Soon tourists began seeking out Charles Krug. The Mondavis became one of the first wine families in the valley to open up a visitors’ center to let people sample wines on the grounds. They also quickly embraced a new craze called the “wine-tasting party”—hosting one in 1958 on the Krug grounds with the Northcoast Prestige Wine Society. Though 1950s America was still a beer, milk, and whiskey-drinking nation, wine consumption was rising, in part because of the postwar drop in import duties aimed at helping the European wineries get back on their feet. Also, some returning GIs had developed a taste for fine wine while stationed in Europe.
The winery also attracted a little Hollywood glitter when crews used the grounds of Charles Krug as well as many other Napa Valley sites to film This Earth Is Mine. Starring Rock Hudson, Claude Rains, and Jean Simmons, the movie had a steamy plot involving the travails of three generations of a Napa Valley winemaking dynasty. In it, the patriarch, played by Claude Rains, stubbornly insists on crafting his family’s fine wines the time-tested way, while his grandson, played by Rock Hudson, pushes to boost profits through questionable business practices. Conflict arises among the family members and romantic complications ensue.
It was a story line that would become familiar to many of Napa’s winemaking families in later years.
Meanwhile, the Mondavis were producing what they hoped would become the third generation of their own business dynasty: Marcia Anne was born in St. Helena to Robert and Marjorie on July 16, 1947, and their youngest child, Timothy John, was born April 11, 1951. Robert and Marjorie’s three children grew up on the Charles Krug ranch, using the tanks and wine barrels as their playground. They wore rubber boots through much of the winter and walked on the wooden planks laid out between the buildings, to avoid the dark mud. Michael Mondavi recalled that from the time he was about three, the winery’s cellar master would baby-sit him, a memory that reflects the fact that his father was constantly working and traveling in those days.
In the meantime, Peter had married a divorcée named Blanche, who had a young daughter from her first marriage. Within a few years, the couple had two sons as well: Marc, who was born in July 1954, and Peter junior, who was born in January 1958. Because Robert had been at Krug from the very beginning, he and his family occupied one of the two rustic homes on the ranch. The other, known as the “brown house,” was set aside for Cesare and Rosa, who continued to live on West Pine Street in Lodi but often visited their children and grandchildren in St. Helena.
Slowly, changes began taking place in the way Robert and Peter ran the winery. As early as the 1940s, they arranged blind tastings of Krug and Mondavi wines against other brands for the winery staff, an innovation at the time. In 1951, they took that same idea and expanded on it. At an annual “Tastings on the Lawn,” which was open to the public, the family compared Krug wines against rivals on the ranch’s spacious lawn. Robert’s philosophy from his earliest days at Krug had been to do only minimal advertising for its more expensive wines, focusing instead on urging people to taste them and decide for themselves. It was this hands-on, intensely personal and local marketing that would become the hallmark of the “boutique” winery movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Soon after, the family converted an old storage shed on the ranch into a hospitality room—painting the walls white and setting out some tables. In the early 1950s, tasting wines at a winery was a novel idea. The Mondavis served cheese and crackers along with their wines, and on some weekends hundreds of people would flock there. Napa Valley became a weekend getaway for San Franciscans and for even the occasional movie star, such as Clark Gable. Krug’s innovative tastings were part of the first small groundswell of interest in visiting the Valley.
During this time, the Mondavis launched one of the first winery newsletters, “Bottles & Bins.” Written by their tour guide, Frank “Paco” Gould, in a breezy style and published sporadically (“Uncorked and poured from time to time” was its motto), the newsletter offered recipes and chat about Charles Krug wine, as well as news from Napa Valley. By 1952, it was being mailed to seven thousand wine lovers across the country. Gould, who sported a beret and was a frequent traveler to Europe, became a legendary public relations man who helped elevate the Napa Valley above other grape-growing regions.
With Gould’s help, Charles Krug became better known. And the ranch, with its massive oaks, graceful lawns, and wisteria and orange trees, was slowly becoming more than the Mondavis’ home and workplace; it was now also a tourist attraction. The family would return from church on Sundays to find visitors wandering in their homes and across their lawns. In turn, the Mondavi kids would have fun with the tourists, spying and shooting peas at them while crouched on the catwalks of the Redwood Cellar, an enormous, four-story cupola-topped building where the family stored and bottled its wines.
