Robert had a knack for hiring good people and one of his smartest hires was his first bookkeeper, a woman named Elaine Clerici. An imposing, big-boned figure in wire-rimmed glasses who was perhaps a few inches taller than Robert, Clerici was meticulous about keeping track of every penny spent by the company. She would challenge such mundane expenses as sending socks and underwear out for laundering while on a business trip, insisting that there was no reason they couldn’t be rinsed in a sink at night instead. She sat right outside Robert’s office and wouldn’t hesitate to bring even the slightest possible malfeasance to his attention.
By the end of the trial, Clerici was headed for a collision with her boss. Robert was so cash-strapped that he was borrowing money from the company to buy groceries. When Clerici caught on to what was happening, she took it upon herself to make sure Robert accounted for every penny. “You’re going to have to give me a receipt, or you’re not going to get reimbursed,” she barked at him. Other people who worked for Robert also sensed his financial worries. He regularly complained that he didn’t have enough money to buy a color television. Partly in jest and partly because he knew his client was truly broke, Cliff Adams gave Robert a color TV as a Christmas gift in 1976. “Although he thanked me, I don’t think he got the joke,” Adams later said.
To foot his legal bills, Robert had pledged his C. Mondavi and Sons stock to borrow a quarter of a million dollars. He ran through that sum quickly and couldn’t pay his lawyers through much of 1975 and 1976. By the time of the decision in August of 1976, Robert owed more than $140,000 to his lawyers, even though Martel and his team had agreed to a reduced rate. If Judge Carter had not ruled in his favor, Robert could have been in serious financial trouble and might even have lost the winery.
Instead, the court’s decision dramatically improved the fortunes of the Robert Mondavi family. By valuing C. Mondavi and Sons at $46 million, the court put Robert’s stake at more than $10 million. And by awarding him more than half a million dollars in compensatory damages as well as his legal costs, Judge Carter gave Robert a shovel to dig himself out of his financial hole. The ruling meant Robert was liquid again: The banks would loan him more, based on his valuable stake in C. Mondavi and Sons.
Robert later said the three-month trial was one of the worst experiences of his life. But Robert’s refusal to back down had given him, Marjorie, and their three offspring undreamed-of financial freedom. The trial that began just before the Fourth of July—the culmination of more than a decade of bitter wrangling—had assured Robert and his family of their financial independence. But it also left an indelible mark on Cesare and Rosa’s children and grandchildren.
The lengthy trial and the ensuing publicity made the Mondavis famous for their feuding. On Friday, August 13, The Napa Valley Register splashed the decision in Robert’s favor on the front page. Inside, it ran a story headlined “Mondavi—A Dynasty Torn and a Family Divided,” summarizing Judge Carter’s lengthy opinion as “retelling an age-old conflict” of brother versus brother.
The Mondavi feud also hit the national news. The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, BusinessWeek, and other publications covered the story. The brothers voiced their respective negotiating stances as well as their shifting emotional states to reporters. “It doesn’t seem fair,” Peter complained to one interviewer shortly after the ruling, as he sat in his cluttered, outdated office with portraits of Cesare and Rosa staring down at him from the walls. “One man can force you to sell what you’ve worked for your whole life.”
Peter had cause for worry. Judge Carter’s order that C. Mondavi and Sons be sold and the proceeds of the sale distributed proportionately among the irreconcilable shareholders multiplied the financial pressures on him. It also threatened his dream of passing on the business his own father had founded to his two sons, Marc and Peter junior. If C. Mondavi and Sons were auctioned off to the highest bidder, Peter and his family, like the other branches of the family, would end up with millions in the bank, but they’d lose Napa Valley’s oldest operating winery.
The alternative: Peter could try to buy out his siblings. To do that, he would have to borrow heavily, possibly burdening the winery with debt for years to come.
Less than eighteen months earlier, Peter’s plan to ensure a legacy for his two young sons had seemed certain. In early 1975, Rosa gave much of her stock in the family company to Peter’s two sons, who were then twenty-one and seventeen. Her gifts transformed Marc and Peter junior, two of her seven grandchildren, into millionaires and assured that Charles Krug would stay under the control of Peter’s branch of the family. Rosa and Peter hadn’t told Robert or Helen’s families about the stock gifts when she made them, nor did she reveal that she had taken steps to keep her fortune out of their hands. The other side of the family first learned of Rosa’s gifts to Peter’s sons at the trial. Not only did that deepen the already existing divide between the four branches of the Mondavi family, they also caused Peter an enormous tax headache that would take seven years to resolve.
The tax problems arose almost as soon as Rosa died. The Mondavi matriarch had named Peter and Mary coexecutors of her estate. After her passing, but before the court had issued its decision, Peter and Mary filed tax forms valuing the shares Rosa had gifted to Marc and Peter junior at $370 per share. Judge Carter issued his ruling soon after that filing and it laid out in precise detail the steps they had taken to try to minimize the taxable value of their mother’s estate. By stating that the value of Krug was vastly more than the heirs had let on, Judge Carter’s decision unleashed the wrath of the tax authorities on the siblings’ heads, with both the Internal Revenue Service and the controller’s office contending that the shares that Rosa had left to Peter’s sons were worth $4,074 per share—eleven times as much as Peter and Mary had reported.
