The Napa Valley Wine Auction celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary the same weekend the grapevines bloomed. Inconspicuous greenish-white sprays delicately encircled the vines’ tendrils, producing a shimmering fragrance that could be caught for just a moment before floating away. From Highway 29, big bidders riding in limousines couldn’t see the flowers tucked discreetly beneath the vines’ dark-green foliage. This vital transformation of bud to bloom took place largely out of sight. Not so the violent changes in the Mondavis’ lives. Six months after Napa’s first family sold out of their namesake winery, the weekend was a chance to set aside their differences and present a united front.
An exception to this was Michael. On paper, he was one of the auction’s twenty-four cochairs. But in reality, he did not attend any of the planning meetings and had no intention of attending the auction itself, almost certainly because his stepmother and father were so prominently involved. Relieved to be free of the family obligations that had yoked him for years, Michael had dropped out of the public eye. He planned to spend the auction weekend ensconced with his campmates at the Bohemian Grove, a private, 2,700-acre forest sixty miles north of San Francisco.
But through the intervention of his old friend Fred Franzia, Michael had quietly begun to make peace with his father. “For Christ’s sake, he’s your dad,” Franzia had scolded him at their annual Deer Camp gathering the previous August. “You just got to make a move. You only got one father. He may not live that long. When you look back on it, in a few months or a few years, it won’t mean a damn thing.” For the first time in many years, Robert had not made it up to Deer Camp that year. But Rob did, and Franzia also said the same thing to Michael’s son. “You of all guys shouldn’t carry any grudge against your grandpa,” Franzia told him.
As the months passed and his health worsened, Robert grew anxious to try to reconcile with Michael. He appealed for help to Franzia, who called Michael that spring with an important message: “Your dad wants to see you and tell you he loves you.” Michael made his way up the long, windy road to his father’s home on Wappo Hill. He’d made sure to come at a time when he knew Margrit wouldn’t be there. Sitting inside, next to the indoor pool, father and son made small talk and discussed Michael’s new business. When it came time to leave, Robert thanked Michael for coming and they gave each other a hug. “I love you,” Robert told him. “I love you too,” his son replied.
Despite these loving words, their estrangement continued. Michael withdrew from most public events involving the winery and Timothy slipped comfortably into the role of Robert’s fair-haired son. He was solicitous of Robert, helping him into and out of his seat, adjusting his clothing for him, helping explain what was going on. His son Carlo was also at his grandfather’s side during this time. At Wine Spectator’s annual wine auction kickoff party at the famed valley watering hole Tra Vigne, on Wednesday night, June 1, Timothy spotted Michael from across the room and approached him, pointing out that their father was also there. He urged his brother to say hello to Robert. Michael approached his father, who was sitting in a wheelchair, briefly said hello, then quickly returned to the party.
Behind the scenes, Timothy proved willing to go along with a plan to restore his family’s reputation, volunteering as the Robert Mondavi family’s face for a public reconciliation with the Peter Mondavi family. Built around the first barrel of wine to be jointly produced by the families in forty years, it was an event staged to coincide with the Napa Valley Vintners’ charity wine auction in June. The recent push for a family reconciliation came from Serena Ventura, another cousin. After the death of her mother, Helen Ventura, in 2003 and of her aunt Mary Westbrook in 2004, Serena actively sought to bring her extended family back together. Having just completed a master of fine arts degree in writing at the University of San Francisco, Ventura had retained a literary agent who was actively pitching her memoir of the Mondavis, based on her UCSF dissertation, to publishers in New York.
The news became a public relations coup for the Mondavis. When veteran New York Times wine columnist Frank Prial wrote the first article in January of 2005 about the plan for the Robert and Peter Mondavi families to jointly produce a barrel of wine, it attracted a rush of media attention. National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and a host of local publications followed the Times’s story. But people close to the respective Mondavi families were guarded as to how genuine the reconciliation really was. Margrit detected a hint of Schadenfreude in Peter and his family’s sudden change of heart toward reconciling after the Robert Mondavi family’s setbacks. It did not go unnoticed that Peter, after a lifetime in Robert’s shadow, had succeeded where his brother had failed: in holding together Charles Krug as a family-owned operation. Yet Peter’s family also had its difficulties.
