Robert Mondavi liked to do his thinking in the vineyards. During his most troubled days, he’d carry a folding card table and a chair between the rows of trellised vines at the Charles Krug Ranch. He’d find just the right spot, surrounded by foliage and out of sight of his mother, who lived just three hundred yards away from his and Marjorie’s home. By taking shelter in the vineyards, he also managed to stay out of Peter’s way. It hadn’t taken his younger brother long to seize control of the winery and move into Robert’s corner office. Unfolding his table and setting it upright onto the gravelly clay loam, Robert would sit there and ponder, sometimes for hours.
At age fifty-two, Robert Mondavi had no job, almost no savings, and private school tuition to pay for two of his three children. The home on the Krug Ranch where he and his wife and children had lived for more than two decades didn’t solely belong to him: Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family were co-owners, since the home was an asset of the family business. And while Robert owned a stake in the Charles Krug Winery and C. Mondavi and Sons, as part of the family partnership his father had set up before his death, there was no quick or easy way to turn his holdings into cash. As a result, Robert’s financial situation looked grim, even desperate.
A restless person, with deep reservoirs of energy and ambition, Robert was initially knocked flat by his family’s decision to put him on leave. Ostensibly a “cooling off” period for both sides, Robert’s forced vacation, instead, deepened his anger and left him dispirited. To make matters worse, when he asked his mother to clarify what his future might be with Krug, he was repeatedly put off with vague and unsettling responses such as “Be a good boy—then we’ll see.” Yet, the signs were not good. As early as January of 1966, Peter had begun openly telling people outside the family that Robert’s leave was permanent and that he would no longer be part of the business.
For more than two decades, Robert had poured himself into the Charles Krug Winery with the conviction that he was building something lasting. He had made the classic trade-off for men of his generation by focusing intensely on work while ignoring his family’s individual dreams and needs. At family meals, Robert would almost exclusively talk business, scarcely listening to his wife and his children. His eldest son, Michael, would later recall, “I can’t remember any times my father did not talk about wines from the time I was in diapers through this moment. Every meal we had at home—lunch, dinner, even breakfast sometimes—had wine involved.” Believing that his sons would inherit and build upon his work at the winery, he’d placed business discussions at the core of most family interactions over the years.
So Rosa’s abrupt decision to bar Michael from joining the family business infuriated Robert. From junior high through college, Michael had spent every summer and holiday working at the Charles Krug winery. He tended the vineyards, washed barrels, manned the pumps, and tested samples in the lab. With Robert traveling almost constantly, and wholly focused on work when he was home, Michael found that the only real way to spend time with his father was to work alongside him. And so he did. Even in his senior year at Santa Clara University, where he majored in business, he made the five-or six-hour round-trip commute twice a week to St. Helena during harvest season, often hitchhiking to save the bus fare.
Michael knew from an early age that he would join his father and uncle in the wine business. Although Michael would later say that his father and mother had “outsmarted” him and his siblings by telling them that they should not enter the wine business unless they really wanted to, Robert’s actions suggested that he fully expected his firstborn son to work alongside him when he was done with college.
Robert began his campaign to recruit Michael early. In the summer of 1961 at the Sutter Club in Sacramento, Robert invited Maynard Amerine, the famed UC Davis professor of viticulture and enology, to lunch with him and Michael to discuss Michael’s future. The dining room of the mission-style private men’s club, with its wood-beamed ceilings and antiques, was a suitably solid setting for a discussion of the young heir’s future.
Then just eighteen years old and about to begin his senior year at Bellarmine, where other Italian-American wine families, including the Sebastianis and Franzias, also had sent their offspring to be educated, Michael spent much of the meal listening to his father talking about the future of California’s wine industry. Robert eventually came around to his real purpose: He declared that Michael should go to UC Davis to study wine.
Amerine quietly disagreed.
Michael’s first reaction was panic: Had the eminent professor somehow discovered his mediocre grades?
“Why not?” asked Robert. “He’s been working in the cellars and the vineyards all his life.”
“Because you can teach him more than I can,” replied Amerine. “His biggest job will be learning how to make a profit.” Instead of Davis, Amerine advised Michael to study business at Santa Clara University, where the professor’s friend headed the business school. “That lunch was worth about two years in college,” Michael now says.
