The legal endgame played out with cold dispassion in a Napa courtroom a few days before Christmas. The Mondavi loyalists clung to one last hope: a court challenge to block the takeover. On Monday, December 20, a group of plaintiffs’ attorneys, representing Connecticut-based Bamboo Partners and other Class A shareholders in Mondavi Corporation, sought an injunction to halt the sale, which was set to be finalized two days later. The plaintiffs’ attorneys huddled together outside Courtroom E of the courthouse of Napa Superior Court, a modern cube of a building that activists decried for blocking views of the Napa River.
Frank Gregorek, Bamboo’s tightly wound general counsel, led the lawyers who sought to block the sale. Their opponents were a group of highly paid attorneys from some of the nation’s leading law firms, charged with defending Mondavi’s corporate officers and Constellation and allowing the sale to go through.
The two sides had plenty of time to look each other over. Although the hearing was scheduled for nine A.M., the Honorable W. Scott Snowden, the presiding judge of the Napa Superior Court, kept the two sides waiting outside the courtroom for nearly an hour and a half because of a crowded calendar. Dark-suited lawyers whose billing rates hovered at $500 an hour or more paced the floor outside a courtroom that was normally used to hear cases involving burglaries, car theft, drug offences, and spousal abuse.
In the weeks leading up to this hearing, the plaintiffs’ attorneys had jetted between New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Napa, deposing Mondavi’s directors. Their goal was to gather enough evidence to support their contention that the interests of the small shareholders in the Robert Mondavi Corporation had been ignored by the directors, who instead had sold out on terms favorable to the Class B shareholders of the Mondavi family.
For Napa Valley, which had never before experienced a billion-dollar-plus takeover, the stakes were enormous. If the judge granted the injunction that the plaintiffs were asking for, it was unclear what would happen next. The deal could be scuttled, sinking Mondavi’s stock. By halting or preventing the takeover, its opponents could save, at least temporarily, several hundred jobs that were slated to be eliminated under Constellation’s ownership. And if the plaintiffs were able to present convincing evidence the board had indeed acted unfairly toward Mondavi’s minority shareholders, it was likely that Hall, Greer, and other board members might be drawn into a lengthy court brawl—something that they hoped to avoid.
Judge Snowden finally called the combatants into his courtroom. Jeff Westerman, representing Bamboo Partners, wasted no time. Mondavi’s sale to Constellation, he argued, was a “self-dealing transaction” on the part of the board in which “no one was looking out for the interests of the A shareholders.” He then suggested a less draconian option: allowing the sale to proceed, but putting the $50 million difference in the price paid to the A and B shareholders into a trust.
Frank Gregorek, from Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman and Herz LLP, then followed up, reading to the judge Philip Greer’s deposition, taken on Friday morning in San Francisco, just three days before the hearing. When asked whether he was looking out for the interests of the minority shareholders, Greer had answered, “I personally never thought, ‘I’m a representative of the A’s here and I want to get as much as I can for the A’s.’” Greer said, “I just wanted to do a deal.”
If this was intended to be the “smoking gun” that the plaintiffs’ attorneys had hoped for, it was not an effective one. Likewise, Gregorek also argued that the board and the bankers on the deal were riddled with conflict of interest. Specifically, he mentioned Ted Hall’s scheduled bonus of $2.5 million if the deal closed, suggesting that Hall was motivated by the prospect of personal financial gain. Judge Snowden, who had a skeptical look on his face, was not swayed.
After a short break, Amelia Starr rose to argue Robert Mondavi Corporation and Constellation’s case. A partner with the prestigious firm of Davis, Polk and Wardwell, Starr rapidly focused on the realpolitiks of the situation. She said Mondavi’s proxy solicitation firm had informed her that as of two-thirty Eastern Time that afternoon, the vast majority of the Class A shareholders who had already voted were in favor of the deal—with only about fifty thousand shares, or one-half a percentage of the total shares outstanding, voting against it.
