Robert first crossed paths with the colorful baron Philippe de Rothschild in the early 1970s, at a wine distributors’ meeting in Hawaii. On the face of it, the men seemed to have very little in common. Robert was a first-generation Italian-American, whose parents had arrived in America with almost nothing. The baron, in turn, was a descendent of a rare-coins trader named Meyer Amschel Rothschild, who worked on Frankfurt’s Judengasse, or Jew Street. By assisting the Austrian Empire with its finances during the Napoleonic Wars, Meyer’s sons had become hereditary barons by imperial decree in 1822. By the time Philippe was born in 1912, the Rothschilds were one of the richest and most powerful families in the world.
Philippe himself was a colorful, controversial figure—a playboy and bon vivant in the 1920s and ’30s who raced cars, wrote poetry, and seduced a long line of beautiful women. He owned a planet named Philippa, sold to him by the astronomer who discovered it, and translated Elizabethan poetry into French for the sheer pleasure of it. His father, a physician who wrote plays under a pen name, had inherited a decrepit, second-tier winery, Château Mouton-Rothschild, that his family had acquired in the nineteenth century. Philippe took over Mouton’s management in his twenties and almost immediately began challenging the calcified French wine trade by rallying other leading producers in Bordeaux to begin château-bottling their wines for the first time, rather than shipping them in bulk to wine merchants, who had traditionally stored them during the aging process.
Philippe’s proposal directly challenged the powerful role of the wine merchants by offering château producers a way to control more of the process and distinguish their wines from lower-quality ones. Traditionally, France’s elite Bordeaux producers had relied on their reputations to sell their wines, shunning marketing. Philippe’s proposal encouraged the châteaus to begin marketing their wines themselves, rather than leaving those crucial steps to brokers and merchants. It was “a true Declaration of Independence for Bordeaux winemakers,” contends the wine writer William Echikson. “They were no longer mere vassals for the merchants.”
As part of this campaign, Philippe rallied his neighboring châteaus in the mid-1920s into a group called “the Association of Five.” Consisting of Haut Brion, Latour, Margaux, Lafite, and Mouton, the first get-together took place over dinner at the famed restaurant Chapon Fin in Bordeaux. There, the owners or managers agreed to château-bottling and to help each other in technical and commercial areas. To overcome the proud owners’ distaste for publicity, Philippe proposed that they work together to promote the “glamour” of their wines—a more palatable goal.
Philippe himself added glamour to Mouton by associating it with some of the leading artists of the age. For Mouton’s first vintage of château-bottled wine, in 1927, Philippe commissioned Jean Carlu, who introduced cubist designs into French advertising, to design the label. Philippe also added his signature to Mouton’s labels, which was a novelty in the French wine industry at the time. In later years, he would use eye-catching labels from Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso. With such unorthodox marketing techniques, the baron displayed his flair for promotion—or self-promotion, as his critics contended.
But Philippe’s progress in reviving Mouton was interrupted by the war. After the Nazis occupied Paris, Philippe made a daring escape from France by foot over the snow-covered Pyrenees, crossing from France into Spain and then on to Portugal and fled to Morocco, where he was imprisoned for eight months. From there, he went to England, where he joined a French army unit poised to support the Allied forces in fighting the Germans. After the war, he learned that his wife, Lili, a French Catholic, had died in a concentration camp. Their daughter, Philippine, was whisked into hiding from the Nazis and saved. When Philippe’s father died unexpectedly in 1947, the hereditary title passed to Philippe, his brother, James, and their sister, Nadine. In sorting out their father’s estate, Philippe offered to buy his siblings out of Château Mouton-Rothschild, the vineyard they had inherited from their father.
Toward the end of the war, the occupying German army had retreated rapidly, leaving telegraph poles down, wires cut, and guns and concrete pillboxes everywhere. So Philippe faced a task of rebuilding the winery at a time when resources were scarce. As well, the baron found himself at war with those same château owners he had brought together in the mid-1920s. Following a rift with his relatives who owned Lafite-Rothschild, Mouton was unceremoniously dumped by the four first-growth châteaus, who took out an advertisement in the Bordeaux paper declaring, “Les Quatre Grands, Noblesse Oblige.”