Michael took Professor Amerine’s advice, majoring in business and with a minor in sales. After college, the plan was simple and appealing: He would go to work at Charles Krug. But first, he’d undergo a glamorous finishing. His expectation had been that his father would arrange for him to serve an apprenticeship at one of France’s grand châteaus, spending six months or a year absorbing the subtleties of centuries-old methods of blending and aging fine wine. Next, he would cross the Channel to spend a year or two in London, working for the wine merchant Harvey’s. He’d then return Stateside to enter a graduate business program and earn an MBA.
By late 1969 or early 1970, he would have been beautifully groomed to help his father elevate Charles Krug into a producer of truly fine, European-style wines. It was perhaps not a coincidence that during his postcollege years, this plan would have Michael safely occupied in work outside the U.S. and thus out of the draft board’s reach. Who could argue with such an elegant and practical solution?
It would also give his progeny a good head-start in the race to succeed Robert and Peter at Krug. As the first of the next generation of Mondavis to announce his intention to enter the business and thus claim his birthright, Michael was a threat to Peter’s plans for his two sons, who were much younger than Michael and not even close to settling on careers yet. That may have been another reason for the subsequent battle between the brothers: They were engaged in the early skirmishes of what would become a dynastic war of succession.
Whatever the cause, the family conflict destroyed Michael’s short-term plan for a grand European tour and his longer-term plan to join Charles Krug. Not only was it unclear whether Robert could count on a salary from Krug past the six-month leave period; it did not seem likely that he would be able to offer his eldest son a job, as Michael had expected. So, just before Thanksgiving, Robert telephoned each of his children at their schools and asked them to come home because he had something important he needed to discuss with them. Returning to the now embattled family compound, the three children retreated into Robert and Marjorie’s home to hear what their father had to say. Sitting them down, Robert explained how he had been put on a forced leave of absence with no guarantee that at the end of the six months he would be allowed to return to the family business. The mood was somber, as Michael, Marcia, and Timothy listened. Robert then laid out his plan to build a winery—warning that they might have to go through at least five and perhaps even ten years with little cash to spare. “I wanted them all to think of this very seriously, that we would not have the standard of living that we were accustomed to before,” said Robert later. His children returned to school in Santa Clara, south of San Francisco, and considered what their father had told them. About six weeks later, they met again and they all agreed that, as a family, they were willing to make sacrifices, if they had to, for the new venture.
Decades later, Robert would say that he wanted to set up a winery out of a sense of obligation to his eldest son. “Since Mike wanted to be in the business, I would establish the Robert Mondavi Winery for Mike,” he recalled, adding that Michael’s first name was also Robert. Perhaps naively, in the face of his brother and mother’s attitudes, Robert recalls that his initial plan was to set up a small, fifteen-to twenty-thousand-case winery, ostensibly for his eldest son, while he continued to work for Charles Krug.
But, given Robert’s vaulting ambitions, it is unlikely he ever really intended the winery to be Michael’s alone. Timothy was still an adolescent at the time and Marcia was in her sophomore year of college, so perhaps it is not surprising that he did not include them in explaining his motives in later years. But it is more believable that Robert was hedging his bets. He must have realized by early 1966 that he’d better begin working toward opening up a winery of his own, as the friction between him and the rest of his original family was intensifying—despite his efforts to extend olive branches.
In the early months of his leave, Robert had approached his mother to ask if she would like to acquire a 25 percent interest in the new winery he planned to open in exchange for investing $25,000. Rosa, who was standing over the sink in her kitchen, asked Robert, “Will I be able to vote my stock?” Robert gently said no. “What I’m offering is a form of nonvoting shares,” he explained. Rosa flatly turned him down. Likewise, Robert’s repeated efforts to get Rosa or the other family members to clarify his status failed as well.
So it is not difficult to believe that by the summer of 1966, Robert wanted to build a winery named after himself in part to prove to the rest of his family that he was right and they’d treated him wrongly. Robert brought up the subject of his new winery’s name over coffee one afternoon at his mother’s home on the ranch. He came into the kitchen, where Peter was also sitting, and announced his plans to call it the “Robert Mondavi Winery.” Peter immediately protested, arguing that Krug had used the Mondavi name on its labels from the beginning and that using it would confuse wine buyers.
