldn’t ask Peter to lend them a corner of the winery. He was a generous man, as we’ll see, but that would have been a step too far.
Since they couldn’t find anywhere suitable, the obvious move was to build their own winery. Robert had visited the new headquarters of Sunset magazine in Menlo Park (in what is now Silicon Valley) and had been impressed by the ranch-style adobe building, especially the indoor–outdoor concept that was becoming popular in mid-century California. It was the work of a designer called Cliff May (it’s now on the National Register of Historic Places), and Robert asked his friend Bill Lane, the publisher of Sunset, to put him in touch. He explained his ideas.
“My father told Cliff he wanted the production facility on one side and a hospitality center on the other. You welcome the people and entertain them there, but you also give them a tour. It was spectacle. It was probably the first winery designed so that visitors could walk through the production facility.” He also told May he wanted the building to pay homage to the Franciscan Fathers, the eighteenth-century missionaries who planted the first vines in California.
Whether consciously or not, he was laying plans for his own mission. Compared to Robert’s wider ambitions, building a winery was almost insignificant. He wanted to teach America the wonders of wine as a source of well-being and happiness. The message – “wine in moderation is good for you, it’s the mealtime beverage that brings friends together and helps food taste better” – hasn’t changed in more than half a century. He intended Robert Mondavi Winery to be a center for hospitality and learning. He understood that people would listen more readily to a teacher (or, indeed, a preacher) than a salesman. This would become explicit in the Robert Mondavi Mission Program, the formalization of his evangelical drive to bring the message of healthy wine to America.
But there was the question of how this was all going to be funded. The deliberations over Thanksgiving included finance, and Michael drew on long experience of working summers at Charles Krug to make lists of essential equipment. “We’d need one positive displacement pump, two centrifugal pumps. We’d need 200 feet of inch-and-a-half hose and 150 feet of 2-inch hose, plus the fittings.” He went to the Healdsburg machine shop to find out what it would all cost.
Those conversations between father and son laid the blueprint for their working relationship for decades to come. As Michael has said, “I was the go-get-it-done guy.” It was his job to interpret and execute Robert’s vision, which was always much more than simply making a wine that would sit alongside the best.
They worked out that they needed $100,000 (about $1 million today) to build and equip the winery and bring in the harvest. Fifty percent of the wine they made would be sold off in bulk, leaving the best to be bottled under their own label. Robert was earning $3,000 a month with his consulting jobs at Mirassou, and at the Lodi growers cooperative the Guild Wine Company, but it was not nearly enough.
It’s important to remember that Robert and Michael were not alone – they had a complex and loyal support network built from years of working with the winemakers, growers, technicians, and banks of Napa. They were popular and trusted. If they needed advice, they could call on Louis M. Martini or André Tchelistcheff; if they were refused financial backing from one quarter, they had other options. Robert went to see Andy Johnson, the general manager of the St. Helena branch of Bank of America. He explained his plans and said he needed $100,000 to get the thing off the ground. Andy said, “Bob, I’ve had the pleasure of doing business with you for many, many years. You’re a good businessman, you’re honest, you pay your bills, but I can’t loan you any money because you have no collateral.” They had their shares in Charles Krug, but they were tied up and couldn’t be liquidated.
So Robert turned to his friends. Bill Hart, the Hemingwayesque figure who became an important mentor for Michael, loaned him $50,000 on very easy terms. The Mirassou family, for whom Robert consulted and at whose San Jose estate (in what is now Silicon Valley) Michael had often stayed weekends during term time, signed a promissory note that enabled Andy Johnson at the bank to loan him a further $50,000. Two local growers, Fred Holmes and Ivan Schoch, brought $25,000 each as founding partners. Schoch managed the vineyards of the Stelling estate at the To Kalon vineyard in Oakville, which sold a 12.5-acre parcel to Robert. It was there that they planned to site their winery.
Excerpt taken from Deals Drama Drive: Michael Mondavi and the making of Napa Valley by Adam Lechmere
