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Archives

Kava in South Kona

September 27, 2011 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

The 'Awa plant, also known as Kava

I caught a glimpse of the sign out of the corner of my eye: “Ma’s Nic Nats & Kava Stop.” I made a quick U-turn on the Mamalahao Highway in South Kona and headed back, pulling across from a laundromat where children chased each other outside as their parents waited for clothes to dry.

From the outside, the kava bar didn’t look like much. But it was starting to rain and I had another hour before I could check into my hotel room. So I climbed out of my car and walked in.

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Filed Under: Ethnobotany, Family Business, Food & Wine, Hawaii, Uncategorized

Revisiting the Mondavis

September 15, 2010 by Julia Flynn Siler 1 Comment

A few years back, a friend asked me to donate a unique item to a fund-raiser for a local non-profit, the Marin Art & Garden Center.  I would lead the winning auction bidders on a bike tour of Napa Valley, showing them favorite spots I’d discovered in my research for The House of Mondavi, my first book which began as a front page story for the Wall Street Journal.

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Filed Under: Family Business, The Writing Life, Uncategorized

Mo’ Bob Mon …

October 21, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

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The elegant Mondavi arts center, above, is a dramatic addition to the rural landscape of Davis — and it will soon be joined by the Robert Mondavi Institute, depicted in an artists’ rendering below.
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Anyone driving east from San Francisco on Highway 80, the 10-lane transcontinental highway to Nevada and points east, can’t miss the name Mondavi. In California’s Central Valley, where the Mondavi family first made its name in the grape wholesaling business in the 1920s and then became America’s foremost wine dynasty, Robert and Margrit Mondavi have passed into legend – so much so that their names are heralded for all to see from the freeway.
This past week, I gave talks on my book, The House of Mondavi, in Sacramento and the nearby town of Davis, where the University of California’s renowned viticulture program is based. Davis is home to both the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. You can see the sign for the Mondavi Center on one side of the I-80 and the construction site for the new RMI on the other.
When I told a good friend from Alabama about these author events, she teased, “Oh, Julie, it’s just Mo’ Bob Mon …” — meaning that talking about the late Bob Mondavi had become a long-standing routine. In fact, it’s been Mo’ Bob Mon for more than 15 months now, and that’s why I was was not much looking forward to what had threatened to be a long and taxing day in the Central Valley.
But to my surprise, the two events were some of the liveliest and most though-provoking I’ve yet attended. The first took place at a breakfast for about 50 members and guests of the Capital Region Family Business Center, a non-profit group made up of second-, third-, and even a few fourth- and fifth-generation members of local family businesses.

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine, The Writing Life

King Lear and The House of Mondavi

July 9, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

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Two kings: Ian Holm as Lear and Robert Mondavi.

Photo of Holm from the University of London; photo of Mondavi by Mike Kepka/SFGate.com

What can Shakespeare teach us about a troubled family business?
That’s a question I’ll try to answer at a discussion hosted by a long-lasting and large book group in Burlingame, Calif., this fall. Over the summer, the group has decided to read Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, alongside my book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.
To prepare myself for the evening, I’ve checked out the DVD of the Royal National Theatre’s celebrated production of King Lear with Ian Holm (which I had the great fortune to see performed in London in 1997) from our local public library. I’ve also checked out the Cliff Notes on King Lear, as well as the text of the play itself (the Pelican Shakespeare edition of the 1608 Quarto and 1632 Folio Texts).

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

Robert G. Mondavi, 1913-2008

May 17, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

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Robert Mondavi as Bacchus, with wife Margrit.
Photo: Avis Mandel for Pate International

During the three years it took to research and write The House of Mondavi, I interviewed hundreds of people, poured through legal and corporate documents, and studied old photographs from high school yearbooks and other fragments of the past, searching for clues about Robert Mondavi’s character. Along the way, I gained an enormous respect for his passion, his perseverance, and his joie de vivre.
I was lucky enough to have the last formal interview Robert Mondavi ever granted to a writer. Our meeting took place in a second floor conference room of the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville on March 29, 2005, nearly four months after the forced sale of the Robert Mondavi Corporation. Although the sale proceeds helped Mr. Mondavi fulfill his many philanthropic pledges, it also put him out of the wine business for the first time since the 1930s. It was a sad spring for Mr. Mondavi, then 91, and his wife Margrit and I left that interview feeling as if Robert Mondavi was already beginning to slip away.