Robert countered that he planned to use the original, Italian pronunciation of the name and that consumers would catch on to the differences between the two brands. Rosa, who was listening quietly to her sons’ argument, then rose from her chair and swiftly extended her hand across the kitchen table, slapping her eldest son on the cheek. Tears filled Robert’s eyes as he suffered this smarting, silent rebuke from his mother.
Several of the family’s closest friends offered to back Robert’s new winery. Bill and Ina McCormick Hart, who square-danced with Robert and Marjorie, were among the first to realize there was a serious rift in the family. The Harts, who had inherited a fortune in Kern County oil, approached Robert and said, “Bob, we know that there is a difference with the family here and if there is anything we can ever do, we would be very happy to support you in any venture that you would want to go into.” Robert initially declined their offer, hoping the problem would resolve itself. He told them, “Well, no, we will resolve our differences.”
But after Rosa had let Michael know he wouldn’t have a job at Krug, Robert realized he needed help. He took the Harts up on their offer and borrowed $50,000. The Mirassou brothers, fourth-generation Santa Clara County winemakers who had hired Robert as a consultant to help them transform their bulk wines into something finer, cosigned a note so that Robert could borrow $100,000 from the Bank of America, which was then the leading agricultural lender in California. Another $50,000 came from two growers in the valley who had sold grapes to the Mondavis for many years: Fred Holmes and Ivan Shoch, who each lent him $25,000 in exchange for shares in the new winery, as well as assurances that Robert’s winery would buy their grapes. So, altogether, Robert had raised $200,000 in start-up capital and had retained 50 percent of its equity. He managed to do this entirely with other people’s money.
Robert’s ability to raise funds to start a new winery was a reflection of the goodwill he’d accumulated over the years, particularly with valley grape growers. It is not a stretch to imagine that Fred Holmes and Ivan Shoch remembered the bad times in 1946 when Robert and his father chose to honor their commitments to buy the growers’ grapes, rather than break the contracts as others did.
Robert’s friendship with Ivan Shoch was crucial in helping him purchase perhaps the most storied vineyard in Napa Valley: To Kalon, which is the Greek term for “most beautiful.” Planted in the 1870s by Hamilton W. Crabbe, who came to California in the 1850s looking for gold, this fertile stretch of vines near the hamlet of Oakville is one of the oldest vineyards in the valley. Crabbe had taken cuttings of “noble varietals” from France and planted a wide variety of grapes in his vineyard. He built To Kalon into a national brand that had developed, by the late 1880s, into one of the valley’s largest and most successful wineries, capable of producing four hundred thousand gallons a year. As Crabbe joked to one visitor, To Kalon may mean “most beautiful” in Greek, but “I try to make it mean the boss vineyard.”
When Crabbe died, the estate was sold to the E. W. Churchill family. The winery reopened after Prohibition ended in 1933, selling only bulk wines, but then burned to the ground in 1939. Four years later, a wealthy San Francisco real estate tycoon named Martin Stelling Jr. bought a large parcel of it. Sensing an emerging market for premium varietals, Stelling began planting many of the 600 acres he owned there with Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc grapes.
Stelling died in a car wreck in 1950 and the property was overseen by a trustee. Its foreman was Ivan Shoch, who eventually approached his old friend Robert Mondavi about buying part of the famous old vineyard. In 1962, the Mondavis purchased nearly 500 acres of the Stelling Estate, including most of the original 359 To Kalon acres, for $1.35 million. The purchase, which The St. Helena Star called “the most outstanding real estate transaction in Napa Valley for many years,” meant that Krug had the grapes to produce an additional 240,000 gallons of premium wine annually, almost doubling its output. The Mondavis held the property under the name of the parent company that Cesare had formed, C. Mondavi and Sons, and they knew the vineyards well: They’d been buying Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from To Kalon since at least the early 1950s.
When the reality that he had been expelled by his family from Krug had really begun to sink in, Robert turned his sights to the remaining few acres of To Kalon that his family didn’t own. By then, the property had become embroiled in a complex development plan. In 1966, with Shoch’s help, he bought a tiny, 11.6-acre parcel of that historic vineyard. While that wasn’t nearly enough land to grow the grapes to supply the twenty-thousand-case-a-year winery he envisioned, a condition of Shoch and Holmes’s investment was that Robert would buy their grapes for his new winery. The spot was ideally located, as well. It was close to Highway 29, the main artery through the valley and the route that most tourists took as they headed toward Beaulieu, Charles Krug, and other well-known wineries. With his keen instinct for public relations, as well as knowledge from his years at Krug of how much more cost-effective word of mouth was over traditional advertising, the location was superb for attracting visitors.
