Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series

Peter Mondavi

ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCTION AT WINERY, 1946-1988

With an Introduction by Joseph Heitz

An Interview Conducted by Ruth Teiser in 1988

Copyright @ 1990 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the University of California and Peter Mondavi dated Februrary 1, 1990. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with Peter Mondavi requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows :

Peter Mondavi, "Advances in Technology and Production at Charles Krug Winery, 1946-1988,"an oral history conducted in 1988 by Ruth Teiser, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1990.

Copy no. Cataloging Information

MONDAVI, Peter R. [b. 19141 Winemaker

Advances in Technolorrv and Production at Charles Krue Winerv. 1946-1988, 1990, viii, 66 pp.

Wine industry practices, 1914-1945; shipping grapes to home winemakers; Charles Krug Winery: purchase and renovation, vineyard, wine processing, production, and marketing; advances in winemaking technology and fermentation; vineyards: diseases, mechanical harvesting, purchasing grapes; new facilities and technical advances in the winery; marketing in the 1980s. Appended materia1,onCharles Krug Winery vineyards and on marketing and sales agreement of 1988.

Introduction by Joseph E. Heitz, Heitz Wine Cellars.

Interviewed in 1988 by Ruth Teiser for the Wine Spectator California Winemen Series. The Regional Oral History, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. TABLE OF CONTENTS -- Peter R. Mondavi

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION, by Joseph E. Heitz v

INTERVIEW HISTORY vii

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY viii

YOUTH, EDUCATION, AND CAREER BEGINNINGS, 1914-1946 Early Years in Virginia, Minnesota Father's Shipping Business Homemade Wines Consumer Preferences for Sweeter Wines Development of a Sweeter Chenin Blanc Boyhood Interests and University Education Industry Practices Prior to the Advent of Cold Fermentation Cold Fermentation and Temperature Control Studies at UC Berkeley Industry Adoption of Cold Fermentation Technology Bradford Winery, 1938-1939 Wartime Service Acampo Winery and Distilleries

I1 CHARLES KRUG WINERY 16 Purchase by Cesare Mondavi 16 Renovating the Property 16 Vineyard Plantings 17 Initial Responsibilities 18 Barrel Aging 20 Experimentation with Cold Fermentation and Bottling of White Wines 2 1 Installation of Glass-Lined Tanks 21 Refrigeration 22 Production and Market Demands 23 Revocation of Fair Trade Laws 24 Winery Promotion, Tastings, and Advertising 25 Wine Marketing Pioneers: and Francis Gould 27

I11 WINE FILTRATION AND CLARIFICATION METHODS Sterile Filtration System Depth Filtration Membrane Filtration Silting Indexes Importance of Wine Clarity

VINEYARDS 34 Land and Grape Prices 34 Acquisition of Vineyards 35 Company Incorporation, Ownership, and Board Members 36 Experiments with Vine Nutrition 38 Phylloxera and Pierce's ise ease 39 Mechanical Harvesting 3 9 Purchasing of Gamay and Grapes 41 Pneumatic Pruning 41

V NEW FACILITIES AND TECHNICAL ADVANCES Computerization Winery Additions and Construction Crushing Bay and Fermentation Technology Pressurized Tanks Pumping Systems Malolactic Fermentation Controls Centrifuging Other Production Techniques Experimentation with Barrels

VI MARKETING IN THE 1980s New Directions Arrangement with Seagrams

TAPE GUIDE 5 9 APPENDIX I -- Charles Krug Winery Vineyards 60 APPENDIX I1 -- Announcement of Marketing and Sales Agreement, 1988 61

INDEX 64 PREFACE

The industry oral history series, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1969 through the action and with the financing of the Wine Advisory Board, a state marketing order organization which ceased operation in 1975. In 1983 it was reinstituted as The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series with donations from The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation. The selection of those to be interviewed is made by a committee consisting of James D. Hart, director of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; John A. De Luca, president of the Wine Institute, the statewide winery organization; Maynard A. Amerine, Emeritus Professor of Viticulture and Enology, University of California, Davis; the current chairman of the board of directors of the Wine Institute; Ruth Teiser, series project director; and Marvin R. Shanken, trustee of The Wine Spectator Scholarship Foundation.

