In 1963, the tense relationship between the brothers would explode over a mink coat. Robert and Marjorie received a gold-embossed invitation from President Kennedy and his glamorous wife, Jackie, to join them at a state dinner at the White House in honor of the president of Italy, scheduled for November. The Mondavis had been invited as prominent Italian-Americans and Robert, to the dismay of the rest of the family, had assumed the honor was only meant for him and his wife. After they had accepted the invitation, it quickly became a source of concern: What would Marjorie wear? And how would Robert, who then earned around $24,000 a year, be able to afford it?
The couple went shopping together at what was then the most sophisticated department store in San Francisco: I. Magnin and Company. Initially, they didn’t find anything that was quite right—until a saleslady suggested that Marjorie try on a mink coat, with the wildly expensive price tag of $5,000. It fit beautifully and the Mondavis felt it was just the right thing for the event—but the couple decided against buying it because it was so expensive. As weeks passed, Marjorie still hadn’t found a coat to wear, and they returned to I. Magnin to discover that it had gone on sale and its price had dropped 50 percent. Even so, the $2,500 price tag was a huge amount for a family with three young children.
Robert decided to buy the coat and put it on his company expense account, with the intention of scrimping and saving in other areas to pay back Charles Krug. While that decision may have been defensible in the sense that it was important for the couple, as representatives of the family business, to look their best at the White House, Robert’s decision to expense the coat without getting approval from the rest of the family first was hardly diplomatic.
When Peter and his wife, Blanche, heard about the purchase, they were stunned. Blanche, who was a divorcée with a young daughter when Peter married her, rode her second husband hard on how his brother seemed to get all the invitations and take all the glamorous trips while she and Peter stayed at home. On top of Robert and Marjorie’s trip to Europe and their lunch at La Pyramide, this seemed to be more evidence of Robert’s irresponsible spending. Envy, too, may have played a role in Peter and Blanche’s perspective on the purchase: Why, after all, had Robert and Marjorie been invited and they had not? And why had the company paid for Marjorie’s expensive mink coat while not paying for one for Blanche?
The issue simmered as Robert and Marjorie’s trip to the White House for dinner was postponed after President Kennedy’s assassination. Robert and Marjorie did eventually attend a state dinner in honor of the slight, white-haired president Antonio Segni of Italy and his wife two months later in the company of such notables as baseball star Joe DiMaggio, composer Gian Carlo Menotti, and pundit Walter Lippmann. As the first state dinner hosted by the new president Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, the White House presented what one observer described as a “musical program of probably the greatest extremes ever witnessed at a presidential dinner”—a rendition of Verdi, followed by a rousing hootenanny. Marjorie looked elegant in the mink coat that would later touch off a family furor.
Despite the mounting tension between their fathers, Rosa held the family together, and her grandchildrens’ memories of the 1960s are happy ones, particularly of the summers they spent together on the ranch and in Lodi. The extended family stayed in touch with its Central Valley roots, even after Cesare’s death. During Lodi’s annual harvest festival, the Mondavis would gather at Rosa’s home on West Pine Street to watch the festival parade. The grown-ups would sit on the porch and steps, while the cousins would perch on the roof above them to get a better view.
The families spent much of the summer together in Lodi, where the heat could rise to an oppressive 103 or 104 degrees during the day. But when they were on the family compound at the Krug Ranch, they’d head to the Napa River, where they’d catch frogs, and fish for sunfish and perch with bobbers. On the Fourth of July, the Mondavis often spent the evening with the Martini family at their nearby winery, the children running around the woods in the pitch-dark night while their parents sipped their drinks and had their own supper, serenaded by the sound of crickets and bullfrogs. For a night out, both Peter and Blanche and Robert and Marjorie were regulars at the square dancing clubs that thrived in St. Helena in the 1960s, a vestige of rural simplicity.
Prunes were still the primary crop and St. Helena’s schools sometimes closed during those years to allow children to help out with the harvest. The town’s population was just a few thousand people and while it was safe—the Mondavi kids would ride their bicycles to school along St. Helena’s elm-lined Main Street and gather after school and on weekends at the A&W Root Beer stand—it also had its prejudices. Robert’s eldest son, Michael, was a little embarrassed to tell people his family was in the wine business, because it was then still mostly an immigrant occupation.