At the same time, Peter and Mary were wrangling with the remaining portions of Rosa’s estate. In late November of 1975, around the time that Rosa was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she changed her will for the last time. With Richard Saveri and his brother Guido as her witnesses, Rosa revoked all her former wills and signed a new one that expressed her unalloyed fury at Robert and Helen by writing them and their heirs out of the bulk of her fortune. She gave a mere $3,000 in cash to Helen and $1,000 each in cash to Robert, Michael, Marcia, and Timothy Mondavi, and the same amount to Helen’s adult children, Serena and Peter Ventura.
Although the language was legalistic, Rosa clearly expressed her wrath in the document. “I have intentionally made no other provision in this Will for my son Robert Mondavi and my daughter Helen Mondavi Ventura,” the will stated. It also contained a provision that if any of Rosa’s heirs attempted to challenge the will on any grounds whatsoever, they’d automatically get only $1.00 each.
All of the jewelry, silverware, china, and furniture in Rosa’s home on the ranch went to her loyal daughter, Mary, as well as the home in Lodi and the Bijou Pines cottage near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The bulk of her fortune, including all of her interest in the trust created by her husband, Cesare, in C. Mondavi and Sons, went to Peter alone, with her partnership interest in Mondavi Properties, a holding company formed by Peter and Mary in 1966 to purchase one hundred acres of prospective vineyards, to Mary’s sons, Henry C. Fink and James E. Fink.
Although he had achieved the large goal of assuring a legacy for his two sons, the cost to Peter in terms of loss of reputation and financial pressures was steep. His frustrations and anger surfaced in the dark month of November, when the directors of C. Mondavi and Sons met in the law offices of Joseph Alioto on Sutter Street in San Francisco. It was the first meeting of the board since Judge Carter’s devastating decision. With Alioto presiding and his partner Richard Saveri taking the minutes, the directors elected Peter as the new president of the corporation, taking Rosa’s place. Then, they elected Alioto as chairman, since he was no longer San Francisco mayor and even though he was struggling through a brutal, highly publicized divorce from his wife, Angelina.
Peter Ventura arrived at the meeting late, missing the elections of officers. Since he and his mother had switched sides and allied themselves with Robert, Ventura was treading onto hostile territory. Alioto’s law offices were filled with dark, richly carved Italianate furniture. A letter had informed him of the meeting’s date and time, but it was clear he was not welcome. When the next item of business rolled around—a move to fire Krug’s longtime accounting firm, John F. Forbes Company—Ventura demanded an explanation for this move.
Alioto archly informed the younger man, who was then practicing law in the Central Valley, that Forbes worked for Robert Mondavi and thus had a conflict of interest. Ventura pressed him to explain further and Saveri spoke even more bluntly: The firm had “betrayed them at trial,” he fumed. The vote to sack the firm was nearly unanimous, with Ventura as the sole objector.
The next contentious issue had to do with boosting Peter and Mary’s salaries. Alioto, according to the minutes of the meeting, contended that since they were taking on additional responsibilities, they should earn more. But Ventura recalled his uncle explaining that it was because he and Mary were no longer receiving salaries from the partnership as a result of Judge Carter’s decision that they needed raises. The salary hikes passed, with Peter’s jumping to $75,000 from $48,000. Again, Peter Ventura cast the only vote against the pay hikes.
Then the group reached an even more emotionally fraught issue: Peter Mondavi sought to rent the “brown house,” the home that Rosa had lived in on the Krug Ranch, for $150 a month, the same favorable terms that Rosa had enjoyed. Since Robert paid $550 per month for his home and Helen Ventura paid $500 for hers, Ventura objected. Alioto and the rest of the board voted in favor. The subject of Robert’s delinquent rent also came up: He owed the corporation $7,500 plus utility payments. The directors agreed to send Robert a letter, demanding that he pay up.
Ventura then broached the question of Peter’s deteriorating relations with growers. Peter shrugged off the problem, explaining that Krug had “lost miscellaneous growers because it refused to pay unreasonable prices.” Although Ventura expressed concern that Krug wouldn’t have the grapes it needed because it had lost so many growers, his uncle assured him it would, even though neither he nor his sister Mary planned to sell grapes from the vineyards they personally owned to Krug that year, as they had done in the past.
The meeting ended on a sour note. Several weeks later, in what seemed like an act of petty retribution toward the nephew who had challenged him, Peter sent a letter to Helen, Ventura’s mother, and to Serena Ventura, his sister, to inform them he was kicking them off the ranch. Dated November 29, 1976, on the same day that Cesare had died seventeen years earlier, it read:
Dear Helen:
You undoubtedly received word from your son that my family and I are moving into Mother’s home, which means that while [sic] the white house will also be fully occupied with furniture other than yours or Serena’s and will be lived in by others. This of course means both homes will be fully occupied.
