Although the fire left Margrit temporarily homeless, her one consolation was that she’d soon move into a new home. During her years as a military wife, Margrit had never felt she’d sunk deep roots in any one place. And although Robert had lived on the Krug Ranch for most of his adult life, the modest house he lived in was owned by the company, not by him personally. So, when the time came for Margrit and Robert to build a home together, they turned to Clifford May, who had designed the winery for Robert in the mid-1960s, for help.
The spot they chose for their new home was the highest hill on the valley floor. With views sweeping from the city of Napa to Mount St. Helena in the north, the land was part of the Oak Knoll Ranch, hundreds of acres of poison-oak-covered, rock-strewn woodlands off the Silverado Trail near Yountville that Robert’s old friend, the distributor Chuck Daniels, had helped him purchase in 1969. Rattlesnakes made it their home.
Margrit confided to friends that her dream was to build a small aerie, a tree house perched on the side of a secluded hilltop. But one day, when vineyard manager Charles Williams drove Robert and Cliff May up to the site in his four-wheel-drive truck, May decided the house should command the very top. “Robert, do you want to be queen down here or king of the hill?” May asked him. Robert, naturally, wanted to be king.
So the one-bedroom home Margrit had originally envisioned became much grander, growing to a stunning, sprawling marble palace under Robert’s influence. Cliff May initially designed a seventeen-thousand-square-foot home for the couple, dominated by a huge, high-vaulted living area. On the lower level would be an indoor pool with a retractable roof, near the bedroom that Robert and Margrit would share. The upper level would be a lounging area. “I thought of the place as an isolated kingdom where Bob would be king of the mountain, so I suggested they call it Mandalay—though eventually they decided on a name that is more reflective of the valley’s history,” May said. Instead of naming their new home after the Burmese city immortalized by the Rudyard Kipling poem, Robert and Margrit called it Wappo Hill, after the American Indian tribe who used the site as a lookout.
To critics, the outré design resembled nothing so much as the atrium of a large hotel chain. Others considered it an architectural wonder. As he had done for the Robert Mondavi Winery, May based his design for the home on the Spanish-mission style and it included a campanile reached by a spiral stone staircase, a large kitchen, a wine cellar, and a four-bedroom guesthouse. The design was meant to reflect Robert’s expansive lifestyle, which included frequent entertaining for the winery. To no one’s surprise, some members of old Napa society dubbed it “Bob’s Folly,” a put-down similar to the one they’d used to describe his winery in 1966. They saw in the home’s grand proportions a reflection of Robert’s outsized ego and ambitions.
Because of Michael and Timothy’s fraught relations with their stepmother, the job of overseeing the design, construction, and ownership terms of Robert and Margrit’s new home fell to Cliff Adams. Michael, in particular, was concerned that if something happened to his father, Margrit and her children would end up owning it. With a value approaching $5 million, it was one of Robert’s major assets, and the development of the property was in part financially supported by the company. “We’re going to go crazy if in fact she gets the house and all his stuff and our kids get cut out,” Robert’s offspring told Adams. In response to their concerns, Adams negotiated terms in which Margrit would get the right to live in the home for her life as a “life estate,” as long as she did not cohabitate with someone else during that period, meaning that after Robert’s death, she could not take a lover and still live there.
The construction itself was nearly as big a challenge as the difficult family politics: The builder balked at May’s initial design, which called for slicing off the top of the hill to lay the home’s foundation and rebuilding a portion of the hillside to support the cantilevered design. May, who was not a licensed architect, insisted that it could be done, but the builder and Adams concluded it would be prohibitively expensive and potentially unworkable. May quit in protest and Adams brought in a licensed architect to shrink May’s design to fit the site. They also ended up importing a stoneworker from Italy to install the extensive marble on the floors and staircases. May eventually rejoined the project, which was scaled back to a nearly twelve-thousand-square-foot home instead.
Their close attention to detail was rewarded in the end: Robert and Margrit’s new home was featured in Architectural Digest and also filmed from a helicopter for the celebrity television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, hosted by the British celebrity-watcher Robin Leach. “The king of the Napa Valley region was the man on whom the hit TV series Falcon Crest was based,” the show’s voice-over intoned. “Mondavi’s mansion is a state-of-the-art castle which even has its own tower overlooking the sprawling vineyard.” Yet, others noted that they had hidden the house discreetly behind trees, screening it from the valley floor.