The purpose of the series is to record and preserve information on California grape growing and wine making that has existed only in the memories of wine men. In some cases their recollections go back to the early years of this century, before Prohibition. These recollections are of particular value because the Prohibition period saw the disruption of not only the industry itself but also the orderly recording and preservation of records of its activities. Little has been written about the industry from late in the last century until Repeal. There is a real paucity of information on the Prohibition years (1920-1933), although some commercial wine making did continue under supervision of the Prohibition Department. The material in this series on that period, as well as the discussion of the remarkable development of the wine industry in subsequent years (as yet treated analytically in few writings) will be of aid to historians. Of particular value is the fact that frequently several individuals have discussed the same subjects and events or expressed opinions on the same ideas, each from his own point of view.

Research underlying the interviews has been conducted principally in the University libraries at Berkeley and Davis, the California State Library, and in the library of the Wine Institute, which has made its collection of in many cases unique materials readily available for the purpose. The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to recent California history. The office is headed by Willa K. Baum and is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, the director of The Bancroft Library.

Ruth Teiser Project Director The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series

September 1990 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley CALIFORNIA WINE INDUSTRY INTERVIEWS

Interviews Completed by 1990

Leon D. Adams, Revitalizing the California Wine Industrv, 1974

Leon D. Adams, California Wine Industrv Affairs: Recollections and Opinions, 1990

Maynard A. Amerine, The Universitv of California and the State's Wine Industrv, 1971

Maynard A. Amerine, Wine Bibliographies and Taste Perception Studies, 1988

Philo Biane, Wine Making in Southern California and Recollections of Fruit Industries. Inc., 1972

John B. Cella, The Cella Familv in the California Wine Industrv, 1986 '.-... ' Charles Crawford, Recollections of a Career with the Gallo Winerv and the Development of the California Wine Industrv. 1942-1989, 1990

Burke H. Critchfield, Carl F. Wente, and Andrew G. Frericks, The California Wine Industrv During the Depression, 1972

William V. Cruess, A Half Centurv of food and Wine Technologv, 1967

Jack and Jamie Peterman Davies, Rebuilding- Schramsberg: The Creation of a California Cham~agneHouse, 1990

William A. Dieppe, Almaden is My Life, 1985

Alfred Fromm, Marketing California Wine and Brandy, 1984

Louis Gomberg, Analytical Perspectives on the California Wine Industrv. 1935- -1990, 1990 Joseph E. Heitz, Creating a Winerv in the Na~aValley, 1986

Maynard A. Joslyn, A Technologist Views the California Wine Industrv, 1974

Amandus N. Kasimatis, A Career in California Viticulture, 1988

Morris Katz, Paul Masson Winerv Operations and Management. 1944-1988, 1990

Legh F. Knowles, Jr., Beaulieu Vinevards from Familv to Corporate Ownership, 1990

Horace 0. Lanza and Harry Baccigaluppi, California Grape Products and Other Wine Enterprises, 1971

Louis M. Martini and Louis P. Martini, Wine Making- in the Napa Valley, 1973

Louis P. Martini, A Familv Winerv and the California Wine Industrv, 1984 Eleanor McCrea, Stonv Hill Vineyards: The Creation of a Napa Valley Estate Winerv, 1990

Otto E. Meyer, California Premium Wines and Brandv, 1973

Norbert C. Mirassou and Edmund A. Mirassou, The Evolution of a Santa Clara Vallev Winerv, 1986

Peter Mondavi, Advances in Technology-. and Production at Charles Krug- Winery. 1946-1988, 1990

Robert Mondavi, Creativitv in the Wine Industry, 1985

Michael Moone, Management and Marketing- at Beringer- Vineyards and Wine World, Inc., 1990

Myron S. Nightingale, Making Wine in California. 1944-1987, 1988

Harold P. Olmo, Plant Genetics and New Grape Varieties, 1976

Cornelius Ough, Researches of an Enologist. Universitv of California. Davis, 1950-1990, 1990