In view of this, we must, of necessity, move all of your’s [sic] and Serena’s furniture out of the white house before these coming Holidays.
The letter then went on to ask where Helen would like her furniture shipped, since the garages were full. It also went on to advise her that she would be billed for expenses “following corporate [sic] rules.” It was cc’d to Serena as well.
With this cold letter, Peter severed ties with the older sister who had turned against him in the court fight. But for Helen, her brother’s rejection deepened the already severe depression that she had been struggling with for years, as her family of origin unraveled.
Always the peacemaker and perhaps a bit naively, Helen had hoped to reach out to all of her siblings over the holiday season. She chose her favorite family photographs from happier times in Lodi, the ranch, and at Bijou Pines, and ordered copies of a set of the photos for each of the four branches of the family. The gifts were meant as a peace gesture and her intention was to try to convince her brothers and her sister to let go of the recent past and reunite in their memories of Rosa’s wonderful feasts and Cesare’s quiet authority.
But Helen’s effort failed. She had left the four sets of family photos in Rosa’s old home, which was now Peter and Blanche’s. Helen never had the opportunity to retrieve them or to give them to her brothers and sister. Another source of pain for her was that Rosa had explicitly willed all of the old-fashioned china and silverware and knickknacks that held so much emotional resonance for Helen to her sister. Mary had no intention of sharing any of it with Helen.
Yet, Helen herself stepped away from an opportunity to become more deeply involved with Robert’s side of the family. At some point after Judge Carter’s ruling, he asked her if she’d like to become an investor in his winery. Pained by the years of litigation and some of the moves made by her brothers during the settlement talks, she told him that she would never be a partner with either of her brothers again. That forceful stand, however, didn’t ease her emotional problems. Helen made another attempt at suicide, again by overdosing on pills. She did not succeed this time, either, but struggled with depression and feelings of being unloved for decades afterward.
Serena Ventura, who was closer to her mother than Peter was, did her best to take care of Helen over the years. But neither of Helen’s children found him-or herself able to escape the emotional fallout, even after their mother died. Their anger and sense of betrayal over having been effectively disinherited by their grandmother was compounded by the coldness they felt from Peter and Mary’s families for many years. Even at Rosa’s funeral, they felt shunned by that side of the family. It was impossible to ignore the sense that they had been the losers in the battle, particularly as the fortunes of the Robert Mondavi family soared. Of the four branches of the Mondavi family, Helen’s may have suffered the most.
As the holiday season passed and 1977 began, Peter struggled with mounting problems of his own. Alioto’s firm was trying to convince the appellate court to toss out Judge’s Carter’s decision and grant a new trial. But when Judge Carter issued his final judgment on February 9, he instead threw out the entire board of directors—including Peter, Mary, and Joseph Alioto—replacing them with a triumvirate of court-appointed directors/receivers. After hearing from Robert’s counsel about the contentious November board meeting, Judge Carter took this radical step to make sure the competitive and financial position of Krug didn’t worsen during the period when the appellate court reviewed his ruling.
Judge Carter chose the former McKinsey consultant Douglas Watson, who had impressed him during the trial with his intelligence and level-headed testimony, to head the triumvirate as its chairman and serve as chief executive of C. Mondavi and Sons. The judge then allowed each brother to choose his representative. Robert’s pick was Harry G. Serlis, a brilliant, quirky wine marketer whom Robert had first gotten to know through the Wine Institute, the San Francisco–based trade association. Peter chose Charles A. Lane, a tax attorney who’d worked closely with Joe Alioto over the years. From the start, the receivers were factionalized, with Watson and Serlis pitted on some issues against Peter’s representative Lane.
The first shot in what would become an eleven-month-long war took place in late March. The receivers unanimously voted to fire Mary and Helen, since they were earning salaries but doing very little work. That didn’t prompt a protest from either side, but on May 3, Watson and Lane moved to fire Peter as president, arguing that his presence was disruptive. To the judge, Watson described a series of problems at Krug that were spinning out of control. Peter had deferred maintenance at the old, oak-shaded winery for so long that a Wine Institute safety consultant had recommended immediate remedial work costing more than $125,000. Morale was terrible and several key employees, including the winery’s controller, quit during these months.
Watson had also found that the dispute between Peter and local grape growers was threatening the winery’s entire production that year. Krug was facing a July 1 deadline to respond to a market enforcement action that arose from the charges of ten growers that it had breached its grape purchase contracts for the 1974 harvest. If it didn’t, it could lose its processing license, meaning that it would be prohibited from producing wine from the 1977 harvest. Because of Krug’s bad relations with growers, it was uncertain whether it could get all the grapes it needed that year. With this looming uncertainty, Peter and Mary tried to use their grapes as a negotiating chip with Watson and his brother. Piling on the complications, the IRS claimed that the company had underpaid taxes and wanted it to pay up—resulting in negotiations on that front as well.