In some respects, Robert and his family were re-creating a compound similar to the one they had left at the Krug Ranch. Michael and his wife, Isabel, also lived on the Oak Knoll Ranch, as did Timothy, Dorothy, and their growing family. But unlike the Mondavis’ relatively modest lifestyle on the Krug Ranch during the 1950s and 1960s, Robert’s branch of the Mondavi family had begun living more lavishly. As one former employee wrote, “the Mondavi style could be best described as Lucullan, with Bob as the Roman general and his family the most privileged Centurions.” It didn’t go unnoticed that Robert had situated his home higher on the hill than either Michael’s or Timothy’s.
The comparison to the Krug compound was not exact, however. For one thing, while Robert, Rosa, and later Helen all lived within sight of one another at the ranch, none of the three Mondavis who lived on the Oak Knoll property could see each other from their respective homes, and their drives were mostly separate. Yet, as in the Krug days, there was a blurring of the lines between what belonged to individual family members and what belonged to the company. Robert Mondavi Vineyards, for instance, owned the land that Michael and Isabel built their home on. In 1972, Michael negotiated a fifty-one-year lease for it, paying the modest ground rent of just $176 per year.
Through the 1980s, Robert remained the family’s general, showing very few signs of slowing down. A very active septuagenarian, he seemed decades younger than his chronological age, perhaps because of his happy second marriage to Margrit and his heady successes of the past few years. He remained strong and fit, swimming forty laps nearly every day and working on his backhand with a tennis pro at Napa’s Silverado Country Club. He never took up golf because it was too leisurely for him. Robert remained so energetic that Michael was known to joke about it. “I run twenty miles every week to stay in shape to keep up with him,” Michael said. “He has so much energy because of his search for trying to do something better. If he ever tasted the perfect wine, I think his life would be over. Luckily, he hasn’t.”
With Margrit’s encouragement, Robert also began dressing more stylishly—with a London tailor, shirts from Brioni, and Italian sport coats. He was traveling with Margrit as an ambassador, spending as much as 150 days a year on the road for the winery and California wines. Always a fast driver, Robert drove Oldsmobiles in the early years, explaining that “I make American wine so I drive American cars.” Later on, he graduated to Cadillacs. Eventually, because his trips to and from San Francisco for wine tastings became so frequent, and also, some suggested, because his driving became even more speedy as he aged, the winery provided a limousine and chauffeur for him. He left the day-to-day management to Michael, his trusted sales head Gary Ramona, and Cliff Adams. Robert did not curtail his lifelong habit of spending freely and traveling first class, prompting Michael to complain about his father’s profligacy.
After reviewing a printout of public relations charges, Michael told a writer for Town & Country, “So help me, I think if an Arab sheik asked Bob to conduct a tasting in the middle of the Saudi desert, he and Margrit would catch the next plane. Of course, he’d probably invite along a few wine critics and reporters to assure a story in the morning papers. And on the way back, they’d more than likely stop in Paris, where Bob would take everybody to the Tour d’Argent for dinner and a tasting of our wines against the best in Claude Terrail’s cellar,” referring to the restaurateur of the French gastronomic landmark.
Just as Robert’s activities did not slow down, neither did the sheer volume of his ideas and words, which spilled out faster than he could express them, leaving many of his sentences in fragments and encouraging his habit of repeating certain synonyms and near-synonyms in pairs: “knowledge and know-how,” “steeliness and backbone,” and “dedication and involvement” were a few favorites. Staffers knew his “speech” by heart, since he’d repeat it over and over again to them, hoping it would sink in. While many of the people who worked for him took his repetitiveness good-naturedly, seeing it as an outgrowth of his passion for the business, it came to grate on Michael. “You don’t ever have one conversation with my father. Redundancy is his middle name.”