Cradled at the base of the hills and blessed with healthy vines and lush greenery, the land Robert felt an immediate connection with possessed a unique calmness and beauty. He intuitively knew this was the place he wanted to build his winery.
Robert’s soaring ambitions were evident in his choice of design. After traveling in Europe and staying with the wine expert Alexis Lichine at his Château Lascombes in the Médoc, and other grand estates, Robert saw that his French counterparts had created veritable palaces. While Robert’s tight finances wouldn’t permit him to build a Versailles of wine, he sought out a singular Californian talent—Clifford May. Robert had never forgotten the elegant, mission-style complex in Menlo Park, California, that May had designed for Sunset magazine. Robert visited it as part of a Wine Institute event in the early 1960s. Low slung, understated, and with a gentle reference to California’s colonial history, May’s project for Sunset perfectly captured the zeitgeist of California in the 1960s, with its architectural focus on casual indoor/outdoor living.
Robert got in touch with Sunset’s longtime publisher, L. W. “Bill” Lane Jr., to ask him which architect had designed the magazine’s new campus. Lane told him it wasn’t an architect at all but a designer named Clifford May, a bon vivant with a beautiful young wife who regularly piloted his own plane down to Mexico to collect artifacts. Lane had left a message for May that Robert Mondavi was interested in talking to him about his new winery. Lane later told him, “Bob, you know, Cliff May was so excited by my message that he called me back at three o’clock in the morning!” Robert felt the same and hopped on a plane with Shoch and Holmes to visit May at his office in West Hollywood. The negotiations got started almost immediately, as May asked Robert how big he planned to make his winery. May’s fees were high; he charged 12 percent of a project’s construction costs rather than the typical 10 percent. And although Robert’s initial plan was to start producing a modest twenty thousand cases a year, he expected to expand rapidly. He didn’t have much to spend on a new building. His worry was that if May designed a winery for him that could produce fifty thousand or even a hundred thousand cases a year, he would have blown his budget before he sold even his first bottle of wine. The men went back and forth.
“Well, Bob, how big is your winery going to be?” May asked.
“It’s going to be a small little winery to start with,” Robert answered.
May then asked how big it would eventually become. Robert didn’t want to reveal his plan, worried that he’d charge too much. After sparring for twenty minutes or so, they found a compromise.
“Listen, Cliff, if I built a winery that big, I wouldn’t have enough money to put into the winery,” said Robert.
So May said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll design it that way and I’ll only charge you for what you build. Eventually, if you enlarge, you will pay me then.”
They struck a deal. Not long after, May jetted up to Napa in a private plane, landing on a tiny private airstrip near Inglenook that locals called jokingly “Rutherford International.” Holmes, Shoch, Robert, and his son Michael picked him up at the airport and took him to look at three possible building sites.
May asked him what qualities he wanted the architecture of his winery to convey.
“I want the building to declare, ‘Here is a heart and soul,’” Robert answered. “I want something that tells people this is not a factory, this is a home.”
His response may have reflected his desire to build a new dwelling for himself, since he had been banished from the family winery and faced possible exile from the Krug Ranch. It also reflected a willingness to break with convention. Clifford May’s design for the new winery was a startling change from the grand Victorian mansions and stone castles that housed the area’s leading wineries at the time. May was a leading proponent of the California ranch-style home that exploded across the state’s burgeoning suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s.
He was also a sixth-generation Californian who traced his roots to José María Estudillo, a commander of San Diego’s Presidio who died in 1830, and May’s vision for Robert’s winery had its origins in the early history of the state. The building’s silhouette would be close to the ground, with an archway separating the modest public façade from the more expansive, private space, defined by two wings of veranda expanding outward, broken by carved wooden doorways and decorative wrought-iron grills. Its low profile would be broken by a soaring bell tower, reminiscent of the Spanish missions that were built throughout California in the 1800s. Through the archway, the vista would open onto an expanse of vineyards and the Mayacamas Mountains. May masterfully balanced the warm and welcoming goal of a public façade that visitors would first see against the feeling of a privileged, exquisitely maintained country estate.