But perhaps the final straw involved Peter and Blanche’s move into Rosa’s old home. In November, when the subject had come up with the previous board of refurbishing the home, Peter had explained that he planned to use part of the house as an office. But when Watson and Serlis discovered that he had charged the corporation $23,000 for furnishing it, they kicked the expense back to Peter, insisting it was personal. Relations between Peter and Watson went from bad to worse as Watson became convinced Peter was holding conferences with growers and employees behind his back, sometimes meeting surreptitiously in the office where Watson worked at the ranch.
Watson convinced Judge Carter to keep Peter out of the winery. Blanche was furious at what she considered Peter’s rough treatment. Peter’s lawyers fought back. They petitioned the court to fire Watson, implying that he had taken a trip to New York to visit his daughter at company expense. Watson later successfully explained to the court that he’d paid for the trip himself. But the result of these skirmishes was to put pressure on both sides to negotiate a settlement.
By September of that year, they had agreed on the terms of a cease-fire. To avoid dissolution or a forced sale of Krug, Peter agreed to turn over cash and properties worth some $11 million and to drop his appeal. Robert, in turn, got some hundreds of acres of the most valuable vineyards in the valley, including much of the old To Kalon holdings, in return for agreeing to drop any further legal action and for permitting Peter to buy Charles Krug. When Judge Carter issued an order to discharge the triumvirate of receivers on December 20, 1977, Watson felt an enormous wave of relief knowing he’d never have to work with Peter Mondavi again.
The Robert Mondavi Winery attracted attention in the early years for its striking architecture and gleaming, stainless steel fermentation tanks. It also drew a group of gifted outsiders to the valley: people who were changing their lives, starting over, or struggling for a place to fit in. The talent was well above the pay scale, which started at about $3 an hour in the mid-1970s for tour guides. But money generally wasn’t what attracted people to work at the mission-style winery off Highway 29. It was a sense that something unusual was happening there: a sense of openness, of being part of a food and wine movement stretching from Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and beyond.
One of the misfits who landed at the winery in the mid-1970s was Norman Mini, a writer who’d been a member of the artist colony that sprang up around Big Sur in the 1950s and 1960s. Henry Miller immortalized Mini in his 1957 book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. “I sensed that he had suffered deep humiliations. I did not look upon him then as a writer but as…a failed strategist, who had now made life his battleground…,” Miller wrote about him. “One felt that he was cut out for bigger things, that he had taken to writing in desperation, after all other avenues had been closed off. He was too sincere, too earnest, too truthful, to ever be a worldly success.”
A short statured man who stood perhaps five feet four in his shoes with a Roman-style haircut shagged in the front, Mini loved good wine and made it himself. He was opinionated on most subjects and intolerant of what he considered ignorant questions by the people he led on tours of the winery. He appointed himself Robert’s conscience on matters of wine quality. Mini was no fan of Michael’s, simply because Michael leaned toward the business side of the winery. He found Robert’s other son’s softer approach and love of winemaking more appealing. During the tour guide’s “happy hour” conversations after work, Mini was often the first to weigh in on what became known as “the brother question”—Michael and Timothy’s fraught relationship.
He did so loudly at a “crush” party in the early 1970s. The tradition marking a successful harvest is an ancient one, but Mondavi was famed for its wild bacchanalias. Margrit and her staff would make a big pot of soup, accompanied by bread and cheese. Wine would flow. In those years of flowing caftans, long hair, and relaxed attitudes toward marijuana, Mondavi’s “crush” parties were exuberant and energy-infused—with employees toking on joints in the back room and slipping off to the vineyards together in uninhibited expressions of free love. “If only the vines could speak!” was a joke that staffers would share among themselves afterward; spouses were explicitly not invited. The parties were cathartic. After fourteen-hour days during the grape crush, everyone from the winemakers to the cellar rats was ready to loosen up.
Toward the end of that particular party, Mini rose unsteadily to make what some of his colleagues remember as a prophecy of further troubles ahead for the Mondavi family. Like many of the employees at that point in the evening, he was well into his cups. Mini made the same point he had repeated to the other Mondavi staffers: Timothy, a person with the soul of a poet, was headed toward conflict with his brother, just as Robert had clashed with Peter. “Tim, the poet, is going to be sorely challenged here,” predicted Mini. He was one of the few nonfamily employees to speak of his worries about this imminent family collision in a companywide gathering, but others saw it coming as well.
Mini’s end at the winery came not long after that fateful harvest party, ostensibly because he had insulted one too many guests on his tour. As the guides used to joke, Mini got his “cake and moscato”—the traditional send-off party after losing his job. His firing wasn’t directly related to his prophecy at the harvest party, but it can’t have helped that he was willing to speak publicly about what many others also saw. Like the ancient seers who prophesied ill omens to the Roman emperors, Mini found his career quickly coming to an end.