Since the stinging judgment against Peter from Judge Carter in 1976, Charles Krug had periodically struggled financially, with the bulk of its revenues coming from low-priced wines. The fractious dynamic between Peter senior, Marc, and Peter junior sometimes delayed decision making; the makeshift sign at the front of Charles Krug wasn’t replaced quickly and vineyard replanting was overdue. Similarly, Marc and Peter junior had moved off the Krug Ranch, where they’d lived for decades. The family tattle was that they moved because Blanche wouldn’t tether her dog to keep him from frightening Marc’s four daughters, but Marc says it was time to move from a 2,300-square-foot house on the ranch to a more spacious place of their own.
The previous attempt to reconcile Peter senior and Robert two decades earlier, orchestrated over a dinner at a luxurious hillside resort in Rutherford, never really took hold. The jet-setting Robert Mon-dah-vi family, it seemed, moved in a different world from the stay-at-home Peter Mon-day-vee family. But by the early nineties, the Peter Mondavi side of the family, too, began pronouncing its surname in the European fashion. At least the linguistic rift had ended.
Over the years, Michael had suggested that the two families produce wine together, but Peter senior was reluctant to partner with a publicly traded company. Once Robert’s side of the family sold out, however, Peter senior’s objections vanished. This time, the reconciliation was not only a way for Robert’s side of the family to regain face and for Peter’s side to get attention as it began to focus on its higher-end Charles Krug wines. It was also a marketing boon to the Napa Valley auction, as the event had been renamed that year. In the catalog, the jointly produced barrel of 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon was presented as a sign that “their brotherly bond is strong again,” signaling “the dedication and commitment that the entire family of four generations shares in making and keeping Napa Valley paramount among wine growing regions.”
Robert’s longtime PR man, Harvey Posert, who handled the publicity for the lot, wrote a press release that called it “a joyful chapter in the history of the Mondavis of Napa Valley.” Named “Ancora Una Volta,” Italian for “one more time,” the lot included sixty numbered, etched magnums and three social events with the Mondavi families to taste the wine as it developed. It was widely expected to command the highest price of any lot at the vintners’ live auction on June 4.
The Napa Valley Vintners, in turn, embraced the publicity stunt. It had been looking for a way to add sizzle to an event that had been suffering a malaise over the past few years. Founded in 1981, the vintners’ auction had long been a key event on the social calendar, where moneyed oenophiles, celebrity chefs, and Hollywood stars descended on California’s most famous wine region for three or four days in June. The success of Napa’s event, long the grande dame of charity wine auctions, had inspired hundreds of similar auctions all around the country, from fund-raisers for preschools to black-tie balls.
But over the past two years, Napa’s event had been upstaged by a rival charity auction in Naples, Florida—a city built partly on reclaimed swamp in a state not known for its viticulture. In 2004, the Naples Winter Wine Festival had trumpeted itself as the world’s biggest charity wine auction after raising more money than Napa’s auction for the first time: $7.67 million, compared with Napa’s $5.3 million. The following year, Naples held the single most successful charity wine auction in history, raising $11.1 million from a relatively small group of 312 bidders, with each lot averaging over $160,000.
Recapturing its rightful role as the preeminent charity wine auction in America was a key goal for the Napa Valley Vintners. In addition to raising money for charity, the group’s unapologetic mission for the auction was for it to help market the valley as a wine lover’s Eden. It had long been a prestigious social event, costing $2,500 per couple to attend and drawing international media attention and celebrity bidders.
Taking a cue from Naples, Napa’s Vintners recast their entire auction—tossing out a Friday-night black-tie ball before the live auction, focusing instead on more intimate soirees that allowed bidders to mingle with vintners, even changing the name to Auction Napa Valley. They slashed the number of lots and radically truncated the live auction, which in the past had run more than six hours. And, in a risky gamble, they nearly tripled the admission price to $7,500 per couple.
The Napa organizers also hoped to regain their events’ sparkle by including glamorous lots. Not only was there the barrel jointly produced by the Mondavi families, but also four three-liter bottles of wine from Colgin Cellars accompanied by a dinner for eight prepared by the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller, and a bit part in the television show Desperate Housewives, which accompanied a lot from Frank Family Vineyards. By tripling the price tag of the main event and making the live portion more elite, Napa’s vintners aimed to lavish attention on the high rollers. In the past, everyone—including the billionaires—had lined up for buses at a winery on the valley floor to make the short trip to Meadowood. This year, chauffeur-driven sedans and limousines whizzed the big bidders from one event to another.