At the time when Robert expressed a desire to build a winery that felt like a home, the valley was experiencing the first rumblings of corporate interest in traditionally family-owned wineries. In 1964, John Daniel, head of Inglenook and a descendant of its founder, Gustave Niebaum, sent tremors through the valley when he sold the winery to United Vintners, a large cooperative that itself was part of Allied Grape Growers. There were many reasons that Daniel sold out, but among them was his belief that he lacked a family successor, since neither of his daughters seemed ready to take over the winery when he was gone. In 1966, as Robert was starting his winery, many of the valley’s longtime vintners could see change was coming. Not only was a generational turnover taking place, but corporate interests began clashing with a small but growing tribe of urban refugees who’d given up higher-paying jobs and moved to the valley to make wine and live close to the land. It was also a time when hippies roamed the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and were venturing north to Mendocino and other rural northern-California counties to live in communes.
For Robert, that arrival of United Vintners and the rumors of big liquor companies on the prowl added to his sense of urgency to get construction under way quickly. “I wanted to be in the market before other people came in. I realized that the big companies were beginning to come in and wanted to invest big money. Not having that kind of money, I knew that time would be of the essence and that is why I wanted to get started that first year.” He had another reason for moving quickly as well. Plans were afoot to turn the old Stelling estate into a Palm Springs–like luxury resort and housing project, with a model winery at its heart. By agreeing to build that model winery, Robert got his first pick of the parcels in the proposed development.
Although he publicly supported the controversial plan, he would later explain that he doubted it would ever win approval from the county. His fear was that if United Vintners or Seagram caught wind of the plan, the price would soar. Shoch, who was friendly with the Stelling trustees and the project’s developer, went to work as Robert’s emissary. They quickly cut a deal. Robert and his partners got a prime piece of land for the future home of the Robert Mondavi Winery.
Construction crews broke ground on July 16, 1966. The Napa Valley Register that month was dominated by news of the killings of eight student nurses in Chicago, preparations for the Gemini 10 spaceflight, and dispatches from the war in Vietnam. On the cultural front, the paper reported that “Pool House Is the Newest Status Sign,” as well as the news that “Frank Sinatra, 50, to Wed 21-Year-Old Mia Farrow.” In local news, there was a photo featuring Miss Napa County cradling a shotgun—a promotion for an upcoming turkey shoot to raise funds for the Yountville Volunteer Firemen. A three-bedroom, split-level home in north Napa listed for $17,500. Perhaps auspiciously, the groundbreaking also took place on the birthday of Marcia, who turned twenty that day.
It was a frantic time for Robert, who continued consulting for the Mirassou family and the Guild Winery in Lodi, earning a retainer of $1,000 a month from each. He also oversaw construction, ordering barrels and other equipment for his new winery. Michael helped when he could, but on June 18 he had married a fellow student he’d met in Santa Clara named Isabel Alcantara, the daughter of a Spanish-speaking stockbroker who had been stationed in Panama as a plainclothes U.S. Army officer, leading some family members to conclude he had been an American spy. The couple exchanged rings in a Catholic ceremony at Holy Cross Church in Santa Cruz, California, not far from where they went to college.
Escorted down the aisle by her father, Isabel wore a sophisticated gown of imported Dupioni silk and elbow-length sleeves of French guipure lace. A dark-haired beauty whose loveliness was set off by the six bridesmaids’ pink organza gowns, Isabel carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley and orchids. Although Isabel’s sister Joleen was her maid of honor, Marcia Mondavi was also a bridesmaid. Michael’s best man was his friend Peter A. Stern. After a brief honeymoon in Hawaii, Michael enlisted in the army reserves and was occupied through November with training.
With Michael gone for much of that summer and fall, Robert realized he needed some help. He found that help through his old friend André Tchelistcheff, who was aware that a young winemaker named Warren Winiarski had just parted ways with Lee Stewart and his highly regarded Souverain Cellars, a pioneer in the budding “boutique” wine movement. Winiarski was casting about for a new opportunity. Robert, Michael, Ivan Shoch, and Winiarski met in one of the partners’ homes, where they spread Clifford May’s plans for the new winery over the table.
Although Michael participated in some of the early planning, he mostly stayed in the background. Robert’s son struck Winiarski as a clean-cut college kid: He wore his hair slicked back and a button-down shirt open at the collar. Although he was polite, Michael otherwise didn’t make much of an impression on the winemaker. Far more memorable was Robert’s enthusiasm, which swept them all up and ultimately convinced Winiarski, who then had a wife and two young children to support, to join the fledgling enterprise.