Whether she was in Lodi or at the ranch, Rosa spent most of her day in the kitchen, humming happily as she made delicious homemade gnocchi—potato dumplings—with dark, rich sauces made from the quail, duck, and even robins that the boys would shoot from the trees for her. She would strip the meat from the jack rabbits that the boys caught for her: They considered them pests since they’d nibble from the low-hanging grapes. Rosa would also sometimes kill a chicken herself. She’d swing it above her head and then stab it with an ice pick, draining its blood into a pot. Always frugal, she would boil the blood and serve it as a side dish with bacon and onions.
“Nonna,” as she was known, never got her driver’s license and so, to do her marketing, she would have her sons or grandsons, once they were old enough, drive her to St. Helena to visit the butcher, the baker, and the other merchants in town.
During the Christmas season, the Mondavi cousins would take turns driving Rosa to St. Helena’s Main Street, where the shopkeepers would offer their customers cookies, punch, and wine in the back of their stores. “Everyone was speaking Italian” back then, Peter Jr. recalls. Peter, who is known in the family as “Pete,” had begun working at the winery when he was eight, unwrapping wineglasses from tissue paper that would be part of the Christmas gift baskets that the winery sold. His older brother, Marc, would assemble gift baskets on the third floor of the creaky and vast Redwood Cellar as a kid.
Every Easter, the Mondavis would stage elaborate egg hunts on the grounds of the ranch—with the older cousins hiding eggs in the gardens or in the Redwood Cellar if it was raining. With catwalks, spiderwebs, and a cupola with a 365-degree view of the vineyards, the winery offered plenty of places for the children to hide and search for colored eggs. The extended family gathered around the table at three P.M. every Sunday for a large home-cooked meal Rosa prepared. The adults might not lay their napkins on their laps and wipe their mouths to finish until four or five hours later. In between courses, the kids would play bocce ball on the lawn. After the meal, someone would usually bring out an accordion; they’d literally roll up the rugs and dance on the wooden floors.
One summer, Timothy and his cousin Marc built a track for Timothy’s new gas-fired go-cart. They raced it around the ranch. “We tore up the lawns and got chewed out for it,” says Marc. “It’s a wonder nobody got killed.” Marc says that Nonna, his father, Peter, and Robert seemed to take turns disciplining the boys. Nonna would pull out her yardstick and wave it around threateningly, thwacking the boys with it every now and then.
The cousins spent hours each day during the summer in the swimming pool. And while the Mondavi kids were not brought up to feel they were wealthy, they enjoyed certain amenities. Although Rosa did all the cooking, she had a full-time housekeeper who would serve the family, many of whom worked at the winery, their several-course lunch each day. In good weather, they’d eat under the spreading oaks, on a rollaway table covered in a red-and-white checked tablecloth, near the front door of Nonna’s home. If woodpeckers began making a racket during lunch, Peter, Michael, and sometimes their cousin James would get their BB guns and try to shoot them—at least until their grandmother put a stop to that practice.
“Stop shooting the house, boys,” she’d admonish, gesturing with both hands, with a smile on her lips. By then in her seventies, Rosa was broad-hipped and full-bosomed, favoring wash-and-wear jersey dresses and plain, comfortable shoes. She kept the waves of her thick gray hair pinned behind her ears and wore a thin wedding band. She cooked, gardened, and ran the home where she and her brother, Nazzareno Grassi, lived together after Cesare’s death. For fun she’d play scopa, an Italian card game, and black jack, occasionally cheating to win. When she was dealing, she’d stack the cards in her favor, then slap her winning combination down and proclaim, “Blacka Jacka!” She also loved to watch Lawrence Welk, and attended the monthly dinner dance at the Native Sons of Italy Hall in St. Helena.
Not every aspect of the Mondavi grandchildren’s lives was so idyllic. Michael struggled as a student in St. Helena’s public school system and spent little time with his father, who traveled constantly. “I was a bad student in a bad school system,” Michael says, explaining why his parents decided to send him to a boarding school in the Ojai Valley in the sixth grade. From that time on, Michael traveled back and forth between school and the Krug Ranch.