But fearing that the live auction would become strictly a “billionaire’s ball,” Napa’s organizers also opened up the less costly barrel auction to the wider public, complete with live entertainment and a ring toss for bottles of wine. Despite all the changes, ticket sales for the full weekend of events, including the live auction that raised most of the funds, were sluggish, forcing the vintners to cancel some events.
The hospitality event hosted by Mondavi on Thursday night had a lighthearted theme: an eighties party intended to capture the mood of the time when the first Napa Valley Auction had taken place. The Vineyard Room was transformed into a glitzy discotheque, with mirrored balls on the ceiling and tablecloths of metallic foil, like a glittering shagged carpet. The event was sparsely attended by bidders, who preferred instead to attend hospitality events hosted by cult wineries, such as Colgin Cellars and Harlan Estate. To save face, the winery at the last moment had invited employees and many nonbidding trade guests to fill out the numbers.
But the biggest difference at the Robert Mondavi Winery’s event was the commercialism that pervaded the evening. Booths had been erected on the patio outside the Vineyard Room to display the showy platinum and diamond creations of Beverly Hills jeweler Martin Katz. An array of sports cars, including an Aston Martin Vanquish S priced at $255,000, sat on the lawn. It was the first time the winery had entered into a sponsorship deal for its auction hospitality event, an idea hatched by the winery’s marketing team, many of whom had lost their jobs by the time of the party. Its partner was the Robb Report, a media company devoted to luxury goods and the lifestyles of the very rich. The winery had also paid to fly in a large funk band from North Carolina named Liquid Pleasure. Dressed in shiny red jumpsuits, the band kicked off their performance by leading the guests in a conga line around the Vineyard Room.
For old-timers, the weekend was a time to reflect on how much the valley and the wine auction had changed. The very first auction was a low-key and almost entirely local affair. Unlike the four-day extravaganza with a cast of thousands it has since become, the first event involved a bucolic al fresco luncheon with round tables tucked discreetly along the edge of the golf green, shaded by tall trees. Each tablecloth was a variation on the hues of the vineyards—with purples, greens, and whites—and lunch was served in baskets woven by volunteers out of grapevines and filled with local cheeses, pâtés, crusty breads, and salads. Purple balloons were bunched together to resemble clusters of grapes.
In each succeeding year, the event itself ballooned and the amounts raised for charity swelled. In 2000, just as the dot-com bubble burst, the bidding during the live auction reached hard-to-believe levels, even for Napa, raising a record-breaking $9.5 million—nearly double the previous year’s $5.5 million total. The top bid of the day for a single lot came from B. A. Adams of Patterson, Louisiana, who’d made his fortune in the oil and gas business. He bought ten one-and-a-half-liter bottles of Harlan Estate wine for $700,000, pricing out at about $7,000 per glass. Perhaps even more astonishing was tech executive Chase Bailey’s $500,000 bid for one six-liter bottle of 1992 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon—the most expensive bottle of wine ever purchased in any charity wine auction.
Outsiders may have missed it, but hundreds of Napans knew the history they were witnessing at the barrel auction on Friday as two very old, warring brothers sat together, holding each other’s hand. To stoke interest in the barrel of wine jointly produced by the Robert and Peter Mondavi families, the public relations staff of the Vintners had arranged a photo opportunity with the two elderly siblings, among the last of their generation still alive. The two men sat on a raised platform, surrounded by photographs of themselves. Some were black-and-white photos from their youth; others were more contemporary photos of them holding wineglasses. In one of the photographs, the boys—perhaps seven and eight years old at the time—wear shorts, knee socks, overcoats, and ties. Their hair is slicked back and precisely parted down the middle. Cesare stands between them. There’s a similar photo of the Mondavi sons with Rosa, taken in their late high school or early college years. Robert in this one wears a striped three-piece suit and tie; Peter, dressed more informally, has rolled up his shirtsleeves and is jacketless.