Although they had come from the Central Valley and had started in the bulk wine business, the Mondavis had begun distinguishing their wines from the product that was most commonly served in American homes through their tastings, concerts, and newsletters. At that time, most American wines were sold in jugs, quality was marginal by today’s standards, and consumption was minuscule. Sweet wines were still more popular than dry table wines and winemaking in the U.S. remained, for the most part, a low-margin commodity business dominated by the Central Valley’s bulk wine producers—Italian Swiss Colony in Asti, Roma Wine Company in Lodi and Fresno, and Ernest and Julio Gallo in Modesto. The Napa Valley had only a few big names: Inglenook, Beaulieu Vineyard, Beringer Brothers, Louis Martini, and, increasingly, Charles Krug.
Driving to work from his home in town, Peter would veer off the main road and turn right onto a dirt lane that led to the Krug Ranch and its grand rows of Dutch elm trees leading to the winery. Flanked by Howell Mountain to the east and the Mayacamas to the west, its properties’ vast vineyards seemed to disappear when they were shrouded in the winter mist.
On days when such otherworldly beauty took hold, it was not difficult to believe the old stories about its past. In one of these tales, a daughter of Charles Krug had been secretly buried on the grounds, after being impregnated by a Chinese laborer. The girl’s bones are said to lie beneath a stone statue that had long stood between the ranch’s two homes, the one occupied by Rosa and Cesare when they visited from Lodi, and the other where Robert and his family lived. The legend is that her ghost still haunts the ranch, unable to achieve its final rest.
By the late 1950s, the Mondavi family was struggling to keep its own skeletons buried. As Peter each day drove past the home where his brother, Robert, and his family had lived nearly rent-free for more than a decade, his resentment began to build. Although Robert’s home was very modest by today’s standards and had no central heat for the first twenty years he lived there, its bucolic setting of lawns and massive oaks was grander than the one-story colonial that Peter and Blanche had built for themselves across from St. Helena’s middle school on a small corner lot.
It was a discrepancy that was impossible to ignore. But Peter’s resentment and jealousy toward his brother grew for other reasons as well. Peter felt that Robert got all the credit for Krug’s success, while he seemed to get very little recognition for making the wine. Newspapers and magazines photographed Robert, while ignoring Peter. Robert also drove a nicer car, earned a higher salary, and was invited to glamorous events. But the reasons for the tension between the brothers went deeper than just press attention or perceived slights. It had its roots in a business crisis that nearly toppled Charles Krug shortly after the end of the war.
Peter had been stationed in England, which suffered terrible food shortages during the war. Rosa sent him eggs that she dipped in paraffin wax over and over again to try to protect them during the journey from California to the United Kingdom. For long stretches, London came under nightly air attacks from the Germans, and some members of the Mondavi family feared that Peter would not survive the war.
When Peter returned to the States to join Krug in 1946, he found the adjustment difficult. His confidence was shaken and he was initially confused by the hodgepodge of grape varieties then under production at Krug. “I was wondering if I was fit for anything anymore,” Peter recalled.
Robert would later claim that he had to teach Peter everything about winemaking from scratch when he returned from England. Because the brothers never formally sat down and decided who would do what, they slipped back into the roles that they’d had as children: Robert, the dominant older son, and Peter, the quiet and reserved younger child. As employees of a family business, their roles were unequal. As the older brother who had been working at the winery from the start, Robert held the title of general manager, making him his brother’s boss.
Perhaps a rupture was inevitable, considering the brothers’ opposing personalities. Robert was a natural salesman and promoter and outwardly never seemed to lack self-confidence. His family used to joke that he could “wear a grape stake down just by talking,” and when his sister Helen was his secretary, she would urge him to reel in his loquaciousness by jokingly asking him: “Bobby, are you dictating a letter or writing a book?” With a tight, compact body set on bowed legs, dark complexion, and piercing gaze, Robert was attractive to women, despite a nose that was a little too pronounced and a high-pitched voice that could grow tiresome over a long evening. Men found him charismatic and likable.
His brother left a very different impression. Soft-spoken and methodical in his decision making, Peter could appear slow or indecisive. But he tended to be the more analytical of the two Mondavi boys and was the one who was more comfortable with academic learning. He was restrained in his manners and more comfortable grappling with technical details than making sales calls or entertaining visitors. With his rimless spectacles, he looked bookish, as well as slightly feminine with his pale, round face and full lips.