Michael moved on to Bellarmine Preparatory, a Jesuit high school, where he joined the football team and played offensive guard. He was a fearless player who wouldn’t hesitate at going up against boys much bigger than he was, even though by his final years in high school he was a well-put-together six-footer with an athletic build. Although Michael was outgoing, he didn’t often let on that he was from a family that was well off.
Bellarmine was an academically rigorous prep school, with two to three hours of homework per night. Perhaps because of the heavy workload, students liked to blow off steam by pulling pranks, such as lifting up someone else’s VW and sticking it between two trees. The acronym for the school disciplinary approach was JUG—an acronym for “Judgment Under God.” Students would say they “got JUGged,” meaning they’d been disciplined by a teacher. Most of the time punishment entailed memorizing a passage of a text or an obscure snatch of poetry. Day students, who made up about half of Bellarmine’s student body, were known as “day dogs.”
At his graduation from Bellarmine, Michael recalls receiving several awards, including one for being his class’s most improved student. When his father, who attended the ceremonies, learned of the award, he commented, “Oh, my God, I didn’t think you had it in you.” Robert’s cruel remark stung his son, though later Michael would say he didn’t think his father intended to wound him. “I think it was his lack of understanding of how to be a father,” Michael says now. “One thing you can say is my father never had an excess of sensitivity. It just was not in his DNA.”
By 1965, all three of Robert and Marjorie’s children were away at college or boarding high schools. Michael, then in his early twenties, was in his final year at the University of Santa Clara, a Jesuit college on the Peninsula just south of San Francisco. Marcia, eighteen in 1965, was completing her senior year at Santa Catalina School for Girls in Monterey, a boarding school, and had been accepted into the University of Santa Clara. Timothy, just fourteen then, was in his first year of Bellarmine Prep.
Michael, Marcia, and Timothy were all boarders. But during the summers, they would return to the ranch and work at the winery. Michael, in particular, began working in Krug’s repair shop from eighth grade on and then, when he turned eighteen, worked for several summers alongside his cousin Peter Ventura as a “cellar rat,” as Cesare had—doing the toughest, dirtiest jobs there were in the winery. “My father’s instructions to Mike Bertolucci, who was the cellar master then, was to give me the dirty jobs and the hard jobs and if I came home and complained, then Mike was doing a good job,” Michael said.
Wearing boots and coveralls, they’d scrub the tops, insides, and underneath the huge redwood tanks, encrusted with years of layered sugars, yeast, and mold, where many of Krug’s wines were still made. They also played the occasional prank, particularly on the staffers in lab coats who tested the wine. One time, they took the car of one of the lab workers and, with the help of six or eight other workers, lifted it and placed it sideways on a truck ramp so the owner couldn’t drive off. Another time, the cousins poured the contents of their buckets over the side of a tank they’d been cleaning on one of the main tour alleys, accidentally drenching a female tourist in the fermenting juice and muck. After their paychecks were docked to pay to clean the dress, the cousins never did that again.
Robert was ambitious for his children and particularly for Michael. But that may not have been the only reason they were off at boarding schools and college during this time. Robert and Marjorie’s marriage was strained by his intense focus on work. At family dinners, Robert would spend the entire meal talking about the winery, despite his sister Helen’s suggestion that he leave work behind for a few hours and talk about something other than business. But she seldom succeeded in shifting the conversation away from the family business.
Robert was also a perfectionist who held his family to what they saw as impossibly high standards. Always very sparing with compliments, Robert would focus on the one gold medal out of ten that Peter’s production innovations at Krug had not won—rather than on the nine that they did. He’d begin with a compliment, saying, “Gee, Peter, this wine is wonderful, but…” followed with criticisms.
His children and wife didn’t escape his barbed comments either. Indeed, it took a long time for Michael to understand why his father was so harshly judgmental. “He wasn’t picking on you; he was measuring everything against the image of perfection that he carried in his mind—but had never experienced.” To Robert, what others viewed as his critical eye, he viewed as his drive to raise the business and the family to a higher level.
Marjorie, to all outward appearances, seemed to simply absorb or ignore her husband’s criticisms. With an apron tied around her waist and dressing a salad on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, Marjorie worked hard to develop her skills as a cook, which could never match those of Robert’s mother, Rosa. She’d spend hours in her modest kitchen, with curtained windows and a view out to the garden, tidying up the dishes before calling the family to gather around the dinner table for the evening meal. Robert would take his place at one end of the table and Marjorie at the other, and Robert would begin carving the roast. Marjorie was hoping the meal would please her husband.