On this day, the brothers, both in their early nineties, sat patiently together. Photographers snapped pictures of them as the crowds attending the barrel auction milled past. Many people stopped to gaze in wonder at the scene and their responses ranged from those who were touched by the sight to others who felt it was a cynical ploy to stir interest in the lot. A few rival vintners questioned how dignified the public reconciliation really was. It appeared that the two men were being put on display simply to raise money. Robert, for his part, seemed to have little understanding of the events. Although some of the visitors tried to talk to him, they generally didn’t get very far. When a reporter asked Robert what had changed to bring the brothers back together, he answered with a single word: “Time.” For the most part, Robert sat on the podium and smiled. Peter, on the other hand, had all his wits about him and said more than a few words at that event. Truly it may have been one of the first times in their lives that Peter, as the younger brother, got the final word.
Saturday night’s live auction began with Jay Leno, the host of The Tonight Show, delivering rapid-fire jokes to warm up the crowd. “This is a performer’s dream,” he said early on. “Rich people who’ve been drinking.” Of the thousand people in the tent, only about three hundred were bidders. The rest were vintners, press, and guests. To first-timers, the seating arrangements in the big top might have seemed casual or even a bit chaotic. Officially, there were few reserved tables. But within the social order of the Napa Valley, the tables were as precisely choreographed as the dance steps at an eighteenth-century ball. The leading families of Napa—the Mondavis, the Davieses, the Martinis, and the Trincheros—all had tables staked out beforehand by stand-ins well before the other guests had arrived.
As well, the Napa Valley Vintners, the powerful winemakers group that organized the event, always made sure that the top bidders from the previous year had their choice of seats. Some preferred the back, which gave them a broader view of the action, while others preferred the front, closer to the auctioneers.
Robert and Margrit sat front and center, flanked on either side by family members. A longtime arts, wine, and society reporter for The Napa Valley Register, Pierce Carson, sat at the table in the front row next to the left Mondavis, while Peter Mondavi senior and his younger son, Peter junior, sat at the table immediately to the right. The Peter Mondavis were joined by H. William Harlan, an original partner in Meadowood who was now better known as the man behind Harlan Estate, the producer of expensive, small-production “cult” wines, and his wife, Deborah.
Margrit had made sure to get her husband settled in his seat early, before the crowd descended. She also made sure he had a large glass of red wine within easy reach throughout. A longtime Mondavi employee served as the sommelier and waiter to the two brothers’ tables, making sure that their trays of olives, prosciutto, Parmesan cheese, and crackers remained filled.
Timothy and his companion, the Argentinian-born winemaker Delia Viader, a cult winemaker in her own right, sat with Robert and Margrit, as did one of Tim’s daughters. As the clock ticked toward the opening bid, the high bidders were slipping into their seats. There was a frisson—a kind of force field of excitement—that formed around them. The auctioneers knew who they were, as did many of the leading vintners.
Toward the back was a table headed by Koo Ming-kown, founder of a Hong Kong–based company, Nam Tai Electronics Inc., a maker of calculators, cordless telephones, and other gadgets. Born in Shanghai and with operations in Hong Kong and British Columbia, Koo, sixty, had developed a taste for expensive wine. Over the years, he had regularly flown a group of Chinese friends into Napa for the long auction weekend. One of the auction’s consistently high bidders, Koo had, a year earlier, made a $100 million donation to the Hong Kong Baptist University—the single largest personal donation the university had ever received. The Vintners hoped he would be in a giving mood this year.
Another big bidder was Gary Rieschel, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had teamed up with Masayoshi Son and Ron Fisher at SoftBank Holdings, the powerful Tokyo software company, early in the Internet boom. As head of SoftBank’s Palo Alto–based venture capital affiliate, he’d made some early and smart bets on Internet winners like VeriSign and GeoCities Inc. Now renamed Mobius Venture Capital, his firm had some $2 billion under management as the auction began. The forty-nine-year-old Rieschel, too, had become an avid wine collector—and had cumulatively spent, by his estimate, $1.5 to $1.8 million at the Napa Valley auction in the eight years he’d attended. Rieschel had been wooed earlier that year by the Naples Winter Wine Festival. Assigned paddle number 1 in honor of his bidding record, he had remained loyal to Napa’s event, at least for now.