Robert left many sentences unfinished and perhaps, fearing that he hadn’t gotten his point across, he’d often start sentences with the phrase “I’d just like to say this….” Bobbe Serlis Cortese recalls interrupting Robert at a dinner party once as he was beginning a new thought with “I’d just like to say this….” When she asked him not to say anything more, her request brought the table up short. Few people were bold enough to interrupt Robert, even though he tended to go on at length. Other friends of Robert’s joked that on his tombstone should be the words “I’d just like to say…”
Yet, Robert’s tirelessness on the part of delivering his message was hugely appreciated by the company’s sales and marketing department. Hands down, he was their most effective salesman. His charisma and energy drew glamorous people into the winery’s orbit of concerts, dinners, and trips: the movie stars Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner on a sunset cruise in Hawaii, the socialite author Danielle Steel at the Mondavis’ new hilltop home, and the glamorous entertainer Ann-Margret in Las Vegas.
His French partners also applauded his indefatigable energy. At a birthday celebration for Robert on June 17, 1983, at the Oakville Winery, the baron’s managing director, Philippe Cottin, presented him with the gift of a bottle of Mouton from 1914—the year after Robert’s birth, explaining that he hadn’t sent the 1913 because it wasn’t a very good vintage. In his French-accented English, Cottin told Robert: “You are proof of an adage we have in France: God cannot make great wines and great men in the same year!”
Yet, the social altitude and sheer velocity at which Robert and his family were soaring raised eyebrows among some in the valley. When kings came to the Napa Valley, they visited Mondavi. In the spring of 1984, Sweden’s thirty-seven-year-old king Carl Gustaf swung through the valley, touring the Robert Mondavi Winery and tasting the new wine produced by Mondavi’s joint venture with the Baron Philippe. When the baron himself came to Oakville to take a vineyard tour, he rode in one of the several dark limousines that wound their way up the hillside, passing Mexican workers in straw hats and viewed from overhead by a turkey vulture wheeling across the dark blue sky. To one observer, the procession of dark cars looked like a Mafia funeral.
Robert and his family’s social ascendancy became apparent at public events. Not long after his seventieth birthday, Robert and his sons attended the third annual Napa Valley Wine Auction, which was blessedly cooler than the auction’s first year. Lot 34 was an imperial-sized bottle of the forthcoming Opus One. Auctioneer Michael Broadbent started the bidding at $900. It soared to more than five times that amount: $5,200. The Peter Mondavi family, meanwhile, had also contributed three lots of Charles Krug wine to the event. Robert and Peter still weren’t speaking to each other after the bitterness of their court battle, and the relationships between the various branches of the Mondavi family were still strained. So when the Krug lots came up for sale, Michael Mondavi refused to lower his paddle until he had won them. Bidding with Timothy, they ended up paying $7,800 for Cabernet Sauvignons made at Krug from 1959 through 1964, when their father was at the winery.
“I’ve tried every which way to buy those wines Bob made, but my uncle just wouldn’t sell them to us,” said Michael, in explaining his refusal to drop out of the bidding no matter what it cost. Some observers saw it as a case of not very attractive “familial one-upmanship”—and a way of sending the implicit message to the Peter Mondavi family, which had struggled for years under the debt it had assumed to settle the 1976 court case, that if they wouldn’t agree privately to a sale of wines, the Robert Mondavi family would simply buy them. Others interpreted it as a conciliatory gesture by Michael and Timothy, a way of showing respect to the other side of the family, leaving open the possibility that the cousins would someday go into business together. Still, the gesture left a sour taste in some old-timers’ mouths, as the Mondavis played out their feud in public one more time.
Just as the relationship between Robert and Peter had not changed in the years since Judge Carter’s decision, neither had Robert’s character altered much. Some of the same habits and attitudes that had driven a wedge between him and his mother and siblings also caused problems between Robert and his sons. Robert continued to take credit for nearly everything good that happened at the winery, despite the fact that he had turned over the day-to-day operations to other people. He was also highly critical—often in public or semipublic settings—of both his sons. He would criticize Michael for “just moving boxes” rather than emphasizing the educational elements of selling that Robert felt were the most important sales tools. When Michael would suggest pushing Mondavi’s lower-priced wines, Robert would say “You’re running too fast, you’re trying to be a big man.” He’d often level these criticisms in front of employees and distributors. Michael would work on plans with his team for weeks and then present them to his father, who’d dismiss them immediately: “I think that’s a terrible idea,” he would say. “We’re not going to do that.”
Robert’s criticisms emasculated Michael in the eyes of the staffers, underscoring that Robert remained the key decision maker, not his firstborn. Michael, in turn, was hurt by his father’s put-downs: “It makes you feel like crap, whether the criticisms were accurate or erroneous. I did quite a bit of running and a lot of exercise to cope.”
