A Legend Uncorked
By KURT LOFT
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE

“No one in the United States has done more to promote the image of fine wine than Mondavi and his family. They have had a profound, positive impact on American culture.”

No conversation about American wine can begin, much less end, without mentioning Robert Mondavi.

The 93-year-old patriarch of the industry is celebrating the 40th anniversary of his famed Napa Valley winery, where his innovations helped transform many California vineyards and the palates of millions who enjoy wine.

Few challenge Mondavi’s status as the elder statesman or ignore what he did for a once-humble California grape, says his wife, Margrit. Mondavi is too frail to offer interviews.

“My husband is a very focused person that had a dream,” she says by telephone from their home in Oakville, in Napa Valley. “His dream was to make wines from his soil. And with his knowledge and his travels, he wanted to make wines that equal the best wines in the world. His dream came true.”

What isn’t always appreciated about his success is what got him there: a grass-roots effort to demystify wine and bring quality to the common table. Mondavi combined shrewd marketing with technical achievements and was among the first to insist that good California wines abandon generic labeling for specific grape varieties.

“He worked 18 hours a day, and his success had a lot to do with being generous and to have no secrets,” his wife says. “He believed in wine, and he exuded it with his enormous enthusiasm.”

When Mondavi founded his winery in 1966, he chose a 12-acre site in a vineyard known as To Kalon, Greek for “the beautiful.” His aim was to create wines particularly cabernet sauvignon with pedigrees on par with the revered vintages of France. Margit believes he succeeded.

“But I’m his wife,” she says, “and I’m prejudiced.”

The comparison is accurate, says Marian Jansen op de Haar, director of wine for Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar in Tampa, along with more than 40 other locations around the country.

“Robert Mondavi has been enormously influential in how Americans think about wine,” she says. “He always set high standards for quality but, more importantly, made people believe that California could produce wines that were on par with French wines. He was one of the pioneers who put Napa Valley on the map for arguably the best wines within California.”

Bridge Building Begins

Forty years ago, Mondavi’s Oakville operation was the first new winery of significant size in the Napa Valley since the end of Prohibition in 1933. The 18th Amendment had a devastating effect on the California wine industry, allowing grapes to be grown only for “nonintoxicating” foods and drinks.

Vineyards that once produced table wines were replanting their land with cheap grapes for fruit juice. This led to a poor-quality surplus that existed for four decades.

Perhaps Mondavi’s greatest contribution was building the bridge between that time and today, says Dave Mela, owner of Vintage Wine Cellars in Tampa.

“He was the one who took wine to a new level,” he says. “He was the first to really do single varietals as opposed to the old way, which was blending grapes.

“He was the first to make a really quality table wine that you could enjoy without spending a lot, and he was very good at covering the market.”

Although Mondavi early on emphasized cabernet sauvignon, he made headlines in 1968 for coining the term “fume blanc” for his dry version of the classic sauvignon blanc.

Originally selling for $1.79, it became one of the winery’s signature creations and generated new interest in this once-maligned white grape. Today, a 2003 To Kalon fume blanc reserve, with its complex floral and citrus flavors and creamy finish, commands $35.

The prominent wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. has said, “No one in the United States has done more to promote the image of fine wine than Mondavi and his family. They have had a profound, positive impact on American culture.”

But many of Mondavi’s featured wines, Parker argues, have lost their gorgeously pure, intense flavors and exceptional ripeness. The Mondavi industry has focused its energy instead on a glut of affordable, ordinary wines popular with consumers.

The result, Parker says in the third edition of his massive “Wine Buyer’s Guide,” are wines that are “collectively superficial, with stripped-out personalities and clipped finishes.”

Knowledge Of Mother Earth

Parker and other wine critics don’t deny the finer efforts and praise Mondavi’s symbiotic relationship with Mother Earth. A million years ago, California’s central coast was underwater, with only the mountain tops peeking above the surface as islands.

Centuries of erosion, volcanic activity and deposits of sand created a nutrient-rich soil that would later be ideal for modern vineyards, says Genevieve Janssens, Mondavi’s director of winemaking.

“The soils, the geographic location, the valley with its mix of volcanic and sediments, all adds to great wine,” she says. “We have a lot of gravelly clay soil, then the grain of the soil gets finer and finer.”

Mondavi knew from the start that winemaking began with the soil and that fundamental principles of farming lead to a great vineyard. He also embraced the harmony between the land, its plants and technology.

So he began workshops on sustainable grape-growing, water conservation, erosion control and integrated pest management. In the late 1960s, the team introduced what were considered innovations of the time, such as cold fermentation, stainless-steel tanks and gravity flow to make processing as gentle as possible on the wine.

The winery went high-tech in 1993, teaming up with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in an aerial imaging project to analyze variables in cultivating vines. The results led to improved techniques in pruning, irrigation and insect control. In 1998, the Mondavi Winery received an innovation award from California’s Environmental Protection Agency.

Although the Mondavi business was sold in 2004 to Constellation Brands the world’s largest wine producer with 85 million cases sold each year the legacy remains, Janssens says.

“He did not compromise a single aspect of growing wine,” she says. “He has spent a fortune in research and to help people understand the future of wine. He brought a holistic approach to winemaking.”