The baron was infuriated and vowed to fight to protect Mouton’s honor. The other four châteaus had used the fact that Mouton had not been ranked as one of France’s premier cru, or first-class, makers of red wines, in the system established in 1855. The baron sought to throw out the 1855 classification and replace it with an up-to-date table, appealing to the Syndicat des Crus Classés, an ancient order of winegrowers who were responsible for upholding wine laws in the district. Philippe’s challenge to the established system even further inflamed the rift that had begun with Lafite.
The baron was relentless in his efforts. Over more than a decade, he petitioned five successive ministers of agriculture, delivered countless lectures, and wrote many articles as part of his campaign. It was a battle for prestige, and finally, in 1973, the French Ministry of Agriculture passed a decree promoting Mouton to premier cru status. The baron opened a jeroboam of Mouton ’24 and all the vineyard workers drank to the future, and their new motto:
Premier je suis, second je fus, Mouton ne change.
(First I am, second I was, Mouton does not change.)
Just as the feud between the Mondavis had garnered Robert’s new winery invaluable publicity, the baron’s crusade to secure premier-cru status, against the wishes of many in the French wine establishment, did as well. That was one of many experiences that the French aristocrat and the immigrant’s son had in common. Both men were highly driven, competitive, and entrepreneurial: Neither could stand to be second-rate. Passionate about marketing rather than numbers, they intuitively grasped the potential of selling an image and a lifestyle around wine. Both also had the fortitude to withstand a long fight. In their famous battles their reputations came under attack. The baron’s crusade to elevate Mouton into a premier cru took well over a decade; likewise, Robert’s battle to gain his rightful share of the family business stretched out for over ten years.
The baron hit upon the idea of creating a second-tier brand after a disappointing harvest left him with a large quantity of wine that was not up to the quality of previous Mouton vintages. At first, he called this wine Cadet de Mouton, indicating that it was a junior member of the Mouton Rothschild family of wines, but soon changed that to the shorter and more elegant Mouton Cadet. His move had its doubters but the strategy worked and in later years, when he didn’t have any of his own wine to spare for it, he produced Mouton Cadet from wines bought and blended from other growers across Bordeaux. It became one of the world’s most popular French wine brands, selling about a million cases a year.
Robert’s strategy was similar. In 1974, faced with a surplus of everyday wine, he came up with the idea of bottling it in-house rather than selling it to other producers in bulk, apparently coming up with the idea over dinner one night with the cookbook celebrity James Beard. The idea hearkened back to the earliest days of the Mondavis’ ownership of Krug, when Robert figured out how to finance the Krug purchase by bottling bulk wine. Michael recalls the origins of the idea a little differently. After a customer balked at accepting delivery of bulk Chardonnay and Cabernet wines from Mondavi, Michael remembers suggesting they sell these commodity wines themselves. To distinguish the wines further, he proposed selling them in 1.5-liter bottles—not as large as jug wines, but twice the size of a regular bottle of wine. As a final touch, he proposed finishing these larger bottles off with a cork, distinguishing it as a higher quality product than twist-top jugs from Italian Swiss Colony and Gallo.
The wines quickly became known as “Bob Red,” “Bob White,” and “Bob Rose”—the latter being a product Mondavi introduced after the astounding growth of Sutter Home’s White Zinfandel. Yet, despite this nickname that referred solely to Robert, the entire family backed the venture, at least at first, and Michael in particular was a strong advocate.
Four years later, as part of the settlement of the legal case with Peter, Robert assumed a lease on a bulk wine facility in rural Acampo, near Woodbridge, and the Mondavis began selling their bulk wines under the Woodbridge brand, since the winery was located on Woodbridge Road, near Lodi, in the San Joaquin Valley. The winery had gone through a series of owners; started just after repeal as a cooperative called the Cherokee Wine Association, by the late 1970s it was known as the Montcalm Winery and had fallen into receivership. C. Mondavi and Sons had leased the facility from Wells Fargo and Company, which in turn had hired Brad Alderson as general manager to turn around the ailing facility.