When asked by a historian in 1984 if he had found it difficult growing up in his father’s shadow, Michael revealed some of the pain he felt. “In 1966, when there was my father, myself, and another employee who started up the company, [my father] was the brains, the direction, everything. I was the brawn. As I then gained experience, everything was totally in his shadow. And I think that I helped to pay many of the corporate dividends of Di-Gel, Gelusil, and all those antacid people until about 1973 or 1972. I got to the point where I realized I would never totally please him, but that’s good because he always demands perfection, whether it’s the wine, or the people, et cetera. If I try to only please him, and only do what he wants, then I won’t be happy. I’ve got to work as hard as I can to do what I think is best and then I have to be able to look back and say, Did I do a good job? Did I do my best?”
Michael seldom received praise from his father, as a boy or as a man, despite his hard work. Michael would typically get up early and work at home from about six-fifteen to seven-thirty A.M. or go for a run in the morning to relieve stress before heading into the office. He packed his schedule with appointments ranging from meeting with the winery’s chief financial officer to leading VIP tours for restaurant owners, wholesalers, and retailers. If he hadn’t taken a run in the morning, he’d slip out for one in the late afternoon, but not before carrying home extendable folders packed with six or eight inches to read that night, working for a couple of hours after dinner.
Repeatedly describing the wine business as a “sickness,” he felt overworked and underappreciated and complained that he went for a period following the start-up of the winery when he had not taken a vacation for years. Even then, when he and Isabel did manage to slip away, they found they couldn’t escape the pressures of their famous last name.
“I had not had a vacation in six years—getting the winery started. So I said, ‘Come on, we’re going on a vacation.’” The couple flew to Las Vegas for a long weekend, hoping to spend some time together, play tennis, and see some shows. In the evening, Michael and Isabel sat down for what they hoped would be a quiet, romantic dinner at one of the clubs, which was a rare occasion for them because of Michael’s heavy work schedule. Almost immediately, upon realizing who he was, the wine steward, the maître d’, and the captain circled their table and hovered around closely all evening. Michael talked business much of the evening and ended up ordering several bottles of wine for the two of them. As the wine business once again intruded on their personal lives, Isabel ended up in tears.
The pressure and lack of recognition from his father contributed to Michael’s explosive temper, which flared up regularly at the winery and elsewhere. Michael’s office was down the hall at the Oakville winery from Robert’s, and staffers at the time remember doors slamming and shouting between the two men, who were both passionate and opinionated. Michael also erupted over seemingly minor issues. The sales staffer Gary Lipp and his wife and Michael and Isabel were once walking through San Francisco’s Union Square after dark when a homeless man said something impolite to one of the women. Michael became infuriated and warned the impoverished man in the harshest possible language to leave them alone. “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker!” Michael shouted that evening, according to Lipp. Although Michael does not recall the incident in Union Square, he says that if someone did threaten his wife or daughter, he’d feel it was his duty to protect them.
Looking back on those years, Michael says he acted out his anger toward his father by venting his rage at unwitting targets. “There were times I would lash out,” he acknowledges. “I asked people close to me to let me know when I did that, so I could try not to repeat it.”
Sometimes those targets were subordinates in the workplace, either employees or people who did business with the company. Once, in the mid-1980s, the company hired an interior designer to decorate a new administrative office it was opening in downtown Napa. The designer showed rug samples to Michael. But since he didn’t express a strong opinion at the time on which rug should be used, the designer ended up making the choice. When he found out about it, Michael began slamming doors, yelling, and screaming. The rest of the staff was befuddled by his outburst.
Michael sought other outlets for his energy during those years. He piloted a Cessna 414 and rode Harley-Davidson motorcycles with a group of young, wealthy winery owners, including Gilliland Nickel, who had inherited a profitable nursery business in Oklahoma, as well as the powerful distribution executive Ted Simpkins, who headed up Southern Wine and Spirits of California. In one small act of defiance against the expectations placed on him as Robert Mondavi’s eldest son, he even grew a ponytail.