The bidding got off to a fast start, with a surprise entry of a replica of a custom-made cork jacket that Robert had worn at the first wine auction, in 1981. “Tonight we are going to auction off this jacket,” said Leno. “If you wanted to make one yourself it’d probably cost you twenty dollars.” The bidding jumped from $70,000 to $85,000. Settling at $95,000, the lot went to Koerner Rombauer, a burly vintner whose great aunt was the author of The Joy of Cooking. With an American flag shirt stretched across his sizable girth, Rombauer made his way to Robert’s table at the very front, leaned over, and kissed the nanogenarian on top of his head. Robert’s lower lip seemed to quiver, perhaps involuntarily, after he took off the jacket and passed it over to Rombauer, who then put it on. Timothy, sitting behind his father, had his hand laid gently on his father’s shoulder. Leno had literally sold the jacket off Robert’s back.
Another few lots rolled past, including the package from Frank Family Vineyards, which included an appearance on the hit ABC television series Desperate Housewives. To hawk the lot, actress Teri Hatcher, one of the stars of the series, climbed the podium to stir up interest. “Jay knows there’s a lot I will do for more money,” joked Hatcher, in a form-fitting dress and high heels. The bidding was so lively that Rich Frank, a top Disney executive and a vintner, and Hatcher decided to offer it to both the top and the second bidder, raising $580,000 in total.
Then came Lot 414, which the Vintners had billed as the sentimental favorite of the evening. “The biggest lot of the night should be for the wine of these two gentlemen,” said Leno, who ended up staying onstage well past his monologue in order to help out with the sale. The auctioneer was Ursula Hermancinski, a striking woman who was once dubbed “the goddess of the gavel” by Food & Wine magazine. She quipped that the brothers had engaged in “the most famous fistfight” in wine industry history, but now they were coming back together again. Hermancinski, who had worked as an auctioneer at Christie’s wine department in New York before diving into the world of dot-com auctions in 1998, was known for her sassy delivery and her delight in egging on bidders.
This time, Timothy pulled a face when she referred to the fistfight between his father and uncle. He mouthed a long “Oooh.” But the crowd loved it.
The bidding quickly soared to $130,000. Jay Leno, with his soufflé of gray hair and square jaw, looked slightly confused as it settled at $200,000 and paused. Clearly, he had expected it to go a lot higher. “Barbara Stanwyck is not in The Big Valley any longer. Hess is gone. These are the only two men left in The Big Valley,” he joked as he tried to urge bidders higher. It moved up to $225,000. Hermancinski teased Gary Rieschel, the big bidder who was sitting in the middle of the tent, to push it higher, referring to his family’s recent move to China. The price jumped to $300,000, and then even further to $360,000. Peter senior raised his arms in victory—stretching all of his five feet, six inches or so to full height. Unlike his older brother, whom Margrit had dressed elegantly for the evening, including pinning Robert’s Légion d’honneur medal to his dress shirt, Peter was dressed like the farmer he had been for six decades: in a plain, open-collared cotton shirt, ironed cotton trousers, and sensible tan shoes.
Jay Leno jumped in once again. “This is the most historically important barrel of wine to be made since 1966, when these guys used to be friends,” he said, eliciting even more guffaws. However corny, Leno’s prodding worked. A new bidder had suddenly leapt into the fray. A woman raised her paddle just as the bids seemed to languish. No one knew her. She was a first-time attendee at this or any other wine auction and she hadn’t really planned on bidding for the Mondavi family’s lot before she’d arrived. But she’d been moved by the brothers’ reuniting.
Heads turned toward her table, in a section set on risers toward the rear. Strikingly dressed in an orange silk skirt and beaded turquoise shawl, she kept her paddle raised. Goaded on by Leno, she moved the bid up, and up again, to $401,000. She had bought the Mondavi barrel. Leno couldn’t resist throwing in one final wisecrack about the lot before he ended his appearance for the night: “Hang on,” he warned. “The two brothers have started punching each other again!” Robert, who was trying to listen with the fierce intensity of the hard of hearing, hardly changed throughout, while Peter seemed to relish the attention. He made sure to get in a few words to the television reporter who was interviewing Pete junior and Timothy. Robert, in contrast, for once remained out of the media spotlight.