In 1978, as part of the $10 million in cash, assets, and land that Peter used to buy Robert out of his stake in the family business, Robert assumed that lease and also got the bulk wine inventory stored at Montcalm—some quarter of a million gallons or so—and it, too, became “Bob Red” and “Bob White.” In 1979, Robert exercised an option to purchase the winery from Wells Fargo, keeping the highly competent and steady Alderson on to run the operation for him and renaming it Woodbridge. Like Mouton Cadet for the family of Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Woodbridge became a sales juggernaut for the Mondavi family, carrying the risk of becoming too much of a success.
Six years passed between the time the Baron Philippe de Rothschild first summoned Robert to his hotel suite in Hawaii to express interest in working together and 1978, when he approached him again. During those intervening years, Harry Serlis and his wife, Bobbe, had become friendly with the baron and his American wife, Pauline Fairfax Potter, staying with them for several days at Château Mouton-Rothschild during one of the Serlises’ many trips to Europe. The couples visited back and forth between each other’s homes in France and California. An incorrigible flirt, the baron pinched Bobbe’s knee under the table at dinner their first night, causing her to start.
Bobbe’s husband, in turn, seldom set aside his business agenda for long. On trips overseas, Serlis would bring California wines as gifts for his hosts and among them was usually a wine from the Robert Mondavi Winery, where he sat on the board and consulted. It was during one of the Serlises’ periodic visits to Bordeaux that the baron confided to him that he hoped to ally Mouton-Rothschild with a winery in California, which he had grown to love. Before the war, he’d had a brief fling as a Hollywood movie producer, working under the name Philippe Pascal. After marrying Pauline, he made frequent trips with her to Santa Barbara, where they found the climate to their liking. As well, France’s business environment was unstable in the mid-1970s and so the baron sought geographic diversification by investing in California.
So, in reply to Philippe’s question about who might make a good partner, Serlis didn’t hesitate: “The one person who shares your vision and passion is Robert Mondavi,” he said.
Serlis’s recommendation led to a call in August 1978 to Robert by the baron’s representative, Miklos “Mickey” Dora, who invited Robert to visit the baron at the Château Mouton-Rothschild in Pauillac, a village in France’s central Médoc. It was a tempting invitation and Robert very much wanted his children to grasp the elegant world he so admired.
Robert decided to invite Marcia along on a trip that same month to visit the baron in France. It was a rare moment for father and daughter, who had seldom spent much time alone with each other. A few months earlier, Marcia had declined to join the group of winery staffers that her father had shepherded around Europe on a three-week winery tour. “A couple of days on tour with Dad and you need a vacation from the vacation,” Marcia explained to The New York Times’s wine writer, Frank Prial, that year. But the grueling pace of trips led by Robert was probably not the only reason Marcia declined to join the group. With her father and mother recently separated and Margrit playing a prominent role on the trip, both as a guide and as Robert’s consort, the group trip would have been an uncomfortable experience for Robert’s austere, all-business daughter.
But a trip just with her father to visit Château Mouton-Rothschild was too tempting for Marcia to pass up. Rolling over the village’s cobbled streets in a chauffeur-driven limousine and entering through the grand gates of the château, the Mondavis saw a place that had been transformed in the years after the war. The larger house, known as Grand Mouton, had been a stable block a few decades earlier. At the time Robert and Marcia visited, its salon was far and away grander than any place that existed in Napa Valley: with Chippendale furniture, paintings by sixteenth-century Florentines, sculptures by Giacometti and Brancusi, all presided over by a nearly life-size Italian Rennaissance figure of a horse, carved in wood and complete with a genuine horsehair tail.
After surprising his fellow vintner with a greeting of “Hiya, Bob!” the baron led his American guests on a tour of the estate, including the grand salon, the newly completed wine museum, and Mouton’s chai, its famed wine cellar. Philippe by then was nearly bald, with ethereal wisps of hair on top and wild mutton-chop sideburns to compensate for the lack of hair on his head. Yet, despite his idiosyncratic looks, the baron showed off his wealth to Robert and Marcia in its entire splendor.
