Yesterday I finished The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, by Julia Flynn Siler (Gotham Books). For Californians plugged into the Napa scene, there are very likely few surprises in this long (396 pages of text, seems longer) and detailed book. My previous exposure to the Mondavis was in Mondovino, where neither Robert nor his son(s) covered themselves with glory. They seemed arrogant, smug and arriviste.
In Siler's book they come across as all of the above but considerably more, especially the unstoppable motor of the enterprise, the ADHD-seeming Robert Mondavi himself. He comes across as a visionary and, tipping the visionary into excess, an overreaching blowhard. Clearly he was a terrible father as his kids were growing up and after, but it's also easy to see how he inspired such devotion among his staff.
It would be cheap sentimentalizing to intone that he was a "tragic figure" out of a "Greek tragedy" -- no doubt such rot has already been recorded for posterity -- but you have to marvel at the man's endless drive, his complexity and his earlier passion to make great wine in California, and to put that state on the world's wine map.
Maybe Robert Mondavi's great "tragedy" is not that his sons weren't up to his level of brilliance and passion, but that the wine industry he inspired has forgotten so many of the lessons he taught it about elegance, territory and what it means to be "the best."
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