She also delivered what might have been read as a veiled threat: If there were a material event, such as an injunction, blocking the sale, Constellation could walk away from the deal: Neither the A nor the B shareholders would get their premium. Not only that, she continued, but the price of Mondavi stock might tank on the news of the court’s decision. And, in a final, understated tone, she managed to undercut the credibility of the lead plaintiff in the case, referring to Bamboo Partners as “professional plaintiffs” with just one hundred shares of Mondavi stock, and which had sued companies fifteen times in the past year. Constellation’s lawyer weighed in, too, noting that the New York–based company was “ready, willing, and able to write a check for the 99.999 percent of the shares of Mondavi not represented in this courtroom. We are ready to do that this week. And as Ms. Starr has pointed out, an auction has been conducted…and the vote is running a hundred to one in favor of the transaction.”
Judge Snowden called a short break. Upon returning to the courtroom he delivered the news to the lawyers, executives, and journalists who had gathered there: He would not block the deal. But the judge refused to throw out all the claims, which meant that the case would still hang over the deal and consume time and resources.
Less than forty-eight hours later, as thick mist swirled through the canyons of San Francisco’s financial district, small groups of people headed for the last annual meeting of the Robert Mondavi Corporation. Since it was December 22, just three days before Christmas, many office workers had taken the week off. But the decision to hold the gathering at the Omni Hotel—fifty-eight miles away from Oakville—at eight-thirty A.M., was a deliberate choice on the part of Ted Hall to minimize attendance after the company received several threats. The strategy worked: Only a fraction of the company’s shareholders turned up to witness the last hours of the Robert Mondavi Corporation as an independent company.
The meeting was held in a large, cheerless ballroom. Not a single member of the Mondavi family came. Between shareholders, advisors, and company executives, perhaps fifty people gathered in a room that had been set up to accommodate three hundred. Armed security guards were posted at the front of the room. Two artificial Christmas trees were mournfully tucked into the back corners of the room. The Mondavi family had shunned the meeting because they abhorred the very thought of being in the same room as Hall and Evans. Greer, who attended, felt as if he were at a funeral.
Promptly at eight-thirty A.M., Evans rose to the podium set at the front of the ballroom and, reading from a script, laid out the meeting’s agenda. His clipped presentation lasted less than fifteen minutes. Toward the end, looking uncomfortably around the room, he asked the small group of shareholders if there were any questions. One asked Greg Evans to comment on reports of further layoffs among winery workers and asked whether some of the longtime employees who had been let go might be hired back. Evans declined to comment.
The rest of the meeting’s agenda was completed and Evans announced that more than 80 percent of the votes cast by the Class A shareholders and 94 percent of the votes cast by the Class B shareholders favored the sale of the company to Constellation. With that cold tally, the battle that had gripped Napa Valley and the wine world for the past four months came to an end.
As he stood in front of the ornate entrance of the Omni Hotel, Evans cut a solitary figure. For most of his working life, he and his family had woven their lives into the fabric of the valley, as well as into the extended Mondavi family. For him, the meeting meant the end of a long career with California’s most famous wine producer. When he returned home that day to Napa Valley, he knew he was being blamed by some members of the Mondavi family and some Mondavi alumni for what they considered a hostile takeover. Not only had Evans lost his job as CEO of the most famous company in the valley; he and his wife, Anne, a local writer, also faced the prospect of continuing to live in a place where he would be shadowed for his role in the takeover.
Unlike Hall, who had been awarded a $2.5 million bonus for his work as non-executive chairman in 2004, Evans’s even heftier payoff helped compensate him for the painful months and years of grappling with Michael and Timothy. He received a salary of some $562,000 and a bonus of less than one-tenth of what Ted Hall had received—getting a relatively meager $156,000 for his efforts in 2004. But unlike Hall, Evans had built up a sizable stock holding in the company over the years. His 218,709 shares, which included options, were worth $12.35 million before subtracting out the options’ strike price. As Evans waited on the sidewalk for his car to be retrieved by the valet, Ted Hall’s had been returned—a Mercedes 550 sedan with the license plate LMR WINE—short for “Long Meadow Ranch Wine.” Ted Hall flew down California Street in his snazzy sedan as Greg Evans stared pensively down at his overnight case on rollers.