Never much of a traveler after his experiences during the war, Peter preferred to stay close to home. He only spent about a week a year in New York on business. Robert would get up to greet visitors and warmly shake their hands or embrace them, Peter would stay behind his desk, seemingly uncomfortable with physical contact. Family-oriented and on the quiet side, Peter could also be stubborn. Once he made up his mind, he seldom changed it.
Although Robert had put several people in place who were officially in charge of making the wine, Peter slowly began to take on more responsibility, eventually becoming production manager. He again began applying the lessons about cold fermentation he’d learned at UC Berkeley—the colder the temperature at which white wine was fermented, the fruitier and better the quality. He took his attention to detail so far as to throw big blocks of ice in the winery’s cooling tower during a heat wave, to make sure the temperature of the fermenting juice didn’t rise too high.
But Peter’s cautiousness would clash with Robert’s ambition to improve the quality of Krug wines.
It wasn’t long before Peter gained some ammunition for what would become a bitter campaign against his brother.
The winery had turned a modest profit in its first few years but ran into serious difficulties after the war. Because of surging demand after World War II, the price of bulk wines had tripled, shooting up to $1.50 a gallon. In mid-1946, the Mondavis were locked into sales contracts with a number of the eastern wine distributors that Cesare had done business with for years. To supply the wine to these important customers, Robert agreed to make large grape purchases from local growers. He also bought an extra hundred thousand gallons of wine at $1.25 a gallon.
As Peter remembers it, his father had warned Robert not to buy all those grapes. But Robert had in fact discussed with Cesare the big commitments he was making and got the go-ahead from him. By February of 1947, prices for bulk wines plunged radically to 50 cents a gallon and the eastern distributors broke their contracts. As a result, the Mondavis were stuck with a loss of some $371,000—driving Krug to the brink of financial disaster.
Instead of suing these important, long-standing customers and risking the possibility of losing their business in the future, the Mondavis chose to absorb the full loss. More strikingly, they also made the tough decision to stick by the promises they had made to their growers and pay them full price for their grapes—demonstrating a personal integrity that would be remembered for years afterward.
But that integrity came at a high cost: Robert and his father scrambled to sell inventory and slash expenses. Despite the belt-tightening, by December of 1947, Krug was struggling under the enormous $600,000 debt. The Mondavis worked hard to bring that down and within the year, they had reduced the amount by nearly two-thirds, to $230,000.
Still, that reversal was one of the reasons that the Bank of America eventually forced Krug to warehouse its receipts—a form of financial control which meant that each time the winery wanted to sell wine, it had to seek permission from the bank to do so. Charles Krug remained in this humiliating state of financial restraint from the early 1950s until 1961, requiring family members to make trips to the warehousing office to get receipts to satisfy their bankers at the St. Helena branch of the Bank of America.
Robert’s mistake infuriated Peter, who remained bitter about it for years afterward. “That decision by Bob set us back ten to fifteen years,” Peter says, recalling the incident some six decades later. “When the banks got tough on him [Robert], I gave him my full support—I told him we’d work it out. But as things got better, he got more active, more expansive in what he wanted to do. He got his confidence back—he’s a salesman. He was on the promoter side and the rest of the family was on the more conservative side.”
In the late forties, shortly after the near disaster with the grape contracts, Peter turned to Cesare to vent his rage. In a meeting with Cesare and Robert in the high-ceilinged “great room” of the home on the ranch, where his father and mother stayed on weekends and in the summer, Peter demanded that his brother be removed as general manager and that the two of them be put on equal footing at the winery.
The Mondavi patriarch, who was sitting at the family’s large dining table, responded quietly but firmly.
“If you bring this up one more time, I will fire you,” he warned Peter.
Then, Cesare turned to his older son.
“If you makes another mistake like this,” he said, “he won’t have to ask me to fire you.”
Cesare had a quiet authority that neither son dared to challenge. But the relationship between Robert and Peter steadily worsened through the 1950s. Robert complained that the wines Peter made were oxidized—giving them an off flavor. Robert also noted that the weekly in-house professional tastings on Monday evenings had come to a halt. As well, Robert claimed that Peter was unable to delegate responsibility and had failed to do the quality checks that might have avoided such problems as oxidation. Peter, in turn, wanted Krug to remain a small wine operation, blaming the quality problems on his brother’s quest to expand production too quickly. Peter also felt that Robert was spending too much on promotional and business expenses as he traveled around the country.