Robert couldn’t resist announcing his new venture to the newspapers. On July 21, 1966, The St. Helena Star ran a story on its front page that confirmed “the long rumored report that Robert Mondavi and his associates will build a new winery in the valley.” The Star also reported that John Daniel Jr., the well-regarded valley vintner who was a former president of the Wine Institute, had placed the first order for Robert’s first vintage, telephoning in a request for five cases. Several other papers reported that Robert had not severed business relationships with his family enterprise, C. Mondavi and Sons. His family’s decision to force him to take a leave had certainly hemmed him in; yet Robert surely could not have been so blind to the possibility that announcing a new winery would heighten tensions with his family.
To Peter, Robert’s plan was a serious threat. By going so far as to set up his son in his own winery, particularly one that used the Mondavi name in it, Robert would be targeting many of Charles Krug’s customers. Peter’s overriding desire was for Robert to completely sever his ties with Krug, leaving the way open for his own sons, Marc and Peter junior, to inherit the business.
Rosa also objected to her eldest son’s plan to build a new winery. “Bobby, don’t do this,” she pleaded to him, siding with Peter. Although Robert’s new winery was arguably at that point only a small competitive threat to Krug, it provided a perfect excuse to Peter for firing his brother. Acting for Rosa and the rest of the family, Peter turned to Krug’s new, high-powered general counsel, Joe Alioto.
Balding, bull-shouldered, and as crisply tailored as he was sharp-tongued, John L. Alioto was a force to be reckoned with as the feud between the Mondavis gained momentum. Fred Ferroggiaro, a top officer at the Bank of America, had recruited Alioto to Charles Krug as a director and as general counsel in late 1965. By that time, Alioto had built a reputation as an unbeatable litigator. His raw magnetism and wide-ranging intelligence had impressed jurors and voters for many years. To Rosa, he was someone strong enough to stand up to her eldest son.
Born and raised in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, Alioto was a product of the city’s vibrant Italian-American immigrant community. During Prohibition, he had stomped grapes in his family’s backyard to make homemade wine. His father, who had emigrated from Sicily at the age of nine, ran a successful wholesale fish market in downtown San Francisco. During the summers, Joe would rise before dawn to work at his father’s fish business, and then hurry off to the nearby courthouse to watch the great trial lawyers of the day make their arguments. From an early age, he was drawn to the operatic drama and eloquent orators of the court.
A star debater as an undergraduate at St. Mary’s College, Alioto graduated magna cum laude and won a scholarship to Catholic University of America Law School in Washington, D.C. He then joined the Justice Department’s antitrust division in San Francisco, which was flexing its muscles under Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. One of the first big cases he brought was against the wine industry, alleging that between 1938 and 1942 it had fixed prices in sweet wines—then the dominant wine sold. In prosecuting that case, he took on some of the biggest wineries of the day, including the Roma Wine Company, Petri Wine Company, Italian Swiss Colony, and the Wine Institute, as well as the powerful Bank of America, which financed many of them.
Alioto scoured documents and subpoenaed witnesses, eventually discovering a series of memos that helped him to win the case. “The entire wine industry was simply a cartel, a huge cartel, dominated by the Bank of America,” he concluded. He had sought permission from his superiors at the Justice Department to file criminal charges against the group, but eventually, after allegations of grand jury tampering, was forced to file a civil complaint instead. Alioto’s effort resulted in a voluntary dissolution of one of the key wine associations, the California Cooperative Wineries.
But Alioto made his name and personal fortune in a series of antitrust cases that he brought against big organizations as a private attorney. Although in later years he liked to characterize his work as defending the “little guys”—individuals and small businesses that had been hurt by anticompetitive practices of big business—he represented some big names, as well, including the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.
A cultured man who, to unwind, would hum “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi and quote Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas to illustrate his points, Alioto was fifty years old and in his prime when he joined Charles Krug’s board.
Robert never forgot the advice that Alioto gave him as they walked across the ranch’s lush lawn together in November of 1965. Robert had just learned that his family was forcing him to take a sabbatical from his job at Charles Krug. Alioto, who even then must have realized that a lawsuit was likely, had counseled him to hire the best lawyer he could find. What was Alioto’s explanation for advice that would not seem to be in Rosa and Peter’s best interests?