“It may sound kind of hokey,” said the winning bidder, Joy Craft, in a slow South Carolina drawl. “But it is as if I had an opportunity to sit with Albert Einstein or Ben Franklin. I saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to sit with two innovators,” said Craft. “Divine intervention took over” and urged her to share this special moment for another family.
Craft, who had moved to Woodside, California, and ran a family foundation, said she knew very little about the history of the brothers’ feud or about the fistfight that was joked about during the bidding. But she had made her first visit to a winery when she stopped at Charles Krug as a twenty-one-year-old who came from a family of teetotallers. Craft recalled that she had made her first trip to Napa Valley in the driving rain. She approached Krug and on an impulse decided to turn in. She remembered feeling lucky the winery’s visitors’ center was still open and brought a signed bottle of wine home with her. The bottle smashed in her suitcase. The way she saw it, she was “coming full circle” in again buying the jointly produced barrel from the Mondavis.
As the excitement surrounding the Mondavis died down, a parade of California’s most prominent vintners came to pay their respects to Robert and Peter. Francis Ford Coppola, who had used some of the fortune he’d made from his Godfather films to buy and restore the old Niebaum-Inglenook Estate, moved toward the old man and, like Rombauer, kissed him on the head. The billionaire vintner Jess Jackson likewise made his way to the Mondavi brothers’ tables. Always, they were especially courteous to Margrit, kissing her on one or both cheeks. Blanche, Peter’s wife, was absent that evening. For several years, she had been in poor health. Peter junior accompanied his father, wearing an elegant gold signet ring.
The final lot involving the Mondavis came toward the very end of the evening. Lot number 455, it was billed as a “Musical Summer Weekend for 10” and included a private dinner at Robert and Margrit’s hilltop home. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make a toast,” hailed the evening’s other auctioneer, Fritz Hatton. “I hope you all share this sentiment. To Margrit Mondavi: This is a sentimental wish to express to you. We raise our glass to your long-standing contributions…. Margrit, you are a treasure!” Hatton went on to dedicate the lot to Margrit, who had spent much of the auction up until then with a pen in hand, noting down the amounts of the winning bids and keeping a running tally of the total raised. She was nervous throughout the event, worried that the auction would fail to bring in a respectable amount of money after all the efforts to revamp it.
Dressed in a lace skirt embroidered with tiny pastel flowers, and wrapped throughout the evening in a pink pashmina shawl, Margrit lifted her head from her tally and beamed at the applause and attention. The bidding for the lot started at $100,000 and rapidly moved up to $120,000, $150,000, and then $190,000. Ron and Teri Kuhn, who had become close friends of the Mondavis over the years, made the winning bid at $200,000. Margrit, accompanied by Timothy and Delia, made their way to the Kuhns’ table to thank them.
Neither of the Mondavi lots was the highest of the night. That title went to Lot 454, the one just before the Robert Mondavi Winery’s entry, which fetched $650,000 for four three-liter bottles from Colgin Cellars. The winning bidders, John and Tamra Gorman of Austin, Texas, shattered Napa’s previous record for the highest amount ever paid for a single lot. Then, Joy Craft became the night’s highest bidder by offering $550,000 for a lot that would allow her and nine friends to raid the cellars of some of the valley’s best-known wineries: Cakebread, Château Montelena, Joseph Phelps, Schramsberg, and Silver Oak. Her spending totaled $951,000 that evening. To end the auction, the vintners shot off confetti cannons over the crowd and truly had something to celebrate. They’d nearly doubled their take from the previous year.
Margrit was elated. The aucton’s malaise had been lifted; although Naples had held on to its bragging rights as the world’s biggest charity wine auction, Napa had nearly doubled the amount it had raised for charity in a year and was nipping at the Florida crowd’s heels. If the auction was a measure of where the Mondavis stood after a year of chaotic change, they had endured it with grace and aplomb and Margrit, in particular, had come into her own as the powerhouse behind her ailing husband.
Robert sat stony-faced through most of the hoopla. When the auction ended, Margrit and Timothy took his arms and helped him make his way slowly out toward the smaller tent, where they would host a post-auction dinner for bidders and guests. Although the reconciliation he had long sought with his brother had finally taken place, it had only happened after Robert had lost his company, giving Peter’s side of the family the distinction of being the only remaining Mondavis to own a winery.