Robert Mondavi glided through the oak-studded grounds of the Meadowood country club in an electric golf cart. The ninety-year-old vintner’s craggy profile looked as if it belonged on a Roman coin, but his dashing Western wear—a red-and-white-checked shirt, drawstring tie, black broad-brimmed bolero hat, and leather vest—prompted a few double-takes from the khaki-clad volunteers setting up for that day’s wine auction. The aging emperor of Napa Valley also wore a faint frown.
Four decades earlier, Robert Mondavi had become famous for praising the benefits of fine wine to a nation that preferred Coca-Cola and cocktails. He had tirelessly sermonized that food and wine were at the heart of the good life, that in an age of fast food, wine was a healthy and civilizing force with sacred traditions, and that Napa Valley wines belonged in the company of the world’s best. Along the way, this son of an Italian peasant became the patriarch of America’s fine wine trade.
His passion had paid off: In time, Napa Valley wines took their place alongside those from Bordeaux as the world’s finest, and a new wine-and-food culture leapfrogged from America’s coastal cities to the heartland. Along the way, he and his children had become fabulously wealthy by selling stock in the family business to the public.
But that was long ago. Now, his company’s reputation for producing high-quality wines had eroded and the House of Mondavi itself was rent by conflict. In the 1960s, a family feud had erupted, leading to a sensational court battle that created a decades-long split between the brilliant pitchman, Robert, and his introverted younger brother, Peter. These tensions were threatening to end Robert’s dream of creating his own American wine dynasty in the image of Europe’s Antinori and Rothschild families. On the eve of the wine trade’s most glamorous annual event, Robert’s family was on the brink of losing control of the company.
The auction tent hummed with Schadenfreude as the Mondavis’ rivals and acquaintances experienced a delicious thrill in witnessing the troubles of the valley’s most prominent family. Two days earlier, a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal had revealed the Mondavis’ personal and business turmoil, after the Robert Mondavi Corporation’s board had ousted Robert’s eldest son, Michael, as chairman and put him on an indefinite leave of absence from the company. The move, which neither his father nor his siblings had opposed, had publicly humiliated the volatile Michael and left the company in the hands of nonfamily members for the first time in its history.
But Robert had a more troubling secret. Only his immediate family and a handful of his closest advisors knew that it was the patriarch’s own financial overreaching, as well as his determination that his offspring would head the company, that had undercut the family’s control of the Robert Mondavi Corporation. Whether it was hubris or simple financial miscalculation, Robert’s philanthropic commitments had led him and his children into a crushing struggle with the company’s board of directors. The nonagenarian’s own financial situation had begun to look precarious.
Robert still commanded a large measure of loyalty and respect, which the Mondavis hoped would be reflected during the sale of Lot 11, their offering. It was a showcase for the family’s craft and a treasure trove of its most sacred winemaking achievements, far removed from the mass-market Mondavi brands sold at Costco and Safeway. The lot contained nine bottles of Mondavi’s finest Oakville Reserve Cabernets, made from coddled grapes aged for three years in French oak barrels. Robert’s granddaughter Chiara had hand-painted and then etched the golden silhouettes of grapevines on each bottle.
For years, Mondavi wines had been among the top sellers at charity auctions such as this, a point of pride in the family. For while they might please millions of customers with affordable table wines, America’s leading wine family could also produce wine lots that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than Robert himself had earned from the company’s entire first year of production back in 1966. A few months earlier, at Florida’s Naples Winter Wine Auction, a lot of four large-size bottles of Mondavi’s 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve had sold for $190,000, reflecting Robert’s role that year as the event’s honored vintner. Lot 11’s price would not only signal the Mondavis’ prestige but also the family’s continuing power in America’s wine industry. “This lot should do really well,” predicted the celebrity chef Michael Chiarello in front of a camera for his cable television show NapaStyle.
Robert limped into the white tent, leaning heavily on his cane as his wife, Margrit, gently guided him to his seat at the front. He was still an icon but in the past year had come to seem physically smaller than he had been before, shrunken in his stylish clothes. The hearing aid in his left ear could not pierce the cocoon of deafness that surrounded him, and his once-famous charisma had diminished. His mind had begun to slow in a way that alarmed some family members as he was beset by a fog of mental confusion that seemed to be thickening each day. More worrisome, Robert seemed to have lost some of the optimistic spirit that had buoyed him for so many decades.
Anticipating that her husband would tire easily after recent surgeries, Margrit stayed by his side. With her ageless blond effervescence, she offered friends a smile and a cheek to kiss as the couple waited for the bidding to begin. In her late seventies, she was a striking woman who carried her small frame with grace. She wore a drawstring linen pantsuit in the color of the Spanish moss that draped the valley’s oaks. Although she had lived in Napa Valley for more than four decades, her English remained softly accented by her childhood in Switzerland.
Auctioneer Fritz Hatton started the day’s bidding.
“Fasten your seat belts because heeere…weeee…goooo!” whooped Hatton, shuffling sideways across the podium. With his gourmand’s belly spilling out of his trousers and his pianist’s hands sweeping rapidly back and forth as if he were playing arpeggios, Hatton kicked up his heels with a flourish.
Below him, a group of vintners also took flamboyant measures to ramp up the excitement. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Birkenstock sandals, Roger Trinchero, whose family’s Sutter Home Winery first became famous for its easy-to-drink blush Zinfandel, whipped out a squirt gun in one hand and a can of Silly String in the other. He incited bursts of laughter at his table as he began spraying guests. The air inside the white tent grew warm. Then, minutes into the auction, some two thousand wine lovers shifted their attention to the podium as Hatton started the bidding for Lot 11.