“An absolutely beautiful dinner, Marj, but the prime rib could have used more salt,” he would say. Or, if she’d prepared a leg of lamb, he’d begin by saying, “Gee, Marj, it was great but…” and then launch into wide-ranging criticism for twenty minutes.
Always elegant, Marjorie would look at Robert and smile, maintaining her composure. Around the dinner table, with family and friends present, Marjorie would not strike back. Her restraint in the face of her husband’s criticism earned her a reputation for being gracious and ladylike. But Marjorie coped with her hurt feelings in other ways. As early as the 1950s, she was drinking heavily and at one point, family members staged what would now be called an intervention to try to help her with the problem. By the 1960s, people outside the family began to realize Robert’s wife was an alcoholic. “Marj was an alcoholic because Robert pushed her that way,” says the wine historian William Heintz, echoing the sentiments of other people in the valley, particularly those who ended up siding with Peter in disputes between the brothers. “She couldn’t keep up with her husband.”
Meanwhile, a vivacious Swiss woman named Margrit Biever, who wore her hair in a thickly braided blond pigtail draped over one shoulder, had joined Krug in the early 1960s, leading tours and helping with public relations. Because the winery was a small operation at that time, Margrit (pronounced Margaret) caught Robert’s eye. They danced together at Krug’s annual employee Christmas party and Margrit remembers that one of the false eyelashes she was wearing had fallen off without her knowing it and was resting on her cheek. Margrit, who was married and had three children of her own, was also able to connect with the Mondavi family through her interest in food and wine as well as her ability to speak Italian. In some respects, she had gifts similar to Rosa’s, including her ability to prepare a beautiful meal and to bring people together at the table.
The tension at the Mondavis’ dinner table during those years may have been heightened by Robert’s roving eye. Michael, for one, believes his mother had sensed the attraction between her husband and his sparkling, buoyant employee almost from the beginning. Peter’s wife, Blanche, noticed, too, her brother-in-law’s cocky behavior. That gave her another reason to be critical of most everything that her husband’s older brother did—including his constant traveling and tendency to focus almost solely on work even at home, which seemed to amount to neglecting his wife and children. Meanwhile, Marjorie’s drinking problem worsened as her marriage began to unravel. So when Peter, Rosa, and other members of the family expressed their views that Robert was uncontrollable, they may have meant his private life as well as his expense account.
In early October of 1965, Robert went to Lodi to talk with Peter. The headlines were dominated by Pope Paul VI’s visit to the United States and the airwaves were filled with the Beatles’ new hit, “Love Me Do.” To protest the Vietnam War, student activists had staged the first public burning of a draft card.
Closer to home, there were also big changes taking place; Lodi, the once sleepy town where the Mondavi boys had spent much of their youth, was growing explosively. Highway 99, the site of Cesare’s tragic accident in the 1950s, had become a four-lane expressway. A new middle school had opened earlier that year to accommodate the waves of newcomers to the area. In June, voters had passed the first municipal bond measure in forty-four years to fund a new building for the police and fire departments, as well as a new courtroom and sewage treatment plant. But despite the growth, Lodi kept up some of its oldest traditions, including the harvest-time grape festival, which had been held almost every year since 1907.
But on that crisp autumn morning after harvest, as the leaves on the grapevines were reddening, the brothers began to argue over Robert’s spending and, specifically, his decision to put Marjorie’s mink coat on his company expense account. Peter had once again accused Robert of spending too much company money on travel and promotion. Then Peter, uncharacteristically, exploded and accused Robert of taking money from Charles Krug in order to buy the mink coat, since he doubted that Robert could afford to repay it. Robert was enraged by the implication; his younger brother had dared to call him a thief and a swindler.
“Say that again and I’ll hit you,” Robert warned him.
Peter said it again.
Then he gave him a third chance. “Take it back.”
“No.”
Robert swung and struck his younger brother hard. Then he did it again.
By one account, the brothers—both in their fifties by then—ended up wrestling on the ground, dust and curses flying. At some point, Robert had his hands around Peter’s neck and throttled him, leaving purple marks on his throat.