That evening, the baron and his guests enjoyed an aperitif of vin blanc cassis, made from the estate’s own blackcurrants. That was followed by a beautiful dinner of quail roasted on the spit served in the château’s library, accompanied by a hundred-year-old Château Mouton-Rothschild. His right-hand man, Philippe Cottin, joined them for the meal, which ended with an ice-cold glass of Yquem. Robert was duly impressed. In the European style, business was not discussed at dinner. But afterward, the baron asked Robert if he and his daughter would mind meeting with him in his private chambers at nine-thirty the next morning, offering the quirky explanation that “ninety percent of all my business is done in my bedroom.”
The next morning, after breakfast, they made their way to the baron’s bedchamber, where he relaxed in one of his three specially made, extra-large beds—one for his bedroom at Mouton, another for his Paris mansion, and the third for the castle he rented each summer for many years at Hesselager, Denmark. As the biographer Frederic Morton noted in his early biography of the Baron Philippe, “His dynamism is huge—and horizontal. He not only sleeps but eats, presides, instructs, phones, telegraphs, and above all writes, propped up against his pillows.”
Diplomatically presenting the proposal of a partnership to Robert as being one of equals, the baron named his Californian partner first. “I would like to have a joint venture in which you have fifty percent and I would have fifty percent. We don’t want it big, we want it small, five thousand cases.” The baron added, in perfect English honed in boarding schools and through having lived in England in the latter years of World War II, “You will put your name on the label, and I’ll put my name on the label.” Robert readily agreed, surprised that the baron was willing to go that far, since the Robert Mondavi Winery was clearly the junior partner in terms of age and prestige. They agreed to produce one red wine with a proprietary name. Then the conversation veered into a more delicate area.
“Well, should we have our own vineyard and our own winery?” the baron asked.
“Baron, if we want to excel, the only way to do it is to have our own vineyards and our own winery,” Robert replied.
They agreed that Robert would provide the grapes and make the wine for the joint venture until it could do so itself. Then the baron asked, “Bob, I hear you have considerable holdings in Napa Valley. Would you mind selling twenty or twenty-five acres of your land to the joint venture?”
Robert looked the baron in the eye and asked, “Would you like to sell twenty or twenty-five acres of yours?”
“Oh no, no, no!” the baron laughed.
“Well, I don’t want to sell it either.”
The men agreed to try to locate a piece of property to buy for their joint venture by December of 1981, about two years later. Then they approached another potential sticking point.
“We are six thousand miles apart. Can you think of anyone that could be a go-between for us?”
Robert suggested Harry Serlis.
“Bob, that’s the man,” agreed the baron.
“But wait a minute,” Robert added. “He’s a member of my board of directors.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” the baron said. “Don’t worry about that. I’m not worried about that. I’ll call Harry on the phone and I would like to meet before the end of the year. Since I’m getting along in years, we have to do something now.”
Their meeting in the baron’s boudoir lasted less than two hours. Yet even more than the Paris Tasting two years earlier, when California beat all of Gaul, the news that the Baron Philippe de Rothschild had entered into a fifty-fifty partnership with Robert Mondavi was a watershed moment for California winemakers. At last, they had arrived on the world wine scene.
Robert returned to Oakville and called his sons into his office, which was then on the first floor of the winery, facing a small patio. He sat behind his small, slightly battered wooden desk, near a table where he displayed wine artifacts he had collected on his travels. Robert then explained the deal to Michael and Timothy, who sat in leather chairs across the desk from him, as well as Adams. “I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to develop this joint venture,” he told them.
Michael’s response was not enthusiastic: He had what he considered more pressing issues on his mind, including the rapid sales growth at Woodbridge, and this venture could well have turned out to be another one of his father’s follies. Tim, in turn, immediately expressed opposition to the idea, questioning why his family needed the Rothschilds as partners in California when they were doing so well on their own. “Oh, no,” he told his father. “Why do we want to do business with the people from France? Why do we want to do business with Mouton? We’re in a golden era, the wines are getting better all the time. We’re being recognized more all the time.”