Timothy always seemed cut from a different cloth than the rest of his family. With his long, fair hair and beard, his looks fit in with the other back-to-the-land seekers who were moving to Napa in the 1970s. A photograph taken of him in 1971 shows a gangly young man in his early twenties whose blond hair is parted to the side, surfer-style. Sporting scraggly sideburns and wearing a college student’s striped T-shirt, he presents a tentative smile for the camera. He’s standing next to Michael, who looks a generation older. Michael had not even turned thirty at the time the photo was taken, but his button-down shirt, his carefully trimmed black mustache, and his confident smile make him look far more mature.
Instead of going to the private college in Santa Clara where his brother and sister had gone, Timothy struck out on his own and became the first Mondavi to attend the publicly funded University of California at Davis, a school then known mostly for its agricultural research. He steered clear of joining the university’s well-known Viticulture and Enology program until well into his freshman year. When his father realized that Timothy hadn’t signed on, he asked him why.
As Robert later recalled to a wine historian, his son expressed the desire for a different way of life than the kind imposed by his father’s hard-driving work ethic, which got him started at six A.M. and often meant entertaining business guests until midnight. “Well, Dad, I want to be creative,” answered the younger man. “You are working all the time. I would like to have things of my own, my chickens, my horses. I don’t want to work seven days a week.”
When his dad challenged him to explain himself further, Timothy said “Yes, I want to work. But I’d like to have something that would give me personal satisfaction.”
Robert answered “Tim, we can make wines here for the next, not one, but three or four generations, and we’ll always learn. This is a very complex thing. There’s [sic] over four hundred elements in wine. Each and every year is a different year. So, Tim, if you want to be creative, we are just getting started in the business. And you can go on and on.”
The summer between his freshman and sophomore year, Timothy headed off on a backpacking trip to Europe with his friend Steve Taplin. Although his father had given him the names of a dozen or so top wineries to visit, he only stopped by two or three. Yet the trip was eye-opening for the youngest Mondavi, who, according to his father’s telling, realized that some of the vintners created their own ways of living on the land, combining grape growing with raising vegetables, chickens, cows, and horses. On that trip, he also saw that the life of a winemaker could be a very good one. “Dad gave me an important perspective: ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘No matter what business you’re in, there’s always going to be turmoil.’” Timothy came back and enrolled in the enology course, fulfilling his father’s wish.
Timothy’s fellow student in the Davis program, Harry Wetzel III, recalls him as being “always a little more serious than I was about his scholastics.” He had a good grasp of biochemistry and came into the program, unlike Wetzel and some other students, with some practical experience in winemaking. During summers in the early 1970s, he would good-humoredly help the winemaking staff with such tasks as taking a physical inventory of the wine. When Timothy graduated from Davis with a bachelor’s degree in fermentation science in 1974, he did not immediately join the family business. Instead, he headed off to South Africa, where he worked on experimental programs at Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery. He learned more about winemaking and was befriended by Francis Bayly, the South African who was in charge of quality control at the winery. Timothy was very well liked by the staff and showed an impressive knowledge of winemaking.
Timothy also had a frightening experience during his sojourn abroad. Driving at night over a mountain pass after a day of collecting wine samples, Timothy ran head-on into a camper van. Exhausted by the long day, he had forgotten that South Africans drive on the left side of the road. Nobody was hurt, but the episode could have been tragic for a by-then famous wine producer’s son.
Although Timothy didn’t broadcast his concerns at the time with professors or fellow students at Davis, he had doubts about joining the family business. Michael had been there since the winery’s founding in 1966, so he would have eight years of seniority on him. He also wanted to avoid the kind of sibling squabbling that his father and his uncle experienced at Krug. Timothy was interested in architecture, marine biology, and the sciences and didn’t want to experience a repeat of the pattern of fighting with his own brother, Michael.
Yet despite his misgivings, he decided to join his father and older brother full-time at the Oakville winery in 1974. He arrived at a time when the winery’s reputation for making superb wines was taking off, in large part due to the efforts of Warren Winiarski, Mike Grgich, and Zelma Long. But to the winemakers, it was clear the family was keeping a spot warm for Timothy to take when he matured into a full-blown winemaker. At first, it didn’t seem to some longtime Mondavi employees as if Timothy was really committed to the job; he partied a lot, flirting with female employees, and did not take things too seriously.
But it didn’t take long before Timothy turned serious. His attitude may, in part, have reflected his changing life circumstances. On July 30, 1976, not long after the Mondavi v. Mondavi trial had ended and before Judge Carter issued his decision, Timothy married the woman he had become very close to, Dorothy Reed. Six and a half months later, their first child was born, whom they named Carissa Ellen. Suddenly, Tim had a family to support.