“Five thousand, there it is….”
“Ten thousand….”
An awkward silence followed.
The bidding had stalled and hushed tension gripped the crowd. After decades of serving as a global ambassador for Napa Valley wines, promoting them in countless tastings and events, Robert Mondavi had built up deep reservoirs of goodwill. No one wanted to see the old king humbled by a low sale price for his family’s choicest wines. Yet, the most sophisticated wine buyers were no longer paying top dollar for Robert Mondavi Cabernets. The Mondavi reputation had slid a few years earlier after his younger son Timothy’s winemaking style came under fire from such influential critics as Robert Parker and Wine Spectator’s James Laube. By the late 1990s, wine connoisseurs had moved on to small production cult wines such as Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, and Dalla Valle Vineyards that were wildly expensive—$200 a bottle was not unusual—and hard to get.
“Fifteen thousand…”
“Twenty…”
Volunteers with big foam index fingers—the type that fans wave around at football games—pointed in the direction of bidders to draw Hatton’s attention to rival paddles. Paddle 253—held by Jess Jackson, the seventy-four-year-old proprietor of Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates—was bidding against paddle 5, held by construction heir Ron Kuhn. A sharp negotiator who had had a legal run-in with the Mondavi family a few years earlier, Jackson wore a placidly earnest look on his face. With a net worth estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.8 billion, he was one of the wine industry’s few billionaires.
“Forty thousand…”
“Fifty-five thousand…”
Hatton looked around for any bidders to top the previous bid. There were none. Robert seemed confused by the slowing bids. Shadows crossed his face. Would his family suffer further dishonor by such a low price?
“Sold…to Jess and Barbara Jackson! Thank you very much,” exulted Hatton.
Excited volunteers—known as the Hoopla Committee—surrounded Jackson, a towering man with a silver crown of hair. Some of them tossed up fluorescent green “Napa Valley Donor Dollars”—with each bill in the denomination of fifty million dollars, bearing the slogan “In Wine We Trust.” Across the room, Robert Mondavi’s bald dome and aquiline profile was unwavering amid the flutter of the play money.
Despite the manufactured gaiety, the moment was poignant for the onlookers at the auction that day who understood the drama playing out in the Mondavi empire. A lot offered by Napa’s most famous family was bought at a fire sale price by one of their company’s fiercest rivals from neighboring Sonoma County. Was the bid symbolic of Jackson’s rising strength in the industry and Mondavi’s fading glory? Was it a kind gesture aimed at sparing Robert from further humbling? Or was it a foreshadowing of what was to come—with Jackson and other potential predators at that very moment eyeing Mondavi’s many attractive properties?
Jess Jackson grinned broadly for the news cameras, photographers, and fellow bidders who surrounded him. He stood up from his table as Robert hobbled unsteadily toward him. The two men grasped hands, at least an eight-inch height difference between them. The Hoopla Committee surrounded both of them and their images were projected simultaneously onto the ten monitors mounted in the tent.
The men soon parted and returned to their seats. The bidding day had just begun and more highly sought lots were ahead. Of keen interest to many of the high-flyers who’d come to Napa that weekend was Lot 17, a “flight” of three bottles of Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon from the 1995, 1996, and 1997 vintages. A wine industry newcomer would have difficulty seeing why such a humble-looking offering—presented in a rustic box, with the brand name and an image of the namesake raptor burned into the wood—could generate such excitement. But Screaming Eagle, owned by Jean Phillips and produced by the winemaker Heidi Peterson Barrett, was America’s most collectible wine.
Expectations ran high. Almost immediately, the bidding leapt into the six figures, with paddles shooting up left and right. The most intense back and forth took place between paddles 511—held by Edward Weltman, a defense attorney from Long Island, New York, and paddle 32, held by a Chinese electronics magnate, M. K. Koo.
“One seventy,” shouted the British auctioneer David Elswood.
“One eighty. One ninety.”
“Two hundred,” Elswood said, gesturing at Weltman, who was wearing a white polo shirt and reflective sunglasses.
“Two twenty,” pointing at Koo, who was sitting in the very back of the tent, with a clear line of sight to the center of the podium.
“Sold at two twenty!”
Over the loudspeakers, the Steve Miller Band’s 1976 hit, “Fly Like an Eagle,” reverberated throughout the tent. The music’s deafening beat became a physical presence, roiling the hot air inside the canvas. The Hoopla Committee swarmed around the inconspicuous-looking Chinese man, as did the television cameras. Koo, wearing glasses, a baseball cap, and a plaid, long-sleeve button-down shirt, stood up, grinned widely, and raised his champagne flute in a toast for the cameras.
As winemaker Heidi Barrett and vintner Jean Phillips came to congratulate Koo, Robert Mondavi and his fair-haired son Timothy tilted their heads back to watch the excitement at the other side of the tent projected on one of the video screens. With the Screaming Eagle lot positioned so closely to the Mondavis’ offering it was hard for anyone to ignore the fact that tiny, upstart wineries had overshadowed the big, venerable names, such as Beaulieu and Beringer, which had put Napa Valley on the map. The prices paid for the California cult wines left those pioneering vintners—people who had been in the valley since the 1960s and, for the Mondavis, since the late 1930s—shaking their heads.
Robert and Timothy stared up at the screen, silent in the midst of the raucous celebration of the bid. They seemed isolated, as the Hoopla Committee and television cameras moved elsewhere. For that moment, the Mondavis were no longer the center of attention. When the spotlight returned in the months to come, it would blaze mercilessly on the dismemberment of their empire.