“Well, the association can be a very beneficial one,” Robert explained patiently to his younger son, who was then in his late twenties. Although Timothy had been to Europe, he may not have been fully aware at that time of the prestige of the Rothschild name or the elevated social circles that Europe’s most powerful banking dynasty had moved in for many generations. Timothy’s opposition to the venture pitted him against the more worldly Harry Serlis, who had immediately grasped what a social and business coup it would be for his friend Robert Mondavi to link his name with that of the Rothschilds. So did Margrit, who enthusiastically supported the idea. But with a worldview molded mostly by his experience in California, Timothy didn’t initially grasp that it was his family—not the Rothschilds—that would gain most of the luster from such an association, the first between an American winery and a producer of French grand crus.
Robert moved ahead with the deal, despite Timothy’s opposition. But before the baron was willing to formally enter into a partnership, he sent his trusted winemaker, Lucien Sionneau, to fly to California and taste the Mondavi wines. If they passed muster, the Rothschilds would then move ahead. Timothy, upon hearing about the French winemaker’s visit, looked at his father and asked, “What do we do for this man? What do you want to show him?” Robert’s answer: “Show him everything.” Timothy poured every Cabernet Franc, every Merlot, and every Cabernet Sauvignon they had, as well as showing Sionneau all of the winery’s experiments, including the temperature of fermentation, methods of barrel construction, and where its grapes were coming from, with the Frenchman signaling a strong preference for the grapes grown in the To Kalon vineyards. Sionneau, who was not only Mouton’s winemaker but also the company’s president, returned to Pauillac and gave the venture his blessing. “You know, Baron, we can make good wines in California,” he said.
Overall, it took about eighteen months to finalize the details. The transcontinental negotiations took place between Rothschild’s managing director Cottin, Serlis, and Adams, and the group decided they would produce a single Bordeaux-style red wine from the 1979 vintage, announcing it in April of 1980. Robert and the baron hosted a press conference in San Francisco, while their progeny—the Baroness Philippine and Michael—fielded questions from reporters in Paris.
The French had agreed to put up all the working capital, while the Robert Mondavi Winery would let the partnership choose from its very best grapes and wines. Mondavi got a disproportionately large share of the profits to compensate it for providing the wine and the venture’s sales and marketing. But from the very beginning, the French insisted on teaming their much more experienced winemaker, Sionneau, with Timothy Mondavi to jointly make the wine. In the traditional Mouton manner, the wine would be racked—transferred from one container to another to separate the clear wine from the sediment that has gathered—every three months. As well, it would be aged in new Nevers oak barrels, sent from France by the baron.
One hurdle remained: What to name the new partnership and the wine it produced? Navigating the challenges of the nine-hour time difference between France and California, they brainstormed dozens of ideas, including Duet, Aliage, Alliance, and even Opus, but none seemed to express the venture’s high ambitions. Finally, Philippe began searching through various Latin sources and came across what seemed like a promising contender in the horoscope. He telexed his idea to California and organized a conference call a few days later to discuss the idea with his American partner.
The baron called to tell Robert that he had come up with the perfect name. “Gemini,” he announced triumphantly, which is the third sign of the zodiac and represented by a set of twins. There was silence. The baron asked his partner what he thought. Robert hesistated, since Gemini was also the name of a well-known gay magazine in the United States. Once he broke the news to the baron, they had a laugh together and quietly dropped the idea.
The San Francisco–based label designer, Susan Roach Pate, and her husband, Dwight, spent nearly a month with the Rothschilds, traveling between Château Mouton and the baron’s mansion in Paris to design a label for the new wine. The search resumed and not long after, the baron and his team returned to the Latin word opus, which means “work” and is often used to refer to a work of art or music. As Robert wrote in his autobiography, “the Baron then suggested we make it Opus One, to convey this was the first work of a master composer. That was an essential touch. It was bold and proud, as if our wine were already declaring itself a Premier Grand Cru Classe.”