Marcia’s path to the family winery was less direct than either of her brothers’. In a lighthearted moment, she described herself as “the renegade daughter who had to have a little time to play before settling down.” To be sure, she had little time to play during her high school years, which she spent at Santa Catalina, a strict, Catholic all-girls boarding school where the students wore skirted uniforms during the week and white shirtwaist dresses and round lace “doilies” on their heads for church on Sunday. Freshmen lived in dorms with linoleum floors and curtains to partition one student’s living space from others’. The girls were required to take four years of Latin, and every Sunday morning they practiced handwriting using wide-nibbed calligraphy pens.
Marcia arrived on the campus of Santa Clara University just as her brother Michael was beginning his senior year. By then, Michael was the proverbial “big man on campus”—a football player, member of the Business Administration Association, the Society for the Advancement of Management, the Ski Club, and the Kappa Zeta Phi fraternity, which sponsored the “Man of the Semester Award,” given to the student who epitomizes the “Santa Clara Man’s image.” Like her brother, Marcia also joined the university’s ski team, which hosted often rowdy trips to the Sierra Nevadas during school holidays. In the span of the seven years that Michael and Marcia were on campus, the university itself underwent tumultuous change. In Michael’s freshman year, the college admitted its first class of women; by the time Marcia got there, half her class was female.
Some of Santa Clara’s male students were actively opposed to women on campus. Not only did at least one sports columnist for the college paper argue against allowing women to sit in the main students’ section at football games, but in ongoing discussions of the so-called sex “integration” issue, a Santa Clara sociology professor at the time argued in print that “…coeducation is also highly desirable for the purpose of mate selection.” By the time Marcia graduated in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in social science, the Vietnam War was raging and ethnic awareness and activism were growing on campus. In January of that year, the Black Students Union, Mexican-American Students Committee, and the Students for Democratic Action stormed the university’s cafeteria to demand the administration recognize them as viable student groups and establish ethnic studies courses. Students also staged a sit-down over dorm curfews in Marcia’s senior year.
Although she graduated from college during this period of rising social consciousness, Marcia followed the traditional route for a young woman of the upper middle class: She began working toward earning her teaching credentials. She taught elementary school and participated in a program for underprivileged children near San Jose University. In 1970, when she was twenty-two, she married Michael Warren Morey, who had been ahead of her at Santa Clara. Their winter wedding took place on January 24 at the St. Helena Catholic Church, followed by a reception at the winery in Oakville.
It was an elaborate affair for hundreds, spilling out from the Vineyard Room onto the lawns. Marcia, whose shoes were custom-made to match her white gown, looked happy as a young bride, with her strong features framed by her dark hair in a Marlo Thomas That Girl–style flip. But some close family friends of the Mondavis were less impressed with her groom, who seemed overwhelmed at initial gatherings by Marcia’s talented and emotional family. After two years, Marcia realized the marriage was a mistake. The couple separated on July 2, 1972, and Marcia and her mother took an extended trip to Europe. When they returned, Marcia turned to the winery’s attorney, Cliff Adams, to handle her divorce.
It shouldn’t have been complicated; there was little property to split up and Marcia wasn’t seeking alimony. But Morey, who came from a devoutly Catholic family, refused to respond to the legal summons in the case and pushed for an annulment of the marriage instead. At that time, divorced people were not allowed to remarry in the Catholic Church and a lengthy list of conditions had to be met for a marriage to be annulled. Initially, that caused some difficulty due to hesitance about the terms.
Eventually the couple worked out the details so that they finalized the legal dissolution of their marriage in June in the state of California, as well as receiving an annulment from the Church. The marriage, which had lasted two years, five months, and eight days, did not produce any children. Marcia successfully petitioned the judge to legally restore her maiden name, Marcia Anne Mondavi.
To begin afresh, Marcia became a stewardess for Pan American Airlines, based out of Miami. The job satisfied her travel bug and was a way for her to see the world. But it didn’t take long before the glamour of the job began to wear thin. Sensing his daughter’s discontent, Robert asked Harry Serlis to try to convince her to join the winery. It had long been Robert’s dream that all three of his children work with him. Their effort succeeded and Marcia worked for a time at the Oakville winery, but in 1976, she moved back to New York as the winery’s eastern sales representative. Her return to New York occurred around the time Mondavi v. Mondavi was heading toward trial in Napa.
Coming from a sheltered background and having grown up on the family compound at the Krug Ranch, for Marcia, the move to Manhattan initially came as a shock. “I’m a slow mover,” she told an interviewer who met her in New York in 1977, after less than a year on the job as eastern sales director. “When I first arrived here it took me four hours to get enough courage to take a ten-minute subway ride to the bank.”
Well before Marcia arrived, her father had established many key relationships with restaurant owners and distributors in New York. In 1972, he signed on House of Burgundy, which carried mostly French and Italian wines at the time, as the company’s New York distributor. Robert was tenacious in his efforts to get his wines included on the top restaurants’ wine lists, including a lunch at Le Cirque with House of Burgundy’s owner, Robert Fairchild. Even though there were already perhaps eleven bottles of wine on the table, Robert ordered even more, as well as his own. It was Robert’s sheer persistence that helped Mondavi break into those exclusive wine lists. Unlike the more laid-back European winemakers, who treated their annual visits to the New York market more as state visits than as marketing opportunities, the Mondavis and other California winemakers aggressively courted New York restaurants.