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

Meritage wines — and a fascinating glimpse into family business

April 23, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

Kim Stare Wallace
Kim Stare Wallace — is she drinking a Meritage?
Photo from Dry Creek Vineyard

As a newcomer to the wine world when I began The House of Mondavi, I discovered that its inhabitants spoke in a distinct language not so easily grasped by outsiders. When Michaela Rodeno, CEO of Napa Valley’s St. Supéry winery, first introduced me to the word “Meritage,” I had no idea what it meant. But she patiently explained it to me … almost, but not quite, concealing her surprise that I didn’t know it already.
“Meritage” is an invented name that grew out of a national contest to come up with a way to describe blended wines. As so many other things in the wine industry, it was born out of a response to government regulations. In 1985, U.S. federal regulators restricted the wording used on wines containing less than 75% of a single grape variety to the not-very-elegant sounding “table wine,” rejecting such descriptors as “Bordeaux-blend.”

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

Mondavi as a case study

April 17, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

The Harvard Business School shield
Harvard case studies probe for the veritas behind business decisions.

The Harvard Business School has done six case studiesMichael Porter, a Harvard professor who wrote The Competitive Advantage of Nations, a book that I read and found fascinating after being assigned it many years ago in business school. Although I wouldn’t recommend them as bedtime reading (unless you’re hoping to be lulled to sleep) I purchased them for $6.95 apiece and read each of them carefully as part of my research for The House of Mondavi.
In particular, I found the study on the Mondavi’s adventure in Chile, and its creation of the Caliterra brand with the Chadwick’s family, to be particularly helpful. My researcher and I found it fun and challenging to match the pseudonyms used in the study to the real executives I’d interviewed for my book.

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

Twenty-six generations….and counting: The Antinori wine dynasty

April 9, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

The Palazzo Antinori
The Palazzo Antinori in Florence, Italy.

Imagine a family business that has passed from one generation to the next twenty-six times, surviving everything from the scourge of Bubonic plague, to the invasion of Napoleon, two world wars, and even the birth and death of the wine cooler.
The Wall Street Journal’s deputy bureau chief for Southern Europe, Gabriel Kahn, profiled such an enterprise in a fascinating story this weekend: “For more than six centuries, the Antinori family has managed one of the most delicate feats in business: passing on a company from one generation to the next,” he writes.
Succession planning is one of the obstacles that trips up so many family businesses, leading the vast majority to break up, fail, or pass out of family hands by the third generation. Italy’s storied Antinori family, which now owns wineries in Tuscany, Napa Valley, Hungary, and Chile, is a remarkable exception.
“This is not textbook management,” notes Harvard’s John A. Davis in the article. “Some of its planning, some of it is just luck.” Even so, the success of the Antinoris has made them into a fascinating case study for other vintners, including Napa Valley’s H. William Harlan II, the founder of Harlan Estate.

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

The Aging King of the Napa Valley

April 7, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

Robert and Margrit meet Gov. Schwarzenegger
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger greets Margrit and Robert Mondavi at the December ceremony inducting Robert into California’s Hall of Fame.
AP Photo by Steve Yeater

One of the questions I’m often asked when I talk at library fundraisers or with book groups about The House of Mondavi is how Robert Mondavi is doing.
Still referred to respectfully as “Mr.” by some of his former employees, Robert Mondavi will celebrate his 95th birthday on June 14th of this year. But it’s unlikely to resemble the birthday parties of decades past – such as at the one to celebrate his 85th birthday in 1998. “Mr.” donned sunglasses, burst onto the stage, and started jamming with the band.
Since the takeover of the Robert Mondavi Corp. in late 2004, he’s had a series of health scares resulting in trips to the hospital. And although he and his wife Margrit still attend many functions and can be spotted dining out at restaurants such as Redd in Yountville, Mr. Mondavi is now confined to a wheelchair and doesn’t say much anymore.

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

The Poet-Farmer of the Napa Valley – Warren Winiarski

March 30, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler 1 Comment

Warren Winiarski

After a quiet lunch in Rutherford yesterday, I drove back home along the Silverado Trail. As rain droplets began hitting my windshield, I passed the modest sign for the winery whose founder, to me, is an almost perfect example of the idealism of many of the early vintners who came to Napa Valley, searching for an Arcadian life.
Warren Winiarski gave up his job as a lecturer at the University of Chicago, packed up his family in their station wagon, and moved to Napa Valley to begin again as a winemaker. After a short stint at Souverain Cellars, he joined the new Robert Mondavi Winery, working through the first two crushes in 1966 and 1967 before starting a winery of his own on Howell Mountain.

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Filed Under: Family Business, Food & Wine

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