The head-butting between the brothers reached a turning point in 1958, when reports started coming in from the sales staff in the field that Krug’s wines were flat-tasting and oxidized. Customers had begun to complain. At the same time, Peter’s production staff was struggling to meet delivery schedules and the morale of employees at the ranch was at a low. This time, Robert turned to his father in a bid to halt what he considered the desperate deterioration in Krug’s operations. Cesare sided with his oldest son and not only gave Robert overall control of the winery’s operations as general manager but also put him in charge of production personnel—an area that had been Peter’s realm.
Peter was infuriated. In September 1958, he left the winery operations for five months, calling on various company accounts and doing public relations work. His time away from the ranch could have served as a cooling off period between the brothers. But when he returned to the winery in February 1959, he was just as angry as before. The seeds of Peter’s bitterness and resentment toward Robert had begun to germinate.
During this time, Cesare’s physical and mental health had begun deteriorating. While behind the wheel of his DeSoto, he slipped into a diabetic coma as he was heading to Fresno to meet some growers. His car veered out of control, jumping the curb and hitting and killing an elderly female pedestrian. Cesare himself was badly injured in the crash, breaking his nose, ribs, and both legs, as well as losing many of his teeth. He spent months in bed and suffered from guilt for what had happened. It was a tragedy that would shadow this proud immigrant man for the few remaining years of his life.
Cesare had always been a man of few words. But he almost never spoke after the accident and spent the rest of his life virtually in mourning because of the death. Michael Mondavi, who was then approaching adolescence, also remembers his grandfather as becoming deeply somber after the tragedy. He relied more and more on “Uncle Pete,” who served as a driver, handyman, friend, and later the vineyard foreman at Krug. At the end of the work day, the deeply reserved Cesare would settle into his rocking chair on the front porch of his Lodi home and silently nurse his Old Fashioned.
Cesare turned over all of his business interests to Robert, perhaps earlier than he might otherwise have done, because of the auto accident. He traded in his DeSoto for a Cadillac and asked Uncle Pete or someone else to drive him when he went on business trips. He also voluntarily sent the victim’s family money and paid them visits. But his decline continued. In mid-November of 1959, Cesare suffered a heart attack. After two weeks in the St. Helena Sanitarium and Hospital, the same place where five of his grandchildren had been born, Cesare died on the cold afternoon of Sunday, November 29, 1959, at age seventy-six, as a tule fog shrouded the vineyards. That evening, Rosa sat at the head of the table as the family silently ate their strawberries in red wine.
The local newspaper, The St. Helena Star, marked Cesare’s passing with only a small obituary, perhaps because the family was not socially prominent at that time. But during the Requiem High Mass that was held at the St. Helena Catholic Church three days later, Cesare’s casket bearers included Paul Alexander—the banker from the St. Helena branch of the Bank of America who had helped him buy the Charles Krug Winery. During the long service, Rosa was overcome with grief. The black-clad widow of Cesare Mondavi threw herself on her husband’s coffin, crying and wailing. Cesare was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery—the first family member to be buried in the Mondavis’ newly established family crypt.
After Cesare’s death, Rosa inherited control of the winery, becoming its president. Charles Krug had been held by a family partnership, C. Mondavi and Sons, with Cesare and Rosa owning 40 percent of the stock, their two sons each owning 20 percent, and their daughters each owning 10 percent. The difference in shares reflected Cesare’s view of the relative contributions that each of his offspring had made to the business: He had considered Robert’s and Peter’s to be equally important, while his daughters—who were married and living elsewhere in California—were not deeply involved in its operations.
In late 1959, Helen moved herself and her teenage children, Serena and Peter, from Beverly Hills to the San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough. Long divorced from her children’s straying father, Henry Ventura, she moved to be closer to Rosa and the rest of her family. Yet, in the rainy spring of 1960, not long after they had unpacked their boxes, Helen suffered the first of a series of emotional collapses.
Not only did Cesare’s death shake Helen and the rest of the Mondavis’ emotional terrain, it also created a leadership vacuum in the family. Without their father to arbitrate between them, Robert and Peter’s disagreements began to build upon each other and their arguments became more and more frequent. “Slowly, the pot began to boil between the two boys,” says Peter Ventura, Helen’s son. “But this time, there was nobody to take care of it.”
Rosa tried to step into that role. But she consistently seemed to side with Peter, the baby of the family. She insisted that Robert treat Peter as an equal in the business, even though Robert was older, more experienced, and had been Peter’s boss for more than a decade.
