Two major themes: one “the brothers' war,” between Robert, who created the Mondavi brand, and his younger brother Peter, who stayed home and stayed anonymous with the not-nearly-so-visible Charles Krug. The family feud boiled to the surface in a fistfight over the family dinner table, and climaxed in a lawsuit that Californians would count as a seismic event.
After the breakup and the lawsuit, Robert went off and created the brand that bears the family name. Which is brings us to the second story: Robert's children, the rentier generation and the eventual (and inevitable) transfer of power from the family to the guys in suits.
The full story goes back to their grandfather, Cesare, who hove up in the Central Valley during Prohibition and made himself a respectable living selling grapes under a loopohole that allowed home wine-making for private consumption. They moved some of their operations up to the Napa Valley at a time long before the Auberge de Soleil, when it was still pretty much a stage set for The Most Happy Fella.
To all appearances neither Cesare nor his sons were ever any great shakes at the actual making of wine. Robert did emerge early on as what he came to be known later: a good salesman and a master promoter. You can probably make a good case for the view that it was Robert more than any other person who established wine (specifically, non-French California wine) as an indispensable component of the good life.
As the less extroverted younger brother, it was probably inevitable that Peter felt some resentment. The puzzle is why it erupted into an open and enduring breach. The critical figure appears to be their mother, Rosa, Cesare's window, who remained until her death the largest single shareholder in the original family business. With a name like “Mama Rosa,” you might think her function would be emollient, to keep the children on the team. No such luck. For reasons that remain unclear (at least to Siler), Rosa early threw her hand in with her baby, Peter, and seems to have done everything she knew how to exacerbate the breach.
Robert was not so hot at a lot of things, but nobody could ever question his effectiveness as a promoter.. It is in that role Mondavi gave Mondavi its identity and inevitably, made it attractive to non-family investors. This is the point where the saga evolves away from Most Happy Fella and towards Falcon Crest. Robert's children are adults by this point in the story; the seem to have had, to put it mildly, no more talent than their father, together with a sense of entitlement that seems to be a natural outgrowth of their situation. They seem never quite to have grasped (or admitted to themselves?) that “going public” was the first step on a past that must lead at last (as it did lead) to loss of control.
There are still Mondavis in the wine business. You can see the Arts Center on the UC Davis Campus as you roll by on Interstate 80: it presents itself for all the world like some great bonded warehouse. Apparently the projecct was a near thing: Robert's bank balance went into a calamitous decline at just about the time some of his charitable chits came due: the University, for its part, was in no mood to match charity with charity,. But somehow the project came together and Robert gets to be remembered as he would surely want to be remembered: as a symbol of genteel good living. With, of course, a nice glass of wine.
Footnote: Aren't there any women in this story, aside from mama? There are. Robert's second wife, Margit, has her name on the Arts Center. Robert had a previous wife, and two sisters, and a daughter. But this is/was an old-world family: women weren't supposed to have a role unless, by chance, they became widows with stock holdings. And even Rosa fulfilled her destiny by taking leave of board meetings to fix lunch.
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