Once the partners had agreed on a name, the next step was to agree on a logo. They turned to Susan Pate, an experienced and talented designer who had made her name working with Moët Hennessy’s California venture, Domaine Chandon, in 1982 after trying another, better-known design firm. Pate was also a soignée blonde with more than a passing resemblance to Britain’s princess Diana. Knowing that the baron was partial to attractive women, and sensing that Susan Pate’s style was very much like the baron’s wife Pauline’s, Michael and Cliff Adams hoped she could come up with the packaging that would capture the partners’ vision, let alone one that Robert and the baron would accept. “We would like you to have an affair with the baron,” Michael Mondavi jokingly explained to Pate when he hired her. “A creative affair.”
The partners initially agreed to pay Pate $25,000 to design a label, as well as agreeing to foot the bill for her and her husband to make a trip to work with the Rothschilds. Before leaving for France, she read everything she could on the baron and his fabled family. Her stay at the château was just as glamorous as she had expected, with liveried waiters, bells to summon servants, and meal cards embossed with the family’s crest for dinner, including the wines that would be served with each course. True to form, Philippe lived up to his reputation as a ladies’ man. The eighty-two-year-old could not keep his hands off Pate.
Susan was provided with a small studio on the third floor of the château, next to the room where Britain’s queen mother would stay when she visited Mouton-Rothschild. Her day would start with a visit to the baron’s bedroom, where he would conduct business in his oversized bed, often with one of his dogs lying nearby. She would present the baron with her ideas and be rebuffed. “No, no no…it can’t be right!” he would say to her in his perfect, heavily accented English. The baron would later recall that three or four hundred designs had been submitted in total. Finally, she sketched an image based on the Roman god Janus, with two profiles back to back. Robert recalled Michael’s coming up with the idea by putting two chess pieces back to back and drawing a rough sketch of the result, while the baron apparently felt the idea was his.
Pate’s clearest memory, though, is of months of bickering between the French and the California camps about which man’s head should be positioned slightly higher on the label—the baron’s or Robert’s. The baron eventually won that argument. But whose signature would be first? This time, it was Robert’s. They leavened their dispute with humor. Robert would complain, “I don’t like my profile,” and the baron would respond, “Mine’s worse!” Robert also joked, “Who wants a picture of a Jewish nose and an Italian nose?”
Pate sought to capture the dynamic between the two men by merging their profiles, with an expressionistic squiggle uniting them. But finding exactly the right line was not easy, and her various attempts elicited many “non, non, nons…” from the baron, who explained there were “too many zig-wee-wees,” explaining that the fused heads looked drunk to him, with all those lightning bolts through them. Eventually, they decided on a very modest zigzag radiating from their shared pates, and a blue, high-energy squiggle below their profiles. It was a striking, soft-edged design using color that was very different from the conventional, hard-edged, black-and-white wine label of the time. Later on, Pate’s label would win widespread praise, although the job ended up taking over two years and costing more than $100,000.
Meanwhile, the 1979 vintage that Sionneau and Timothy produced was not the world-class wine that either side was hoping for. The French winemaker preferred an elegant wine that would go with food; Timothy was a product of the California palate and he advocated a bold, intense wine. They managed to find a compromise but decided to package the 1979 and 1980 wines together for Opus One’s first release. Releasing five thousand cases, Opus One recommended a retail price of $50 a bottle—about ten times as much the cost of an everyday bottle of wine.
The press coverage of the new venture in the autumn of 1981 was enthusiastic, but there were a few murmurings in the valley that Robert was overreaching. Some suggested that by “fawning” over a French grand cru producer for the public relations benefit, he seemed to be tacitly acknowledging France’s superiority over California. Others wondered how two supremely charming egotists—Robert Mondavi and the Baron Philippe—would ever agree on anything.
Robert and Margrit were also setting a new fast pace with their busy social lives. But while the old crowd of upper Napa Valley vintners looked down on Margrit, in particular, as a social-climbing arriviste, a faster, more sophisticated crowd embraced the new couple. Some of those friends, including the Bernsteins, attended a first-anniversary party hosted for Robert and Margrit by the San Francisco Examiner’s society columnist, Pat Montandon. It took place at her mirrored, all-white penthouse apartment, eight hundred feet up in the area of Russian Hill, which her son Sean Wilsey nicknamed “the marble palace.”