The rainy season in early 2005 was unusually long, with days of unceasing gray. Even the bright, regenerative bloom of yellow mustard, normally such a welcome sight between the bare vines in February and March, seemed damply muted. The energy and creativity that had infused the Robert Mondavi Winery for so many years was seeping away as Constellation laid off hundreds of longtime Mondavi employees. Those who remained girded themselves for the next round of cuts.
A debate had begun over whether Highway 29, the artery that sliced the valley lengthwise from south to north, should be dedicated to the Robert Mondavi Winery. For advocates of the idea such as state senator Wesley Chesbro, supported by Robert’s longtime lobbyist Herb Schmidt, the idea backfired in the worst possible way. Not only did several wine trade groups give it the cold shoulder, but the proposal sparked angry letters and editorials, most notably one from Michael Dunsford, Calistoga City Council member, in The St. Helena Star, explaining why the council unanimously voted down the idea.
“Calistogans have great admiration for Bob Mondavi,” wrote Dunsford. “However, we must not forget that Robert Mondavi now represents big business and is now a corporate icon. His winery recently sold for $1.3 billion. That’s billion with a B…. It is the small family wineries that are now the treasures of the Napa Valley and they should not be overshadowed. God Bless Bob Mondavi, but let’s not Disneyfy the Napa Valley and turn it into Mondaviland.”
Dunsford’s prickly comments came on top of an even more searing public criticism of Robert Mondavi and the wine empire he’d built. The film director Jonathan Nossiter, whose other credits were Signs and Wonders and Sunday, had decided to explore the subject of globalization through the lens of the wine industry in a film called Mondovino. In part because of Mondavi’s well-publicized retreat from Languedoc, he cast the Robert Mondavi Corporation as one of the primary villains, portraying it as a corporate imperialist, intent on spreading mediocre wine around the world.
In the poorly lit interview with Michael, shot in the newly refurbished To Kalon barrel room, Michael jokes about expanding Mondavi’s sales not only around the globe but into outer space, in comments that reinforce the film’s point of view about the superficiality and commercialism of corporate wine producers. “Ten, fifteen generations from now it would be great to see our heirs producing some wine on some other planets,” Michael chuckles to the filmmaker while he’s being filmed. “That could be kind of cool. Beam me up, Scotty, send me some wine from Mars or something.”
Margrit and Robert had long felt pleasure on passing through the archway of the Oakville winery. But in recent months, that feeling had been replaced by a sense of edginess and dread. They rode an elevator up a floor and made their way into the thickly carpeted executive wing of the Oakville winery, passing one empty cubicle after another until they reached their side-by-side offices, guarded by secretaries who had survived the corporate putsch. They were stepping onto hostile turf from which so many of their old friends and employees had been banished.
The winery’s head, Jean-Michel Valette, continued to occupy his nearby office under Constellation’s ownership. Tia Butts, a Mondavi employee who had handled public relations for the Woodbridge brand and won a significant promotion in the aftermath of the layoffs, had been moved a few doors away. Chief among her many responsibilities was minding Robert and Margrit.
The couple had signed employment contracts with Constellation specifying that they would continue serving as ambassadors for the Robert Mondavi brand. That meant they would appear at public functions and hospitality events at the winery. But there was no doubt on either side that the arrangement was an uncomfortable one.
To make matters worse, it was growing increasingly difficult for Robert to play the ambassadorial role he had performed so masterfully for so many years. His hearing had deteriorated, and by March, some longtime friends had begun to realize his mental acuity was slipping even further. On bad days, he was having trouble expressing complex thoughts and seemed unable to follow the thread of a conversation. Timothy suspected his father had suffered a series of small strokes. Margrit worked hard to draw her husband out of the isolation imposed by his hearing problem, particularly in front of Butts and other Constellation representatives. But following a painful and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at an interview with a journalist, Margrit realized that the time had come to limit his public appearances to situations where he was only obliged to shake hands and say a few words.