Antonio Perelli-Minetti, A Life in Wine Makins, 1975

Louis A. Petri, The Petri Familv in the Wine Industry, 1971

Jefferson E. Peyser, The Law and the California Wine Industry, 1974

Lucius Powers, The Fresno Area and the California Wine Industrv, 1974

Victor Repetto and Sydney J. Block, Persvectives on California Wines, 1976

Edmund A. Rossi, Italian Swiss Colony and the Wine Industrv, 1971

Edmund A. Rossi, Jr., Italian Swiss Colony, 1949-1989: Recollections of a Third-Generation California Winemaker, 1990

Arpaxat Setrakian, A. Setrakian. a Leader of the San Joaauin Vallev Grave Industrv, 1977

Elie Skofis, California Wine and Brandv Maker, 1988

Andre Tchelistcheff, Grapes. Wine. and Ecologv,- 1983

Brother Timothy, The Christian Brothers as Wine Makers, 1974

Ernest A. Wente, Wine Making in the Livermore Vallev, 1971

Albert J. Winkler, Viticultural Research at UC Davis (1921-1971), 1973 INTRODUCTION--PeterR. Mondavi

You are about to read the story of Peter Mondavi's life, as told by him in two interviews. Even a person of Ruth Teiser's expertise cannot possibly elicit the true depth of such a person in so short a time .

If one's destiny is to become a renowned wine master, it probably helps to be born into an Italian family, especially if that family knows grapes and enjoys the pleasures of wine. Such a circumstance was Peter's early life.

Peter's wine was known to me before I knew the man. As a student of enology at the University of California at Davis in the immediate postwar years, I became enamored with Charles Krug Traminer, which made a delightful and lasting impression on my palate. Later, during my years as a wine chemist at , and he as winemaker for Charles Krug, we became personally acquainted. Even during the hectic days, and especially nights, of harvest season, information would be exchanged. Peter would occasionally drop by for a late night snack of french bread, salami, and Cabernet in Beaulieu's fermenting room. His real reason,of course, was to discuss the vintage and its problems, tell us what new things Charles Krug might be trying, and seeing if we at Beaulieu were into any new trends or experiments. His perseverance and dedication to learning, and constantly trying to improve wine quality and wine processing techniques, were always at the forefront of his thinking.

As his talents and abilities grew with the years, his base of operations broadened significantly, and his realm of control expanded into the vineyards, winery construction (and all that entails!), finance and management, and even into a more active role in marketing. Through all of this Peter has been a rather quiet man, apparently willing to let his efforts show in his wines and winery development and improvement rather than vocal self exaltation.

Surely, his good wife Blanche has been his helpmate through the years, and together they have made their business and lifestyle attractive enough to convince their two sons, Yarc and Peter, Jr., to carry on in the quality traditions that have been established. Those of us who know Peter Mondavi as a friend and peer understand the patient endurance and determination to pursue his ideals that have made this man an outstanding example of family, personal, and business success.

Joseph Heitz

June 1990 St. Helena, California vi i

INTERVIEW HISTORY--PeterR. Mondavi

The letter inviting Mr. Mondavi to participate in the Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series was sent to him on November 11, 1987. Lacking a response, we followed up with telephone calls and letters which fortunately resulted in appointments for two interview sessions, the first on May 31 and the second on June 3, 1988. They were held in the conference room of the office area at the rear of the winery complex.

Mr. Mondavi is a man well liked and respected by his associates, as Mr. Heitz indicates in his introduction. Lisa Jacobson and I found him unassuming and pleasant, a hospitable host to visitors. He proved cooperative in replying to questions, and he elaborated upon some subjects that are of particular interest to him.

The interview transcript was edited slightly, with a few repetitions eliminated, some wording tentatively clarified to be submitted for his approval, and a number of brief questions added. This text went to him in April of the following year, but reached him at a time when he was ill. Early in February, 1990, it was returned with many of the questions answered and with the list of vineyards we had requested, which appears here as Appendix I.