Having been cast in a lesser role all his life grated on Peter. Throughout his childhood, he had lived with the nickname “Babe.” To his dismay, his identity as the youngest in the family clung to him through adulthood. Peter strongly disliked the name and had tried to convince the family to stop using it when he went to Stanford, but his request was ignored. To this day, some people in the Mondavi family, as well as longtime Napa Valley residents, continue to call him “Babe” or “Uncle Babe.”
In addition to being older, Robert was also more driven than his younger brother. That became clear in 1962, when Robert took his very first trip to Europe in what would be a pivotal moment for the Mondavis and the history of winemaking in California. Over several weeks, he and Marjorie visited forty-eight wineries—at company expense—including many of the continent’s great wine-producing estates in Bordeaux, Burgundy, Tuscany, and Germany’s Moselle region. Robert couldn’t help but compare the Europeans’ focus on handcrafting their wines and using small oak barrels to add depths of flavor and complexity with the American focus on technology and mass production. Held against the European wines he had tasted, he realized that not only his family’s tank wines, but also its better table wines, were still far outclassed.
Robert and Marjorie also got their first taste of the good life on that trip. The couple traveled to a small village outside Lyons. Shaded by plane trees and graced by a walled garden scented by the northern Rhône, their destination was La Pyramide in Vienne, one of the world’s greatest restaurants. Under owner and chef Ferdinand Point, La Pyramide was the training ground for many of France’s most famous cooks, including Paul Bocuse and Pierre and Michel Troisgros. As they settled into their seats, savoring the thought of the meal ahead of them, their waiter brought their first course, a sole from the Saône River that was “floating in butter,” as Robert described it. “The sole was light, delicate, and full of flavor—we finished it all,” despite having had a large breakfast a few hours earlier. The couple moved on to their next course, a chicken Alexandria, and then the desserts. They ate everything but felt better than when they had arrived. The food was full and flavorful but not overpowering or heavy, and accompanied by wonderful wines. Robert realized that Krug’s wines could also be made with the same lightness and subtlety.
It was a life-changing meal for Robert, a far cry from the sturdy, home-cooked meals and rough wines that he’d grown up with in Minnesota and Lodi. For the first time he had experienced the subtle and graceful pairing of foods and wines in course after course. For years afterward, he would retell the story of how dining at La Pyramide just once had changed his thinking about what a sublime experience eating fine food and drinking gracious wines could be. He returned from that trip convinced that his family should aim higher and produce truly fine wines, rather than the jug variety that they had mostly sold. Robert was convinced that conditions in California for producing fine wines was equal to or perhaps even better than in Europe. By adapting techniques and learning from the Old World, he felt certain that California winemakers could improve their quality.
In part, Robert was swept up in the Francophilia that engulfed America in those years. It was a time when Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the glamorous first lady, became a trendsetter by wearing fashions designed by Chanel, Givenchy, and Christian Dior, prompting her husband to introduce himself at a press luncheon as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” Likewise, the American food world fell in love with France. In 1961, when McDonald’s and other fast food chains were multiplying and many Americans were drinking Coca-Cola and eating TV dinners, Mastering the Art of French Cooking became a best seller.
The book’s coauthor, a Californian living in Paris named Julia Child, led the charge, bringing a new awareness of food and wine into many homes. A few years later, in 1966, a young American student named Alice Waters would have a similar revelatory dining experience at a country inn in Brittany, just as Robert had had at La Pyramide. When Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1969, she would consciously model it on the French cooking she had found so inspiring during her time abroad, particularly its use of fresh local ingredients.
But while worldly Americans were embracing all things French during that period, Robert was ahead of his time compared to many of his fellow winemakers, who continued to sell relatively low-quality bulk wines and saw no reason to change. In the early 1960s, as the wine historian Paul Lukacs has written, the overwhelming majority of American wines being produced were either “misery market” fortifieds, such as Thunderbird and Ripple, or undistinguished table blends, helping to explain why President Kennedy’s decision to order U.S. embassies around the world to serve only American wines in the early 1960s came as a shock to the wine world. With a few exceptions—wines made by Beaulieu Vineyards, Inglenook, Louis M. Martini, and Charles Krug—the American wine industry still churned out oceans of mediocre juice.