Despite these concerns, Robert’s grandson Carlo brought a group of Asian visitors to meet his grandfather on February 19, 2004. A few months earlier, Carlo had detailed his wine family lineage on a private offering memorandum to raise money for the luxury skin-care company he had founded, Davi Skin Inc. Issued on November 1, 2004, just days before Constellation entered into an agreement to acquire the Robert Mondavi Corporation, the memorandum sought to raise $10 million. One of the selling points for the stock was that Robert, Timothy, and Michael were all listed on the company’s executive advisory board, assisting Carlo, who was then just twenty-four years old, and the company’s other officers to make “certain high level planning decisions.”
A strapping six-foot-two snowboard champ, Carlo had founded the company in 2003. His partner in the company was his friend Josh LeVine, a fellow snowboarder who, like Carlo, had also gone pro for a time. Together, Carlo, LeVine, and the CEO they hired merged Davi Skin with a publicly traded Nevada shell company called MW Medical, in June 2004. Davi Skin became a penny stock.
Based in an office suite in Beverly Hills and incorporated in Nevada, the company had no products and its chairman, Carlo, had no experience in manufacturing or selling skin-care products. Nor did he have a college degree. But Carlo did have one big advantage: the Mondavi name. Although the company had yet to sell a single product, it did have a beautifully constructed Web site, with soft music, burgundy tones, and a crest, suggesting Carlo Cesare Mondavi’s place as a member of America’s leading wine dynasty. The site also featured a black-and-white photo of Carlo sitting next to Robert, both holding glasses of red wine, that had been taken a year earlier at Opus One. Extolling the Mondavi family’s long history in winemaking, the site included both Robert’s and his grandson’s signatures.
So when Carlo brought a group of potential investors to the Napa Valley that February, they had every reason to expect to meet Carlo’s family. And they did, enjoying a private dinner with Robert and Margrit at their Wappo Hill home, as well as a tour of the Robert Mondavi Winery and Opus One, which Carlo seemed to imply the family still owned and operated, which, of course, it didn’t. Timothy joined his son and the group for a meal at the expensive restaurant Auberge du Soleil, perched on a hillside in Rutherford. During that grand tour, one of the potential investors, Takahiro Tashio, allegedly came to understand that Carlo had promised him that he could become a distributor for Opus One wines in Japan and also that Timothy and Robert were investing significant amounts of money in Carlo’s business. Tashio, who speaks no English, relied on others in the group to translate for him. But he ended up investing about $965,000 in Davi Skin stock, apparently believing that the company had signed contracts for the rights to use the pomace from the Robert Mondavi Winery and Opus One. As a parting gift, Carlo offered the investors bottles of wine signed by Mondavi family members.
Some members of the Mondavi family, as well as Greg Evans and Mondavi’s general counsel Michael K. Byers, had grown alarmed by Carlo’s expansive business plans well before that visit. Byers warned Carlo several times and Ted Hall and the rest of the board were briefed on Carlo’s plans, as well as the steps that had been taken to rein him in. Although his charisma, good looks, and entrepreneurial energy resembled those of Robert in his younger days, Carlo was also naive. Timothy warned him about using Robert’s name in promoting his company, particularly because the Robert Mondavi brand name had belonged to Constellation since December 2004. What also bothered Timothy was that at least one of Carlo’s business ideas, a Robert Mondavi–branded line of stemware, seemed the kind of overuse of the Robert Mondavi name he’d fought so hard against over the years.
Other members of the family were even more worried. Marcia warned Margrit, “If Carlo asks you to invest, don’t do it!” Neither Robert nor Timothy invested in Davi Skin. Michael didn’t, either, and he later told his nephew he did not want to serve as a figurehead on Davi Skin’s executive advisory board, especially since they hadn’t talked to each other in over a year. Michael thought highly of his nephew, but also felt that his naïveté made him vulnerable to unscrupulous people who would suck him dry.