Eventually Marcia found that, like her father, she had a talent for promotion and the composure to make cold calls on potential customers. She began by knocking on the doors of the city’s top restaurants, urging them to place her family’s wines alongside the French wines that were more familiar to East Coast oenophiles. She met the most resistance from French restaurants, which insisted that their customers expected only French wines. “Madame, we do not serve any California wines in our restaurant. And we will only do so over my dead body!”
Marcia initially felt discouraged. In frustration, she once confided to her father that she felt she was not cut out to be a salesperson. He bolstered her confidence by explaining that her job was to educate and build relationships, not just to sell cases. Eventually Marcia helped place Mondavi wines on the lists of The Four Seasons, Windows on the World, and Quo Vadis.
Marcia also began organizing “component tastings”—a program adopted from the University of California at Davis that sought to explain the different flavors in wine by breaking them down into their basic ingredients; sugar, yeast, and alcohol. In this, as in many other areas during the 1960s and 1970s, the Robert Mondavi Winery was not as much an innovator as an early adopter of ideas, helping to spread them through the industry. Marcia and Michael together presented the idea of component tasting to the Wine and Food Society in New York. The president of the London branch attended that presentation, and asked the Mondavi siblings to fly to England to do the same thing there. Because Michael had a scheduling conflict, Marcia would have to do it alone. Marcia ended up doing such an excellent job that her father received letters from the presidents of both the London and New York chapters offering “a glowing tribute to what my daughter did there. She’s just that articulate.”
Marcia’s initial plan was to stay in New York for only about a year. But she met and fell in love with a New York–based financier named Thomas Borger, who was the friend of a restaurant owner she had been dating. They married in 1980, at a time when her parents’ lives were in flux. Compared to the Medici-like atmosphere in Oakville, Manhattan seemed calm.
On her own turf in Manhattan, Marcia was gracious and dignified. But in Oakville, Marcia found it more difficult to keep her composure while working alongside her brothers and her father, let alone Margrit. In part, she felt hampered by Old World attitudes which dismissed the contribution that women could make to a business, unless it was to adorn the reception desk or lead visitors on tours. Although she was not a vocal feminist, Marcia complained that she felt “totally marginalized” while working at the winery and that her father never listened to her.
Marcia’s role in the family may have contributed to her frustration. She was a traditional middle child, trying to smooth tempers and play peacemaker in the family. She often served as a counterbalance to Michael and Timothy, and was a bit of a “daddy’s girl”—idolizing her father, despite his faults.
Yet, at least in the early days, she did not feel as if she had real power. As she explained to an interviewer in New York in 1977, she was “the middle body, literally. Michael, my older brother, is executive vice president of the winery; Tim, the youngest, is production manager and a graduate of UC Davis. But do you know something? It would take all three of us to carry on the winery as Dad does. We say it’s a democracy—but Dad makes all the decisions.” In that respect, her brothers were in the same position she was: essentially powerless relative to their father.
Along with her two brothers, Marcia in later years served on the company’s board and made frequent trips between New York and Napa. Following a board meeting where Robert had dismissed one of Marcia’s suggestions, her frustration bubbled over. She turned to Cliff Adams to complain about her treatment as an employee. “My father is a chauvinist pig,” she told Adams, complaining that Robert wouldn’t pay any attention to her and didn’t seem to value her opinions on business matters. “You’ve got to do something,” Marcia begged the lawyer. “You’ve got to make him listen to me!” Marcia’s complaints went nowhere, since her father, who had grown up in a household where his mother’s place was in the kitchen, was not going to change his attitudes toward women to suit his daughter, no matter how intelligent and persuasive she might be.
And Marcia wasn’t the only female employee complaining about Robert’s treatment of her. One of Robert’s former secretaries, Mimi Brewer, brought a legal claim against her old boss, charging that he’d discriminated against her on the basis of her sex and age. It was an unfortunate and awkward situation. Brewer had been let go in the early 1970s, after working with Robert during the early years of the Robert Mondavi Winery. After she left the company, Mimi brought a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Robert and the company. Cliff Adams did not take the case lightly, due to Brewer’s extensive knowledge of Robert’s business, which may have included her boss’s rumored sexual dalliances. The dispute was eventually settled out of court with the help of a mediator and Brewer won a modest cash settlement from the winery.