Against that backdrop, Robert’s aspiration to produce even higher quality French-style wines put him on the cusp of a powerful trend. Even though some of Krug’s profits and most of its sales came from its lower-priced CK line, Robert had years before befriended the valley’s preeminent champion for quality, John Daniel, who became a mentor.
With his characteristic enthusiasm, Robert pushed hard for changes when he returned home to St. Helena. He felt an evangelical fervor about his beliefs and was not particularly diplomatic with the family about communicating them. He didn’t present his family with a plan to discuss: Instead, he returned from Europe and declared a new vision he intended to follow—a vision that would in coming decades ultimately shift the balance of power from the great châteaus of Burgundy and Bordeaux toward the new world.
He did not mince words about the areas that he felt were most lacking at Charles Krug: the way it made wine. Because production was Peter’s realm, Robert’s effort to make the changes he wanted was interpreted as criticism by Peter. Even though Peter, too, was trying to produce better wines, he resented the unilateral way his brother was pushing it.
“I was working like a dog, and he’d come back from a trip and tell me I was doing everything wrong. Meanwhile, he was out promoting, overspending, overprojecting, never catching up with any of his projects. He was uncontrollable!” Peter would say. “There was a big difference between my brother and myself and I did what I could, but it never satisfied [Robert]…. I devoted my whole life to this business, for better or worse, but I couldn’t satisfy him. He always criticized.”
Robert knew that his brother was bridling at his suggestions, but attributed this to what he perceived as Peter’s deeply rooted conservatism and stubborn resistance to change. To Robert, it just didn’t seem as if Peter shared his ambition to create world-class wines. Underlying this resistance was Peter and his wife Blanche’s insistence that more of Charles Krug’s profits should be distributed to themselves and other shareholders, instead of being reinvested in marketing and promotion. Peter and Blanche gradually won Rosa, Mary, and Helen, at least initially, to their side of the argument. In effect, while Robert wanted to invest to expand the business, the rest of the Mondavis preferred to keep it as a small family enterprise that paid them larger dividends.
William Bonetti, a longtime California winemaker who worked at Charles Krug in the 1960s, recalled that Robert Mondavi used to say, “One bad wine in the valley is bad for every winery in the valley. One good wine in the valley is good for everyone.” Robert maintained that Napa Valley winemakers were in it all together and would be better off cooperating rather than withholding ideas from one another. He set the tone for the cooperative spirit of sharing ideas, equipment, and facilities that helped fuel the valley’s explosive rise to fame. It was a spirit that would be largely pushed aside by fiercer competition in the 1980s and 1990s.
It was that reasoning that led Robert to call André Tchelistcheff, the storied winemaker for Beaulieu Vineyard and the one man in Napa Valley who held the secrets to making the greatest French-style wines, to ask him to consult for Charles Krug. A diminutive Russian émigré who had escaped the Revolution after serving as a White Russian cavalry officer in 1918, he had been educated in the best wine school in France and then hired by Georges de Latour, the worldly Frenchman who owned Beaulieu, after meeting him in Paris in 1938. Tchelistcheff had brought a level of precision and skill to winemaking that was unknown at that time in the valley. Tchelistcheff’s custom of wearing a white lab coat to work reflected his exacting standards. He was known to gallantly begin kissing a woman’s hand at an introduction and proceed with small kisses up to her elbow but was also nicknamed “Stalin” by some of the winemakers who found him intimidating.
“I said, ‘André, why don’t we form a group of people?’” recalled Robert. “‘Let’s bring in Louis Martini, Inglenook, Beringer Brothers. Let’s have a little seminar, a group where we could meet and exchange the ideas of winemaking so that we can further the cause of winemaking by all of us.’”
That led to the formation of the Napa Valley Technical Group in the 1950s. Although Tchelistcheff was open to the idea of swapping information, some fellow winemakers expressed concerns. “After about the third meeting, one or two of the people said, ‘Gee, we’re giving away all our secrets.’”
One of those people was Peter. As Krug’s assistant production chief Bonetti recalled it, Peter was one of the people who felt it was imprudent to share too much information with competitors. Bonetti felt that Peter was so concerned about keeping his production techniques secret that he cut himself off from learning from other winemakers, comparing the stance to China’s decision to build the Great Wall. There were only a few dozen wineries in Napa during the mid-1960s, and unlike later years when the wineries would compete aggressively against one another, the Mondavis and other Napa Valley winemakers at the time were struggling to produce enough wine to meet the surging demand. Against that backdrop, the willingness to share production information with rivals was a key philosophical difference between the brothers.