The bleakness of that time was finally relieved by a week-long showering of awards and praise on Robert in April. By this time, workers had mowed the mustard in anticipation of bud break—the first sign of life from the bare vines. The Mondavis’ own resurgence kicked off with a trip to New York, where Robert was one of six Americans honored by the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation as a distinguished descendant of immigrants. Having made it on that trip was in itself a bit of a triumph. A few weeks earlier, he’d been hospitalized briefly for mild pneumonia. Timothy had been worried and called Michael, urging him to come visit his father in the hospital. Michael didn’t go, since he was traveling. And before that, he’d had a mishap during a session with his personal trainer. He’d accidentally gone into the swimming pool at his home while wearing his hearing aids. The result was that these tiny yet crucial electronic devices shorted out.
While a seemingly minor inconvenience, the loaner hearing aids he tolerated for some weeks severely limited his ability to communicate with almost anyone except Margrit. To everyone’s relief, by the time of the Ellis Island event, his own hearing aids had been fixed and returned to him. With Timothy and four of his children looking on, as well as Marcia, and longtime friend Warren Winiarski, Robert was presented with a framed copy of the original ship’s passenger manifest, documenting the arrival of his father in New York aboard the Vaderland. Some sense of the stature this winemaker had reached could be measured in the other honorees that day: General Colin Powell, Astronaut Scott Parazynski, and Nobel Prize–winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
A few days later, the French ambassador to the U.S. gave Robert one of the most coveted honors in the world: the medal of the Légion d’honneur. Established in 1802 by Napoléon Bonaparte, the French government has conferred the medal on only a few U.S. honorees, including the late president Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, and David Rockefeller. Robert’s ceremony took place closer to home, so that many more of the Mondavi family’s friends could attend. Those lucky enough to be invited to the Sunday afternoon event at Opus One had received an invitation with one of Margrit’s watercolors, featuring a playful cherub waving an American flag in one hand and a French flag in the other. Jointly hosted by the French embassy and the Franco-Californian winery, the ceremony and reception were to have been held outside on Opus One’s grassy outer forecourt, ringed by mature olive trees.
The overcast weather didn’t cooperate, so the event was moved to a utilitarian mezzanine, with cinder block walls and a resin-based floor. Two soaring arrangements of red roses, white snowbells, and blue delphinium, set against a dramatic spray of magnolia leaves, provided relief from the room’s industrial feel, as did the U.S., California, French, and EU flags hanging on the walls. A pair of sliding doors, large enough for equipment and pallets of grapes to pass through once they’d been hoisted up to the mezzanine floor, opened to a view of Opus One’s Cabernet vines, which were just beginning to sprout tiny green leaves, flecked delicately with pink at their tips. In front of the view, facing the rows of seated guests, sat a pair of eighteenth-century French theater chairs. They twinkled with their recent regilting and were upholstered in a French drawing-room fabric; they looked like nothing less than thrones.
Most guests had arrived by three P.M. when Robert arrived, arm in arm with Marcia. Slightly hunched over and walking unsteadily, he looked shockingly small as he leaned against her for support. A glow of good spirits infused him, and Robert’s dapper pink silk tie suggested a man who, despite his age, was meticulously cared for. Over the past difficult months, Robert had come to rely on Margrit even more heavily. Yet, Marcia made the crucial entrance with her father, quickly guiding him to his seat at the front of the room, with his back to the open doorway and the mountains.
After making sure he was comfortably seated, Marcia then began to work the crowd. Looking businesslike in an understated dark pantsuit with a large pink flower in her lapel, her dark hair cut casually in a becoming style that brushed her jawline, she reached over to clasp the hands of friends who were seated already and beamed at others who were too far to touch. She was assuming the role that Michael had long played as polished ambassador for the family and the winery.
Ten minutes passed and the guests started to grow restless, whispering to one another over what could have caused the delay. Timothy and the French delegation still hadn’t arrived. Timothy’s first wife, Dorothy, waited patiently in a seat on the aisle, about halfway back, and most of their five children were there to witness the honor to be bestowed on their grandfather. Carlo, in particular, stayed close to Robert. While the room quietly buzzed, it was difficult to ignore the empty front rows. They had been reserved for the French guests, as simultaneous-translation earphones rested on the seats. A few more minutes ticked by and Marcia made her way to the back and engaged the PR representatives in intense conversation, not hiding her exasperation.
