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The James Beard Awards

June 12, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

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Above, the author (center), her sister and her husband celebrate in style at the James Beard Awards ceremony. Below, Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery share the award with the sweetest of their creations.
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(Tartine photo from Gothamist.com)

It was hard to escape “Sex and the City” even at the black-tie 2008 James Beard Foundation Awards Ceremony on June 8th at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.
The evening’s co-host was Kim Cattrall, the actress who played Samantha in the movie and TV series. Kim didn’t disappoint her fans, at least in terms of adding glamour to the evening: she wore a short, gold-spangled dress with a plunging neckline. While it wasn’t a particularly body-conscious crowd (too many people who loved food more than fitting into size four dresses), Ms. Cattrall looked terrific.
Less terrific was the silly repartee she engaged in with her co-host Bobby Flay. The chef/restaurateur looked downright terrified by Ms. Cattrall, or perhaps just by her man-eating “Sex and the City” character.
I confess: I loved walking down the red carpet at the entrance of Avery Fisher Hall, with paparazzi snapping photos of celebrity chefs. It was very thrilling, indeed, for a plain old reporter like me. And it was even better to be accompanied by my handsome husband in his tuxedo and my beautiful, supportive sister.

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Filed Under: Food & Wine, The Writing Life

Allegro Romano

June 3, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

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Although on this visit there were no San Francisco mayors at Allegro Romano, there were plenty of people to meet and greet.
Photo from Allegro Romano

Allegro Romano, a small Italian restaurant on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, is the setting for a key scene in The House of Mondavi. The restaurant was where Timothy Mondavi broke bread with two of the outside directors of the Robert Mondavi Corp. in an effort to convince them to oust the company’s non-family member CEO. His efforts backfired. Instead of convincing them to fire the executive, his campaign only fueled the directors’ growing conviction that Timothy, himself, was a loose cannon.
I’d never been to Allegro Romano until I was invited there last week by Judy Miner, president of Foothill College in Silicon Valley. I’d given a book talk as part of the Foothill Authors Series and Judy took me there afterwards, since it was one of her favorite neighborhood restaurants. The restaurant’s ebullient Italian owner, Lorenzo Logoreci, welcomed us to a table scattered with rose petals and confetti. “Bella,” he called Judy, greeting her warmly and referring to her as his first customer. (Logoreci and Fusae Castelluccio, both from Rome, bought the long-established restaurant about eight years ago.)

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Filed Under: Food & Wine, The Writing Life

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

Just a guy from Turlock: Michael Chiarello and lifestyle marketing

April 28, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler 2 Comments

Michael Chiarello's Bud Break party
Michael Chiarello with guests at a past Bud Break Party (above) and with his own budding progeny, Aidan (below)
Photos from NapaStyle.com and ChiarelloFamilyVineyards.com
Michael Chiarello and son Aidan

Michael Chiarello is at home, making risotto alla primavera for 130 or so of the best customers of Chiarello Family Vineyards. He tastes a bit of the rice and parmesan cheese mixture, finds it to his liking, and orders it dished onto the scores of white plates which are laid out and waiting, where it will be topped off with a soffrito of spring vegetables.
Wearing his white chef’s coat emblazed with a burgundy emblem signifying his kudos from the James Beard Foundation, he dashes out of his modern farmhouse-style St. Helena home, navigates around the swimming pool, and bounds down a few stone steps, to a 125-foot table set up in the vineyards where he and his wife Eileen are hosting a late-afternoon supper for their best customers in the vineyards.
Barely pausing to say a few words to his guests, most of whom have bought a case or more of his wine to qualify for an invitation to join the day’s hospitality, he dashes back up the steps, towards the kitchen.
“Now, now!” he snaps at the waiters ferrying plates of risotto to the table. The temperature in the vineyard hovers around 85 degrees, even at five in the afternoon, so there seems little risk of the dishes cooling down in the moments it takes to deliver them from kitchen to table. He’s paired the course with a 2006 Giana Zinfandel, named after one of his three daughters.

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Filed Under: 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

Yes, Chef!

April 11, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler 3 Comments

Gareth Blackstock
Gareth Blackstock, aka Lenny Henry
Photo from Siegler.net

Some people find gardening shows relaxing. Others love watching playful otters frolic with each other in nature documentaries. Give me the red meat and raw savagery of the kitchen anytime.
First, I tore through Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which I found hugely enjoyable and not a little bit scary. I’m assured by his longtime spokeswoman, Rosemarie Morse, that these days it’s safe to order fish in restaurants on Monday.
In recent weeks, I began watching the BBC series from the 1990s called “Chef!,” starring the British comedian Lenny Henry as the character Gareth Blackstock, a chef in a two-Michelin starred restaurant in the fictional Le Chateau Anglais in the English countryside.

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Filed Under: 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

Vinography – 2008 Best Wine Blog Award

April 1, 2008 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

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Suggested wine pairing? Ask the go-to guy.
Photo by justinsomnia.org

Alder Yarrow and I had lunch together today at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. After noting the $100-plus bottles of Shafer Hillside Select, Quintessa, and Blackbird Vineyards wines on offer at a take-out place that serves $8.99 burgers and $3.99 hotdogs wrapped in paper, Alder modestly mentioned that he’d just heard that morning that his brainchild, Vinography, had been named the best overall wine blog in 2008 by Tom Wark’s American Wine Blog Awards.
I started reading Vinography a few years ago after meeting Alder at the very first Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in 2006. We were both participants then; Alder has gone on to be one of the most generous and well-liked speakers at the 2007 and 2008 Symposiums. A corporate web designer and consultant during the day, Alder started Vinography in 2004 after realizing he had become the “go-to guy” for his friends who wanted wine or restaurant recommendations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Filed Under: Bay Area Book Scene, Food & Wine, The Writing Life

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