Ruth Teiser Interviewer/Editor

July 1990 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California at Berkeley Regional Oral Kistory Office viii University of California Room 486 The Bancroft Library - Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

(Please print or write clearly

lour full name Peter Rudol~hMondavi

Date 'of birth November 8, 1914 Place of birth Virginia, Minnesota

%Father'sfull name Cesare Mondavi

Birthplace Provihce of Ancona Italy

Occupation Vintner aua~eShipn~r -. .

Mother's full name Rosa ,Mondavi (Grassi)

Birthplace Province of' Ancona, Italy

Occupation House Wife

Where did you grow up ? Virginia. Minnesota until 8 years old. Lodi Ca aftgr.

Present community St. Helena. CA

Education Graduate of Stanford Universitv

Occupation(s) Vintner

Special interests or activities Fishiu I YOUTH, EDUCATION, AND CAREER BEGINNINGS, 1914-1946 [Interview 1: 31 May 1988]////l

Early Years in Virginia. Minnesota

Teiser: Let's begin at the beginning. When and where were you born?

Mondavi: Virginia, Minnesota, November 8, 1914

Teiser: And as I remember, your father had come there from Italy.

Mondavi: He came from Italy in 1906, he and Mother. Actually, apparently he came just before that, and then went back and married other.^ Then the two of them came over in 1906 and settled in Virginia, Minnesota. They probably had spent some time in Duluth, which was close to Virginia, Minnesota, but I recall Virginia, Minnesota, as being where I was born. I lived there until I was a youngster. Dad started working in the mines for several months, but that was not his desire, so he developed a grocery store business. With the grocery store business, naturally he became acquainted with all his customers. Many of them being European, they were interested in making homemade wines .

- - - lThis symbol (//{/) indicates that a tape or a segment of a tape has begun or ended. For a guide to the tapes, see page 59.

'~esare and Rosa Grassi Mondavi. Father's Shi~~infZBusiness and the Move to California

Mondavi: He came to California during the harvest season--thefirst year was 1918--and shipped grapes East for the home winemakers, and sold grapes there. So he came to California in 1918, 1919, '20, and '21, just during the harvest season, to ship the wine grapes. Then he decided the future for him and the family was in the grape shipping business, so he moved the family to California in 1922. Actually, his desire was to settle here in St. Helena in Napa County because of the quality of the grapes. And the countryside was lovely, probably more typically European; but more important was the quality of the grapes.

His shipping business was really centralized out of Lodi. He shipped grapes out of Fresno, which came in early--the varieties came in early--and then when shipping was complete over there, they started shipping out of Lodi because the maturing of the grapes followed that schedule: earlier in the southern part of the state, then Lodi, and then the Napa Valley. So that was the heart of his business there, and of course he went down to the Imperial Valley in the early years, too, from which he shipped lettuce and cantaloupes for a few years.

I remember we used to have a Chrysler coupe that he drove around there. I think it was something like a ten- or twelve- hour trip to get that far. So he did an awful lot of traveling. I forget whether it was three or six seasons--inother words, he didn't stay down there except for the harvesting, etc. What they do is lease land and raise the lettuce and cantaloupes and ship it.

For a number of years he was also in the cherry shipping business, as well as the grape shipping business, which he perpetuated throughout his entire career. He handled cherries out of adjoining areas around Lodi, but his main concentration, of course, was in the grape shipping business in the Fresno area, Lodi, and Napa Valley areas.

Teiser: Which was, of course, increased as Prohibition got underway.

Mondavi: Yes, it increased with Prohibition; naturally, he was quite a large shipper. In Fresno he also did shipping of tree fruit. He stayed down there during the season, but then he'd more or less commute back and forth because he had people working for him down there. So he developed quite a large business, but before he passed away he sold the Fresno business to a family over there.

Teiser: What was it called?

Mondavi: Mondavi-Helzer. In other words, he had brought in some partners. In the early days he did his own shipping, but then as he expanded he brought in the Helzer brothers as partners in the shipping business, in Fresno only. So he called it Mondavi- Helzer on the labels. With them in the business--they were living there--they did a lot 'of tree fruit shipping, etc., as well as the grape shipping business. Then in 1933 with Repeal, he foresaw the fact that naturally the shipping business would diminish. But actually, it's amazing that there's still a lot of shipping going on in spite of all the wine production.