Finally, about twenty minutes late, Timothy and the French delegation arrived. After their lunch in the Vineyard Room, the younger Mondavi son had led the delegation on a tour of the winery. They settled into their seats and David Pearson, Opus’s CEO, rose to address the room at the podium. He thanked the French for coming and announced the honored guests—the French ambassador, the French consul general in San Francisco, five members of the French Senate, and members of the Mondavi family.
Then he noted who wasn’t there—most conspicuously, the Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, who he reported was “distraught” at not being able to attend the event because of a previous commitment. Ironically, that commitment, he revealed, was a meeting of the Primum Familiae Vini, the “first families of wine,” which was taking place in Moscow that weekend. Robert’s old friend Piero Antinori had also declined the invitation for the same reason. Sadly, the Mondavis had been forced to resign from Primum Familiae Vini once they sold out to Constellation. If Robert had understood the nature of the baronness’s other commitment, it surely would have been a bittersweet reminder of what his family had lost by selling out.
Timothy, wearing dark-framed tinted glasses and a sleekly tailored gray suit, rose to speak. Reading from prepared remarks in a high, slightly nasal voice, he stumbled over a quote from the wine writer Hugh Johnson. Unlike David Pearson’s, Timothy’s presentation was less fluid. But his sincerity was evident and his remarks heartfelt. His emergence from Michael’s shadow was welcomed that day by Robert and Margrit’s friends, who’d watched Michael in the role of the heir apparent for many years. On this, one of the peak moments in Robert’s life, Timothy was there to support his father.
The French ambassador, in turn, spoke in heavily accented English and praised Robert and his role in this French-Californian joint venture. He referred to Thomas Jefferson’s penchant for French wine and expressed gratitude for Robert’s efforts, including “the use of French oak wine barrels. Thank you!” he said, as the crowd chuckled. “We are appreciative of this smart move.” Several times, he remarked that President Jacques Chirac himself had been intent on making sure that Robert should receive this honor. Then, amid all this goodwill, the ambassador made a faux pas that raised eyebrows. “We are deeply appreciative to your family—to your son and daughter and most particularly to your wife, Margrit Biever Mondavi.”
Unintentionally, the ambassador had erased Michael from the Mondavi family in his remarks. During the cocktail chatter at the reception afterward, many guests quietly noted that Michael was absent from the ceremony that had conferred international recognition and great honor upon his father. The official explanation was that Michael was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict. But the truth was that Michael didn’t feel like putting himself through the potentially humiliating exercise of making small talk with his father and Margrit’s friends as if nothing had happened. The Peter Mondavi family had also been invited and they, too, had chosen not to come.
Margrit took the seat of honor next to Robert where Marcia had been sitting. Robert stood up and took a few steps toward the center. With Timothy standing alongside him, the French ambassador pinned the gold medal, hung on red ribbon, to the left side of Robert’s chest, just above his heart. Margrit captured the moment with a small camera. Robert then moved to the podium and said, “God bless all of you…. Very emotional. It’s a wonderful thing for two countries such as France and America to work in harmony with each other.”
Momentarily confused, Robert looked around and asked, “Where are you?”—searching for the ambassador, who was to his left.
“Oh, there you are,” he said, when he caught sight of him.
It was a lighthearted moment and the guests smiled. Robert continued reading and then slowed for a moment. Timothy pointed to the medal on his chest as a way to jog his memory that the subject at hand was the medal, and Robert continued, noting that he felt optimistic, particularly “to work in harmony, for a change, instead of fight.”
The crowd rose and began to applaud. The cinder block walls and hard floor amplified the clapping. Then, a five-piece woodwind group began playing the U.S. national anthem, followed by the French national anthem, which elicited another round of applause. Waiters emerged with trays of Riedel Vinum stemware, containing dark red pools of Opus One, as well as more of the champagne. Tray after tray of delicacies appeared: pan-seared wild salmon brushed with white truffle oil, Ahi tuna on lotus root chips, Maine lobster salad served on purple Peruvian potatoes, and duck confit with essence of thyme baked in puff pastry.