“So we don’t steal you blind,” Alioto said.
But very quickly Alioto dropped any pretense of serving as an objective mediator as he was drawn into Rosa’s powerful orbit. Krug’s board meetings took on a pleasurable aspect for him, since they were generally concluded with a home-cooked meal served by Rosa in her dining room. Robert and Peter would both attend these luncheons. The lunches were a temporary cease-fire.
Despite Rosa’s habit of spending most of her time during board meetings in the kitchen, preparing the meal, it didn’t take long for Alioto to grasp that the power in the family lay with her as the company’s president. His allegiance was firmly with the Mondavi widow, perhaps in part because his longtime law partner Richard Saveri had drawn up Cesare’s will for him many years before. Alioto’s goal was to help Rosa protect the family business against the consequences of a bitter sibling rivalry that threatened to tear it apart.
Alioto’s later descriptions of the family drama playing out at the Krug Ranch resonated with Old Testament pathos. Rosa, in his words, had meted out “old-world punishment” to her eldest son, declaring that he should be “exiled” for six months from the business. He had quickly grasped that Rosa had made up her mind to fire Robert from the very beginning and had no intention of allowing him to return from his expulsion. “There isn’t any question that the mother did in substance fire him, even though she paid him his wages,” Alioto said.
In early 1966, Alioto arranged to meet Robert, who was returning from a trip to Los Angeles, at the San Francisco Opera. They enjoyed the performance and talked afterward. As Alioto recalled it, he tried to convince Robert to rejoin Krug. But Robert instead told him that he planned to open his own winery. The issue simmered as rumors began swirling in the valley about Robert’s new project. But it was further newspaper coverage that brought the family’s anger to a head. On August 4, 1966, Alioto sent Robert a searing letter that excoriated him for starting a new winery.
“Dear Bob,” it read. “You are familiar with the fact that I made a considerable effort to ameliorate the unfortunate situation that developed in your family. I did tell you, however, that the moment you went ahead to a point of no return on the construction of a winery in the Napa Valley that [sic] all chances of success in restoring family unity would be gone. Your mother and Peter have told me that you have begun construction of your winery and I believe that inevitably it can only be called a competitive winery.”
Alioto then went on to inform Robert that his employment at the family business was being terminated as of July 31, 1966. His severance pay would be a paltry one-month consulting fee in the amount of $2,000. Alioto made particular note of the newspaper announcements of Robert’s new winery, calling them “unfortunately worded,” and insisted that Robert stop using the Mondavi name in his new venture. Alioto then laid out the further details of Robert’s firing: While the family would permit him to continue living in his longtime home on the Krug Ranch, it would be putting Robert’s utility and telephone bills in his own name. Robert, in turn, must return all his company credit cards and begin paying his own membership fees and country club bills.
Alioto struck one small conciliatory note. “I say again as I have previously told you that I am genuinely sorry that I was unable to patch up this serious rift; and while I know you have a difference of opinion about it, I am convinced that the existence of the new winery is an insurmountable obstacle in the whole matter.” The letter was signed, “Very truly yours, Joe.”
Alioto’s icy letter stunned Robert. “I couldn’t sleep for three months because I spent twenty-nine years of my life, every day, working and creating something,” he later recalled. Even years later, Robert couldn’t bring himself to believe that his mother had acted coldheartedly or with malice toward him. Nearly two decades later, he continued to maintain that “this was really an unfortunate misunderstanding. I knew that my mother didn’t want to hurt me. I saw her practically every other day, or every third day. I lived right across the way, went to her, explained the differences in that regards. Unfortunately, we couldn’t resolve the difference. There were honest misunderstandings in the thing.”
Far from simple misunderstandings, Robert’s estrangement from Rosa and other family members deepened further. Although he and his family still lived on the Krug Ranch, the Robert Mondavi family was no longer invited to sit at the table with the rest of the Mondavis at family meals at “the brown house,” Rosa’s home, although he continued to enjoy her lunches at board meetings. On holidays, Rosa would cook one of her spectacular feasts of roast lamb, cappelletti, “little hats” of ground meat and spices, and verdure—spinach or chard sautéed in garlic and oil. First, she would serve the Peter Mondavi family, her brother, and other relatives and friends at her house. Then, carrying a tray of food, she would walk over to Robert’s home across the way and hand him the same meal through the door, without staying to eat with them.