Homemade Wines

Teiser: People got used to their homemade wines, I remember.

Mondavi: They still liked their homemade wine. It's amazing, all the people that still perpetuate the making of homemade wine. Well, they made a stronger wine, for one thing, with a lot more body and a lot more character. It didn't have the finesse of the wine that was produced in the winery, but it was something that they were so used to, and usually high in alcohol.

I think they wanted high sugar grapes for the maintaining of the wine, more so than the character, because with the high sugar content you had a higher alcohol content, and as a result the wine kept better. Because in the making of homemade wine people used a barrel, and they would draw out of the barrel a certain amount of the wine. If there wasn't a high alcohol content it would start souring. Some of the families, very few, would put it in demijohns and the like to keep it from spoiling, but the main factor in preventing the wine from spoiling was the high alcohol content. So that's why the home winemakers wanted a high sugar content. Popular Grape Varieties

Teiser: What grape varieties, especially, were the most desired7

Mondavi: In this case the main grape was the Zinfandel, which has always been quite important. The other variety was actually the Muscat grape. A lot of the European families back there would make a red wine, and for the red wine they always preferred the Zinfandel. And if they were making a white wine they all seemed to like the Muscat grape because of the character. Naturally, Muscat is much more distinctive than the other varieties, so they could make that and have good character in the wine rather than just a simple, plain white wine.

Teiser: Your father wasn't involved with Alicante Bouschet?

Mondavi: No, we did it very little. I'll tell you where they used Alicante Bouschet--they used it for coloring of the Muscat, and Muscat wine that was produced at home. The reason for that, subject to my experience here when we did produce some Muscat table wine, is that the Muscat table wine always remained quite cloudy. It seems to me, just by deduction, that they added a little Alicante Bouschet, just a small amount, to give it a little tint of a color, which seemed to overcome the haziness of a white wine. That's the only thing I can deduce from that. And it gives it a little bit of character. Muscat wine does not clarify itself like the normal white wine varieties.

Teiser: The Muscat made quite a sweet wine, didn't it?

Mondavi: Sure, they used it for a fortified sweet wine; that was the winery production. But for home use it was a table wine. Of course, you see, a lot of them wanted a high sugar content so they'd end up with high alcohol, and as a result they also had a certain amount of unfermented sugar. The high alcohol would make it strong; and usually with the higher-alcohol Zinfandel you always had more color. Having high alcohol tended to subdue the fermentation at the final stages, so they always ended up with a little unfermented sugar, which was a good combination: high alcohol and enough sugar to ensure a lot of color, body, and flavor to compensate for that high alcohol. So they liked that combination.

As a matter of fact we still produce a wine today called Fortissimo, which we have been producing for many years. It's a wine which, let's say, replaces the homemade wine. In other words, it's high in alcohol--13.8, 13.9 percent alcohol--and has a certain amount of unfermented sugar. It's a special blend that we prepare with about four different grape varieties. That is still being shipped and is still quite in demand for those who used to make homemade wine. Basically where it ends up is on the East Coast, the state of New York mainly, or up and down the coast there, and also in the Chicago area, where a lot of grape shipping was being done. So that's a big item.

As a matter of fact, we also produce Bravissimo, which is a white wine, but it has a fair amount of the Muscat grape to simulate the homemade Muscat wine. Those are wines that we have been producing now for a number of years, and we're still producing. We thought it would die away, but it still seems to be holding its own; certain families still want that type of wine.

Consumer Preferences for Sweeter Wines

Teiser: As I remember, just after Repeal, the white table wine that we drank here, which we called--

Mondavi: Probably chablis; it's a common terminology for the white.

Teiser: Now it is, but it seems to me we called it by another name, and it was sweeter than the ordinary white wine.

Mondavi: Are you talking about Chenin Blanc? ?

Teiser: Sauterne, we called it.

Mondavi: Oh, yes. [laughs] That's like a forgotten name now. No one uses it any more. It's either table white, or this or that.

Teiser: It used to be applied across the board, the way we call wines chablis now.

Mondavi: Sure, that's right. There was sauterne, and then chablis; that's what we had. That's a lost name now, sauterne.