Forgoing the appetizers and the alcohol, Richard Sands, the chairman of Constellation Brands, left as soon as he could. That Sunday, he was in the thick of negotiating his company’s next possible deal—a joint effort by Constellation and several partners to top a $14 billion acquisition of the British drinks giant Allied Domecq. Waiting for his car to take him back to the airport, he clutched a phone to his ear. To make sure none of the other guests waiting for the valets to deliver his car could overhear him, he retreated down a dirt row, between trellised vines. His young nephew waited on the curb. Staying to mingle was not his top priority that day.
Two days later, Robert Mondavi arrived at the imposing Victorian mansion occupied by the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, where many of the valley’s most powerful vintners would gather to pay tribute that evening to his six extraordinary decades in Napa Valley.
With his bright red Légion d’honneur medal pinned to his chest, Robert arrived shortly before five-thirty P.M. and hobbled into the small elevator up to the second floor. On the floor above him, facing down into the stairwell, a squat gentleman with an Old World face played the theme from The Godfather on his accordion.
Its effect was to deepen the pathos of the moment. By having sold out, Robert Mondavi was no longer, strictly speaking, a vintner—a change that the Peter Mondavi side of the family were not averse to mentioning publicly on more than one occasion. Under the vintners’ group’s rules, he was no longer eligible to be a member, though in recognition of his many years of service, the group named him a “member emeritus.” Still, Robert was painfully aware that for the first time in more than six decades, he was not making wine. With his failing health, the vintners were aware this could be the last time they would see their old friend.
Robert entered the dark, echoing reception room, where the vintners had held their banquets and meetings for many years. Votive candles on round tables provided flickering light. The wooden-beamed ceiling and stone walls conveyed an atmosphere of intimacy, despite the hall’s capacity to hold hundreds of people. Only winery owners were welcome, not their employees. Each had been asked to contribute a magnum of wine to the evening and some wonderful wines did indeed appear—such as an older vintage from the famed Martha’s Vineyard. The Mondavis also contributed two magnums of 1994 Fumé Blanc Reserve. Since all members were invited, Ted Hall and his wife, Laddie, were on the list, whether the Mondavis wanted them there or not.
One of the first to arrive was Robert’s younger brother, Peter Mondavi. Upright and far more mobile than his older sibling, Peter, like Cesare before him, was a short-statured, unassuming man. He stayed to the sides of the room, lifting the small, elegant bowls of Thai crab soup to his lips and gulping it all at one time, as if he were drinking a shot of espresso. Meanwhile, Robert had made his way to the front of the room, where a long sofa had been placed on a low platform, with a backdrop of draped peach curtains in the background, softening the scene, which had been framed on either side by towering arrangements of white flowers. The gathering seemed mournful, as if all the life had been drawn out of it. Two hundred vintners were expected but far fewer actually showed up, leaving delicate fans of escarole leaves uneaten and dozens of bottles of rare wines unopened.
Robert sat as vintners slowly made their way up to grasp his hand and say hello. As his nephew Peter Ventura approached to pay his respects to his uncle, he said, “Hey, Bob, do we kiss your ring now? Should we be kneeling and kissing your ring?” Robert didn’t seem to comprehend his nephew’s barbed comment, the result of decades of resentment and bitterness stemming from the 1976 trial.
When it came time for the current president of the Napa Valley Vintners to make a brief speech and presentation, Margrit guided her husband to the sofa. None of the organizers even bothered offering an explanation for Michael’s absence. Peter Mondavi left soon after the president of the vintners had made his speech and the family photographs were taken.
H. William Harlan made a late appearance, missing the presentation but arriving in time to pay his respects to Robert and Margrit before leaving. In recent years, Harlan had quietly hired many of the talented employees who had been discarded by Michael’s regime at the winery: The label designer Susan Pate had designed all of the classic, banknote-style etched labels on Harlan’s wines; the wine historian Nina Wemyss helped conduct classes for one of his ventures; Robin Daniel Lail even worked for Harlan for some time. As one of the contenders to inherit Robert’s role in the valley, Harlan had come to pay his respects to its fading king. He’d been pondering the question of family dynasties for many years and had watched carefully as Robert Mondavi’s dream of passing his wine empire to his children unraveled.