Montandon’s parents were both evangelical Nazarene ministers and she and her six siblings traveled throughout the West from one small town to another during the Depression, with their parents preaching in tents along the way. Born in 1928, Patsy Lou, as she was then known, was a tall, gawky child. But by the time she was sixteen, she was a beauty, with chiseled cheekbones and erect carriage. As a teenager, she got a job modeling at Nieman Marcus and then eventually, in 1960, made her way to San Francisco, where she was hired to run “the Wolf’s Den,” the gentlemen’s formal department at Joseph Magnin, where the salesgirls dressed up like sexy elves at Christmastime. When Montandon racked up the highest seasonal sales in the company’s history at the time, she was put in charge of managing Magnin’s new store at Lake Tahoe, where she met and dated Frank Sinatra.
When the summer season was over, Magnin’s brought her back to San Francisco and Montandon made a few changes. She dyed her hair blond. And, just as Robert had done, she changed the pronunciation of her name from the hick-sounding “Mawntandun” to the more European-sounding “Moan-tan-dawn.” She then concentrated on launching a new career as a society hostess, columnist, and author, penning books such as How to Be a Party Girl. She married the celebrity trial lawyer Melvin Belli in a Shinto ceremony in Japan in 1966. The marriage lasted just thirty-six days—a development noted by the rival San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist Herb Caen in a tart item headlined “30 Seconds over Tokyo.”
After divorcing Belli, Montandon married Al Wilsey, who had made a fortune in a butter-and-egg business inherited from his father. The couple entertained lavishly, both at their penthouse in San Francisco and at an estate in the Napa Valley hamlet of Rutherford, where they would spend weekends. Wilsey was famous for buzzing his private helicopter above Mike Robbins’s gabled Victorian home and his Spring Mountain Winery, which was the opening shot for the evening soap-opera set in the Napa Valley, Falcon Crest. Trouble was looming in the Montandon-Wilsey marriage, but Montandon didn’t know that on the day she lunched with Robert, Margrit, and Robert’s administrative assistant, Robin Lail—a daughter of Robert’s old friend John Daniel and a member of Napa Valley royalty herself—to discuss raising money for a local hospital.
It was a beautiful, warm afternoon and the foursome ate on a patio outside the Vineyard Room, with trellised vines and the mountains in the background. Montandon had an idea she wanted to pitch to Robert, who by that time was someone with a reputation for making things happen. Beforehand, Montandon’s husband, Wilsey, had warned her that Robert would ask her for a donation during the lunch, so Montandon settled that matter straightaway.
“Bob, I’ll make a donation to the hospital,” she said. “Now there’s something I want to talk to you about….”
Montandon went on to explain her idea of a charity event, which could be held on the grounds of her Rutherford estate. The group talked and the idea bubbled up of a charity wine auction similar to the one held each year by France’s Hospice du Beaune. Robert wondered if the Napa Valley Vintners, the powerful and, even then, fractious trade group made up of the valley’s winery owners, would be able to agree to taking on such a project. But he also thought he’d be able to recruit Michael Broadbent, the eminent wine auctioneer from Christie’s in London, to take part.
The details fell to Robin Lail, one of many beautiful women who would work in the Robert Mondavi Winery over the years, who took charge of organizing the event and rallying support. The vintners signed on but insisted that the late Louis P. Martini chair it—a more politically acceptable choice to the group than Robert, who was always on the move in those days, flying from tastings to appointments to meetings and to business dinners during his fourteen-hour workdays.
Volunteers pulled the event together. Molly Chappellet, owner with her husband, Donn, of Chappellet Vineyards, took charge of the auction’s “visuals”—the floral arrangements, table coverings, and many other aesthetic decisions. The organizers were forced to quickly shift gears and change the location: By 1981, Pat Montandon was in the throes of a bitter divorce from Al Wilsey, which made it impossible for her to host an event at the Wilsey estate in Rutherford. So the group instead chose a newly revived club called Meadowood, owned by the real estate developer H. William Harlan II and several partners. Molly Chappellet spent many hours at Meadowood, on the flanks of Howell Mountain, studying the trek of the sun across the fairways to plan the best position for the tables in the shade. But despite her best-laid plans, the week before the auction was one of the hottest in memory.