One of Michael’s more humorous ventures was appearing as “the man in the Hathaway shirt,” wearing the brand’s black patch over his right eye like a charming corporate pirate. Michael, then in his early forties, was strikingly handsome—and by some accounts, better looking than his famous father. His height topped Robert’s by four or five inches and, unlike his father, was a polished, though perhaps less passionate, public speaker. He patiently worked through fifty-four takes before the directors got the one they wanted for the sixty-second television ad and another two dozen or so takes for the thirty-second spot. The copy for the print version of the ad read, “Every man has his own management style. Take Michael Mondavi. Proud, persistent, dedicated to a tradition of quality winemaking.”
Michael also joined the “Young Presidents’ Organization,” a networking and peer group for people who were presidents, CEOs, or chairmen of companies before they reached their mid-forties. There he met a group of young and aggressive businessmen from the valley, such as the corporate-executive-turned-grape-grower Andy Beckstoffer and the technology-executive-turned-vintner Garen Staglin. He also got to know many others like himself, who had inherited their wealth and positions in family businesses. The YPO meetings were places to network and to air issues that were unique to second-and third-generation business owners, such as how to deal with difficult family members, how to handle management succession from one generation to the next, and how to minimize inheritance taxes on family-owned businesses when the founding entrepreneur died.
But they also, at times, resembled drunken frat parties: In one instance, a group of YPOers visiting a prominent Napa Valley winery tore around in a golf cart and crashed it, much to the dismay of the winery’s management. Members swore to maintain complete confidentiality about matters discussed in the meetings and were obliged to meet one full day per month, except during the summer, as well as attend a mandatory chapter retreat in March for two or three days. The chapters also held a nonmandatory but popular Christmas party each year.
Some staffers felt Michael spent too much time at these off-site networking sessions when he should have been spending more time minding the business. Michael found they helped him think through the issues his family would face in coming years. By the mid-1980s, Michael saw himself as the family’s long-term thinker, particularly since he considered Timothy’s focus to be on growing grapes and making wine. He also held the title of company president, which allowed him to join the Young Presidents’ Organization. Timothy, who didn’t hold that title, was thus not eligible. The YPO was another way for Michael to distinguish himself from his younger brother at a time when Timothy sought broader influence at the company and was bridling under the perception that he was just a winemaker.
The Young Presidents’ Organization was the type of go-getter group that held no appeal for Timothy, who did not easily fit into the role of a manager or corporate leader. He preferred lower-key outings, such as a fishing trip he took in June of 1989 to a spot near Crater Lake, Oregon. Invited to join his longtime friend Steve Taplin, Steve’s brother Bill, and a UC Davis classmate of Bill’s named Rich Casias, he took off with Bill and Rich in a rented single-engine Piper and flew to Oregon. There they met Steve Taplin and spent four memorable days of fishing, food, and wine.
On Friday, June 23, Bill Taplin, Casias, and Timothy boarded the plane to fly back to Napa. When the plane took off, it was caught in a downdraft and failed to clear high trees at the end of the runway. Casias, who was piloting the plane, managed a crash landing. The plane caught fire and Casias and Taplin were knocked unconscious. Timothy, seated in the back where he had been reading a book, managed to escape through the rear door and dragged the others out with the help of someone who lived nearby. Moments after pulling them to safety, they watched the plane explode in flames that entirely consumed it. “If I had been knocked out, we would have all gone,” said Timothy.
Casias was taken to a burn center in Oregon, where he woke up nine days later and began a slow process of recovery that included extensive skin grafting and physical therapy. Taplin suffered a broken wrist and burns. Timothy was also briefly hospitalized with a cracked rib. When Casias woke up, he was relieved to learn he had suffered the worst injuries, but worried about whether breathing the smoke might have left the younger Mondavi son, who was known for his sensitive palate, with lasting problems.
But to Timothy’s colleagues, his behavior at work sometimes seemed less than heroic. His habit of being perpetually late to business discussions, for instance, drove his father and the people who worked for him to distraction. In front of journalists for such influential publications as Wine Spectator, Robert would complain about his younger son’s tardiness. At a blind tasting of sparkling wines held at the Oakville winery in 1984, for instance, which was attended by two dozen tasters sitting around a twenty-five-foot-long table, Robert began his opening remarks and then looked around the room in puzzlement. “Who knows about these wines we are having?” he asked. “Where’s Tim?” Then he’d repeat, “Where’s Tim?”