Likewise, although Peter was ostensibly in charge of production by the early 1960s, Robert retained a keen interest in everything that went on in the winery and cellars. Robert was as far from a hands-off manager as could be, which undoubtedly irked Peter and others. Particularly at times during the year that Peter was in Lodi, supervising the original family business of shipping grapes back East, Robert would keep a close eye on production in his absence. It was Robert, then general manager, who hired Bonetti to serve as assistant production manager under Peter in 1961.
“I remember [Bob Mondavi] used to follow me, watching the temperatures, and watching the fermentation every morning,” Bonetti recalled. “I would say, ‘Well, tomorrow we have to start at six o’clock,’ and by six o’clock, Bob Mondavi was there.” Intensely focused and hard working, Robert seemed tireless to people who worked for him, driving them as hard as he drove himself.
Yet while the company had spent heavily on public relations and promotion, it scrimped on the unglamorous production side of the winery, which was Peter’s area. The original winery, known as the Redwood Cellar and dating back to 1861, was badly in need of updating. The last big renovation had been in 1957, when the winery installed glass-lined tanks that were better for storing wine than stainless steel, which developed a metallic taste in the vintages. But in the mid-1960s, Krug, like many other wineries, was still fermenting its wine in open-topped tanks, which meant that bugs and other contaminants could fall into it.
The ranch’s vineyards were also in a sorry state. They were a mix of old, obscure grape varieties—most of which were no longer popular. Although replanting had gone on in the early years, the fiscal restraint that Krug operated under during the 1950s made replanting difficult. By the mid-1960s, there were still many acres on the ranch that were long overdue for being pulled out entirely and replanted with better varieties.
The few improvements that had been made circled back to public relations. Not long after Robert and Marjorie’s trip to Europe, in 1963, Robert decided to upgrade the image Krug presented to its customers. It brought in a plush, reconditioned railroad dining car to serve as a supplementary tasting room. Built in 1914, the car had traveled for years between San Francisco and Reno on the Southern Pacific line and now had a view of the family’s vineyards from its windows. In a Saturday evening ceremony with champagne, the Mondavis christened it “Rose of the Vineyard,” in honor of the family matriarch who had become the company’s largest shareholder after Cesare’s death.
It was not a successful venture, though, perhaps because of the railcar’s tendency to heat up during the summer months. With a semicircular bar in the center of the seventy-five-foot carriage, some family members later dubbed it “Mondavi’s Miscarriage.” But although the carriage was not a hit, the winery’s popularity as a tourist destination continued to grow, with seventy thousand people visiting the winery in 1964, up from fifty thousand in 1960.
The Mondavis also began making a few key production changes. During his trip to Europe, Robert had discovered that French winemakers used small, 50-to 300-gallon oak barrels to store and age their wines. In contrast, when the Mondavis bought Charles Krug, they had also bought huge, old-fashioned redwood tanks. The original tanks, which were decrepit with age, were soon replaced—but also with redwood tanks, which were then used for many years to make the everyday wine, the smallest holding 9,600 gallons and the largest more than 36,000 gallons. Such large redwood tanks were typical for Napa at that time.
Winemakers in the valley were beginning to realize that aging wines in redwood was not ideal because of the risk of oxidation and discoloration. As well, oak imparts a subtler flavor to wine than redwood. So Robert wanted to invest in new barrels. But the brothers initially disagreed on the kinds of barrels they should use. Robert wanted fresh French oak barrels, which were more expensive than the used oak barrels Peter had initially preferred. Peter’s choice, while not as flavorful, would have saved money. Robert, as general manager, won the argument and Krug ended up placing an order for 125 barrels of different oaks with Demptos, a famous Bordeaux-based barrel maker that had been supplying the world’s leading winemakers since 1825.
The winery tried out the wines in the different barrels and learned that the origins of the wood, as well as how it had been toasted, or aged, made a big difference in how the wines ended up tasting. So Krug started aging some of its wines in smaller oak barrels in 1963, a key step in giving them the complexity that Robert had discovered in the European wines. Although Sonoma County’s Hanzell, a hobby winery owned by the forest products executive James D. Zellerbach, had led the way nearly a decade earlier, Charles Krug became the first large-scale California winery to age wine in French oak. As with cold fermentation and the tastings on the lawn, the brothers in later accounts disagreed over who had played the leading role in each of these innovations.