When Rosa saw the bruises, she demanded he tell her where he’d gotten them. At first, Peter insisted he didn’t know. Then he claimed he had run into a door. Although he was a grown man with children of his own, Peter would always be Rosa’s youngest child, in need of her protection as she saw it. Eventually Peter told his mother about how Robert had hit and tried to choke him. That news was the breaking point for Rosa.
After all the years of mounting conflict, the fact that the brothers had come to blows precipitated a family crisis. If this had been merely another argument between the Mondavi boys that had gotten out of hand, that would have been one thing. But it was much more. It was the future of the business itself.
Both sides gathered their armies. Rosa, in her role as matriarch, quickly conferred with the rest of the family about what to do about Robert. She also turned to a prominent San Francisco lawyer, Joseph L. Alioto, who would eventually serve as that city’s mayor. A year or two earlier, Alioto had joined the board of the Mondavi family’s company at Robert’s suggestion. One of his key skills was speaking Italian, which helped in communicating with Rosa, whose Italian was better than her English. As well, the family had brought in Fred Ferroggiaro, who was then chairman of the finance committee of the Bank of America and was a member of the family company’s board, to try to mediate the dispute between her sons. Rosa also tapped the well-known management consultancy McKinsey and Company to help the family through the crisis.
Robert had met the McKinsey consultant Douglas Watson on a transcontinental Pan Am flight earlier that year from San Francisco to New York. The men spent the entire six-hour flight talking about the wine industry and how it was changing. Watson was struck at the time by Robert’s almost evangelical conviction that Krug’s future lay in transforming itself into a high-quality, premium wine producer.
Watson quickly grasped that the young vintner’s ambitious vision was sharply at odds with the philosophy of some of his other wine clients, including the California Wine Association, a trade group of mostly Central Valley wine producers who shipped their wines back east. Soon after that conversation, Robert hired McKinsey to review Krug’s marketing strategy and prepare a ten-year growth plan. He hoped that the white-shoe firm would agree with him that Krug’s future was in the fine-wine business.
Watson and his team interviewed the winery’s employees and examined Krug’s costs. In 1965, the company had earned a pretax profit of $201,000—almost ten times greater than a year earlier. That fact alone would seem to have bolstered Robert’s position as head of the family business, since Krug was booming. Robert had asked McKinsey to weigh in on a relatively simple strategic question: whether Krug should drop its less expensive CK label, which sold most of its wines in half-gallon and gallon jugs, and focus instead on its higher-end Charles Krug wines. McKinsey concluded that the winery should focus on its more profitable Charles Krug label wines.
In the course of that study, the McKinsey consultants discovered a swirling cauldron of bitter family emotions. They soon saw that Robert’s brash style had alienated the other family members. It didn’t take long before they discovered that a majority of Krug’s shareholders, Rosa, Peter, Mary, and at that point Helen, believed that Peter should replace Robert as general manager. And although McKinsey’s initial assignment was to see if they could find a better way to structure Krug, when Robert punched Peter in Lodi in the fall of 1965, they ended up in the midst of a war, since the majority of Robert’s family had turned against him.
Several months after their final report had been delivered and the engagement completed, Watson and his team again met with members of the Mondavi family. This time, though, he met only with Rosa and Henry Ventura, who was married to Rosa’s daughter Helen at the time, at McKinsey’s offices on 100 California Street in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. The meeting took place on a Saturday morning. Rosa had turned to Watson and the other consultants because she wanted advice on how to handle her battling sons. Over several hours, the McKinsey men talked through the various possibilities to end the feud once and for all.
To Watson, it seemed as if Rosa had already made up her mind to fire Robert. Diplomatically, the consultant suggested that the family instead ask Robert to take a paid six-month “leave of absence.” Watson was hoping that that might cool the family’s heated emotions down, allowing Rosa and the rest of her children to see that Robert’s contributions to the business outweighed his mistakes in family diplomacy. Rosa decided to take his advice.
A day or two later, Rosa summoned Robert and other members of the family to her home on the ranch. Joining them was Fred Ferroggiaro. As the other members of the family filed out of the room without asking Robert about the dustup between him and Peter, Ferroggiaro delivered the news: Robert must take a six-month leave of absence with pay and would no longer be general manager of Krug. Although Ferroggiaro attempted to present the leave as a “cooling-off period,” Robert was furious and shocked at having been blindsided by his mother and siblings. He felt betrayed by his family.