Tim, unusually this time, was already at the meeting and seated at the end of the table. His father just hadn’t seen him.
“Tim, you are thirteen minutes late!” his father joked.
At other times, Robert’s criticisms would cut his sensitive younger son to the quick. Once, Timothy, the winemaker Zelma Long, Robert, and a few other staffers were tasting wines at a round table in the laboratory. They stuck their noses deeply into the glasses, inhaling the rich scents of the fermented juices. For a short while, they were silent, in appreciation of the poetry of fine winemaking. But not long into the tasting, Robert launched into a criticism of his younger son. As Timothy’s eyes filled with tears, the others looked away, in an attempt to ignore the Mondavi patriarch’s treatment of his youngest child. But Timothy’s humiliation was too blatant to ignore, since it happened in front of his female boss, Long, and other staffers.
Timothy truly loved the artistry of fine winemaking. At the same time, the family politics and heavy expectations placed upon him undermined his ability to use those talents. Unsurprisingly, Timothy was highly indecisive. A typical example would involve deciding when to pick grapes based on their sugar levels and the weather forecast. Relying on what they knew, a group including the winery’s vineyard manager and a grower consultant would agree to hold off on picking over the weekend, in part because it cost more to pay workers for overtime on Saturdays and Sundays. Timothy would then weigh in at length on the subject; arguing that perhaps they should bring in just ten tons of grapes on Saturday—a small amount, but one that would require nearly as many workers as the typical three hundred tons that they’d bring in during a weekday. In situations such as these, although Timothy cared deeply about choosing the optimum picking time, he didn’t seem to fully grasp the economic and the business issues underlying a question such as when to harvest the fruit. Timothy brought little urgency to his decision making, preferring lengthy discussion to concrete action.
Robert compounded the problems his sons were having in the business. Not only did he criticize them publicly, but he also seemed to pit Michael against Timothy in subtle ways, leading the brothers in later years to joke with each other about whose turn it was to be in the penalty box with their father. Michael came to believe that Robert engaged in a pattern of keeping his sons in competition with each other as a way of retaining control over them and the company. The Darwinian competition between his sons forced each of them to work harder for the company—and for their father’s approval.
This dynamic played out in the lengthy strategic debates that took place in the 1980s over whether to introduce a medium-priced Chardonnay. Timothy, whose vision was to produce high-end, technically perfect fine wines for connoisseurs, inevitably ended up on the opposite side of this argument from Michael, who pushed for sales growth and who enjoyed deal making and transactions of various sorts. This particular discussion went on for five years as Michael championed the idea of introducing a line of Chardonnay that was less expensive than the wines made in Oakville and Timothy adamantly opposed it. The result was that Robert became the ultimate decision-maker, with both sons and various staffers engaging in behind-the-scenes lobbying of the patriarch to try to sway him to their side.
Fed up with the fighting with his brother and criticism from his father, Michael threatened to quit over the years. Each time, Robert managed to persuade him to stay. “I think it’s a mistake. There’s plenty of room here for you and Tim,” Robert would tell Michael. “If you wish to leave, I’m not going to hold you back. I’ll support you a hundred percent, but I think it’s a mistake.”
Yet, at the same time, Robert showed remarkable sensitivity to the plight of other wine families struggling with some of the same issues he had as a younger man. In 1986, for instance, when the third-generation vintner Sam Sebastiani was fired by his mother from the family winery, Robert dispatched Michael to Sonoma to try to prevent him from making the same mistakes he had made with Rosa and Peter. And later in his life, Robert would take responsibility for the unhappy work environment he’d created. Robert’s philosophy had been to speak his mind about the faults and problems he saw around him. At the time, he justified that approach by weighing it against the alternative of backstabbing. But later on, he realized he’d made a serious mistake by being so blunt in group meetings, pointing out faults and upbraiding the person responsible, even if it was one or both of his sons.
“I was unaware, at the time, of what I now call the humiliation factor,” Robert wrote in his autobiography, explaining that he didn’t realize that if he was going to give one of his employees a dressing-down, he ought to have done it privately. Instead, he humiliated them publicly and made them lose face with their colleagues and staffers. “For many years, I was totally blind to all this. And it caused Mike and Tim enormous pain and anguish, sometimes to the point where they were on the verge of leaving the company.”