The morning of Saturday, June 12—with only a week to go before the auction—dawned with an unusual, acrid tinge to the air. A fire had erupted in the valley’s eastern hills, blackening seven hundred acres and sending smoke so high it could be seen throughout the Bay Area. The conflagration was aided by an unusual heat wave for that time of year, with temperatures hitting more than a hundred degrees and gusts of twenty to twenty-five miles per hour accelerating the flames. The county and state put more than a hundred firefighters on the ground, in trucks, and overhead. Bombers dropped fire retardant on flames to try to quench them. Even crews of prison inmates were used to try to stop the flames from spreading even further.
The day of the auction, Sunday, June 21, thermometers in the valley hit an astonishing 107 degrees. The wines that had sat outside by the pool for the barrel tasting before the live auction had heated up dangerously. By the early evening, the British auctioneer Michael Broadbent had discarded his jacket and stuck his feet in a tub of water to try to cool down from the sweltering temperatures in the tent. There were 590 lots sold in an event that lasted more than seven hours, but there was one clear showstopper: the first case of wine jointly produced by the Rothschilds and Mondavis, which would be released two years later.
The bidding grew heated in the sweltering tent and the prices being offered for the wine—then only known as Napamédoc Cabernet Sauvignon—soared. The owner of a liquor supermarket in Syracuse, New York, Charles Mara, ultimately claimed the lot for $24,000—nearly double of most estimates of what it would sell for and the equivalent of $2,000 per bottle. Mara’s winning bid broke almost every record in the history of wine auctions. Although the wine was still aging in French oak and was still a few years away from bottling and release, on that excruciatingly hot afternoon it became the single most expensive case of California wine ever sold at auction.
The Mondavis exulted in their success. For Robert, who was sitting with Margrit in the front row, it was heady vindication of the mantra he’d been repeating over and over for years to anyone who would listen about how Napa Valley wines could be in the company of the world’s finest. Robert’s doubting son, Timothy, also shared in the triumph of the moment. When approached by a reporter for The Napa Valley Register for a comment on the sale, Timothy shed all of his private reservations about the joint venture and credited Robert with the idea. “That’s my father’s baby,” he beamed after the record bid. “That’s great. I expected it to take off, but that’s above what I thought.” Timothy added that he wasn’t sure how the wine would be priced when it was released to the market in a few years, “but with that kind of recognition, it won’t last long. It will zoom.”
By the next day, attention shifted to the fires that were breaking out again. This time, they had been set by an arsonist along the eastern boundary of the valley floor. The fires spread and combined into a violent inferno, scorching hundreds of homes and more than twenty-five thousand acres. Funnels of white smoke began billowing into a brilliant blue sky near the Stags Leap District that Monday afternoon. With the hills parched and temperatures still into the hundreds, the blaze raced through the underbrush and trees, leaping through narrow canyons and folds in the hills. Authorities began evacuating homeowners, and planes began dropping fire retardant over the flames in the area. By the next day, eight hundred firefighters had descended on Napa to try to halt the blaze, but winds continued to fuel it. By Wednesday, the winds had started to quiet and by Thursday, the firefighters had it contained.
But that moment represented a turning point for the valley and for Robert Mondavi and his family. Both publicly and privately, their landscapes had changed unalterably as flames consumed the Atlas Peak home that Margrit had shared with Philip Biever. Gone were the family photos, the European furniture, mementos from the moves she had made as an army wife, and many of the objects that the couple had accumulated during their long marriage. Margrit by then was living with Robert in a small condominium, waiting to move the rest of their furniture and possessions into the home they were building together. It was an apocalyptic sign that Margrit’s old life had ended—literally, in ashes—and that her new life with Robert had begun.