Robert’s ouster was formalized at a board meeting of Krug that took place on November 11, 1965, in the main dining room of Rosa’s home, with its enormous dining table that could seat twenty. It was a stormy event, with shouting and fists pounding on tables. After hearing the news that all the shareholders of the company with the exception of Robert had decided that Peter should become general manager and Robert should be put on leave, two directors—the company lawyer Webster Clark and an auditor named Harry Meade—objected to Robert’s removal. Outvoted, they both ended up resigning in protest instead.
Not long after that meeting, Robert’s son Michael learned that there would be no position for him at Krug either. As a senior at the University of Santa Clara, Michael had been planning to join his father and uncle at Krug after a trip to Europe in the summer after his graduation. Instead, Rosa had let it be known that Michael would not be working for the family business. It was a crushing blow—made worse coming from his grandmother. In later years, Michael would struggle to understand why Rosa would do such a hurtful thing to him. The explanation he came up with was that Rosa, for many years, had herself been excluded from any business matters by her chauvinistic husband and was not equipped to handle it when she was forced into that role. Cesare’s attitude had been that business was not for women. Indeed, when one of the women in the family would go into Cesare’s office in Lodi, all conversation would stop.
Robert, in turn, interpreted Rosa’s decision to ban Michael from working in the business less charitably. He simply saw it as her way of making sure that Peter’s children would inherit the ranch.
Rosa later denied that she had banned any of her grandchildren from working for Charles Krug. She explained in a court deposition, through an interpreter, that the tensions between her sons had begun years earlier.
“Before dying, my husband asked me to go in between the two brothers and try to make them agree,” she said in the deposition. “I answered him: You are not able to do that. How do you think I will be able?” Cesare urged her to try anyway, but her efforts failed. Three and a half months later, her husband died.
To be sure, Rosa was more comfortable preparing food in the kitchen and feeding her family and guests than mediating disputes between her sons. Barely literate and with little or no formal education, she was ill equipped to halt the feud that was brewing. She developed the habit of sucking breath in through her thin lips and letting it out again in a staccato fashion that signaled to her family that she was upset or anxious. At night, she would weep in her bed.
Outwardly, her response to their fighting over the years had been to insist that the boys try to get along, as if they were schoolchildren again. She was a forceful, hardworking person who didn’t fear much in her life. Indeed, a few months before Robert and Peter had their tussle, a fire started on the third floor of the winery. Neither of her sons was around at the time. In a moment captured by The St. Helena Star, Rosa donned a fireman’s jacket and hose to help put out the blaze.
But after the fisticuffs in Lodi, she realized that she could no longer cope on her own with her sons fighting. So she picked one son over the other. Rosa’s choice: Peter, the baby of the family who she felt needed more of her protection. Recalling that decision during her deposition, she would explain that she tried to consider all of her children’s interests, and perhaps she felt that Robert was better able to fend for himself. “With everybody, because I was—for everything. Sometime I am a mother to everybody. I am the mother of all of them.”
Yet, what the Mondavi brothers needed at Charles Krug was not a mother, but a mediator who could help them work out their disagreements quietly and quickly. That didn’t happen, despite the efforts of Joe Alioto and others.
However he might rationalize Rosa’s reasons, Robert was especially furious that Michael had been banished from working at Charles Krug. Like his own father, he had implicitly embraced the idea that his eldest son would follow in his footsteps and inherit his role as leader of the family business. It was an echo of the ancient system of primogeniture—land going to the firstborn son—that still exists in many rural societies and was certainly the norm in Sassoferrato at the turn of the century, when Cesare and Rosa emigrated to the U.S.
From Robert’s perspective, his father’s idea had been to build a business for the entire family, including his son Michael. He tried to explain to his mother that his son had wanted to join the business since he was a boy, but Rosa told him he couldn’t because of what she termed a “difference of opinion.” Rosa refused to be specific with Robert about what that difference was, but, of course, it was Robert and Peter’s inability to get along with each other at Krug.
“I then said to her, ‘If that’s the case, Mother, what I will do, I’m going to build a winery.’”