The winery was hit with an even stickier personnel problem a few years later. The married vineyard manager, Charles Williams, began an affair with his assistant, Dorothy Barajas, in early 1982. His wife, Stella Williams, caught wind of the affair and was enraged. She stormed into the winery’s executive offices on several occasions to confront Michael, Cliff Adams, Robert, and the winery’s female head of human relations, insisting that they put an end to the affair. Stella Williams also called the Mondavi men’s wives, hoping to rally their support. The Williamses divorced and Charles Williams then married Barajas. But soon after they married, Adams sat the couple down and explained that Charles would not be permitted to work with his new wife and that Barajas would have to go. In choosing between the two employees, Adams and others at the winery decided to retain the male vineyard manager and fire the female secretary, citing the couple’s marriage as the ostensible reason for the dismissal. The company lawyer explained that there were, indeed, two sets of rules at the Robert Mondavi Winery: one that applied to professional staffers and another that applied to Robert, as the winery’s founder and majority owner, and his employee Margrit.
Barajas was hurt and infuriated. Like many others who worked for the Mondavis, she considered the company family and felt crushed by the betrayal, as if her own family had thrown her out of the house. Robert himself sought to help Barajas by sending a memorandum to the management council asking if there wasn’t a job that could be found for her where she wasn’t directly supervised by her husband. “Good employees are not the easiest thing to find,” Robert’s memo insisted.
But Barajas was terminated anyway, in a letter from Greg Evans. It reiterated an offer by Timothy to give her severance pay equal to seven weeks’ salary in exchange for a release of all legal claims against the company, but she didn’t take it. Timothy, who initially supported Barajas’s efforts to find another job at the company, later turned against her after hearing that some employees felt that she, and not her husband, was running the vineyards unit. Michael, too, felt that Williams and Barajas’s relationship had had a damaging effect on employee morale. In later years, Barajas and Williams maintained that the company scapegoated her for doing what Robert and Margrit, as well as others, had also done—engage in an adulterous affair with a fellow employee. Michael, in particular, seemed especially upset by Williams and Barajas’s romance, perhaps because it occurred shortly after his father’s secret elopement with Margrit. “Michael wouldn’t look me in the eye,” says Barajas.
Barajas underwent several years of therapy to try to cope with the pain of her dismissal. She also filed a lawsuit against the winery in 1987, alleging employment discrimination, fraud, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. As part of the discussions surrounding that suit, Barajas’s attorney had compiled a dossier on Robert’s own extramarital affair with Margrit, threatening to publicly expose them. That threat was significant: Not only would it potentially embarrass Robert and Margrit’s spouses and children, but it also could undermine Robert’s reputation for fair dealing. The company argued that Margrit was not directly supervised by Robert, but by the winery’s public relations head, Harvey Posert, and though it conceded it had more than a dozen married couples working for it as well as numerous family members of employees, none of them directly reported to each other. After more than two years of litigation and on the verge of a jury trial, the company settled the case by paying Barajas a cash settlement of around $25,000.
The irony, however, of Barajas’s losing her job was not entirely lost on the Mondavi family. After the suit was settled, Barajas visited a gym in Napa that many Mondavi employees use to work out. Barajas had finished her exercise and was slipping into the hot tub when she saw that Timothy was there. They chatted and the conversation turned to the family business where Barajas had found a job. Timothy noted that someone in that company had gotten a job through a relative, who was also employed there. “Isn’t that a little bit of nepotism?” Timothy asked her. Barajas flushed deeply and decided not to respond, since Timothy remained her husband’s boss.
Although Barajas’s dismissal occurred in 1986, long after Gloria Steinem launched Ms. magazine and feminists were pushing for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the Robert Mondavi Winery remained a male-dominated company that was not always sensitive to women. It was a period when staffers threw a birthday party for Michael Mondavi and hired a stripper to perform for him in his office—with little thought to how female employees might view such boys-will-be-boys fun. Similarly, there were company events involving scantily clad women, including one party with belly dancers. And sometimes it was the men who took off their clothes. At one party for the sales force in the mid-1980s, Robert stripped off all of his clothes except his white cotton briefs on a dare with a salesman from Florida about jumping into a swimming pool, even though there were female sales staffers present. The attitude, particularly among the sales and marketing force, seemed to be “anything goes.”
Likewise, the flirting and suggestive banter by the company’s male executives toward female employees were perceived by some women who worked at the winery in the 1970s and 1980s as bordering on harassment. Robert developed a reputation as a man with a voracious sexual appetite and, as the boss, set the tone for the company. On at least one occasion in the 1980s, Michael felt it was necessary to take his father aside and caution him to try to be less obvious in his sexual approaches to women. “Please, use some common sense,” Michael asked Robert, “or at least be discreet if you aren’t going to use common sense.”
Some female staffers, however, just laughed his advances off as part of the Mondavis’ macho, Italian-American background. When Robert reached under the table and squeezed the knee of Helen McDermott, the company’s female head of human relations, to emphasize a point he wanted to make, McDermott just took Robert’s gesture in stride and did not raise a ruckus about it at the meeting or afterward. Through the years, there were rumors in the valley of quiet payoffs to women who worked or came into contact with some of the male employees of the Robert Mondavi Winery. But, like McDermott, the women didn’t talk about it either.