Teiser: It seems to me it was a sweeter wine.

Mondavi: Well, yes, what was known as "French sauterne" was always on the sweet side. Even here in California when we made sauternes, we were making it sweet in the early days. We also had Semillon, which is basically a sauterne variety, and we would make it both dry and sweet.

Teiser: It seems to me that public taste was generally keyed to a sweeter wine.

Mondavi: It was, because, number one, people didn't know wines. We found that they always went for the sweeter taste because it was easier to drink. If you're talking about a dry wine, naturally it takes years of appreciation. It's just like the Coca-Cola drinkers, the soft drinks are all on the sweet side. So that's the easiest one to become acquainted with, and then it's a question of education, appreciation of your drier table wines.

Even today you have a certain percentage--forinstance, our visitors coming through: if you call it dry and it has a little bit of unfermented sugar, they prefer that. It's like in champagne--youcan call it Brut, but it's sweet; there's a certain amount of sweetness. There's no such thing as a real dry champagne around, unless you really look for it. It usually has a certain amount of unfermented sugar in it. People like to say that it's extra dry, or Brut, etc., assuming that it really has no residual sugar. But actually it does have residual sugar. They like to talk dry, but they like to drink sweet. I don't mean real sweetness; just a lictle mellowing effect is what it is.

Teiser: Do you find that in the tasting room?

Mondavi: We find that for the average taster in the tasting room, yes. By and large they all go for the mellow wines. I'm talking about wines that have maybe one and a half, 1 1/2, 1 3/4 percent sugar.

Teiser: That high?

Mondavi: That high. But usually it's not as sweet as it may sound because there's enough acid in there to counterbalance it. We always refer to it as a mellowing.

Development of a Sweeter Chenin Blanc

Mondavi: As a matter of fact, we're the ones that really developed the Chenin Blanc in 1954. It was made out of the Chenin blanc grape, but we used to ferment it dry. At that time we called it White Pinot, because you could call a Chenin blanc grape White Pinot on the label.

The sales always remained flat at about five thousand gallons per year throughout the years, and we decided it wasn't going anyplace. We had a lot of Chenin Blanc wine on hand, because there were a lot of Chenin blanc grapes produced here in the valley. Being familiar with the Vouvray wines of France, we decided to try it with the residual sugar, which we did.

There were a number of factors that made it possible to try. One was that in my research at the University I developed a cold fermentation in 1937. I graduated from Stanford, but then I took this wine course at the University of California at Berkeley under Professor [William V.] Cruess.

Teiser: I'm going to ask you a lot about that a little later.'

Mondavi: Okay. So in 1954, seeing that the White Pinot wasn't selling, the sales were flat, we decided to follow the Vouvray pattern with the cold fermentation and sterile filtration. With cold fermentation we could stop the fermentation at the desired sugar level. The first one we had was 1 1/2 percent, and that's more or less where we've been staying with the Chenin. That was so well accepted that it sold itself. Of course, today most everyone has a Chenin Blanc that's on the sweet side. I would say that, by and large, they probably use ours as a pattern for comparison.

There are so many of these types of mellow wines nowadays. [tape off during phone call]

Teiser: Is your Chenin Blanc still 1 1/2 percent reducing sugar?

Mondavi: Anywhere from 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 reducing sugar. It all depends upon what the season's like and what the reaction is. And it also depends upon the acidity, which is important--the combination of the residual sugar and the acid balance. It's what you call a sugar-acid ratio.

Teiser: I thought I remembered that it had gotten drier. Have you made a drier one?

Mondavi: No. For all these years we've been producing a Chenin Blanc that runs between 1 1/2 and 1 3/4 percent reducing sugar. It's

'see pages 10-12, 21. kind of tricky to stop it, because you stop it by refrigeration. So you try to anticipate how soon you should chill it. If it's fermenting a little faster, you have to chill it earlier. [tape off]

Bovhood Interests and College Education

Teiser: Let's go back a little bit, to the beginning of your career in the wine industry. As a boy, I understand, you worked around vineyards.

Mondavi: Very little. In my growing days I thought I was going to become an aeronautical engineer. I used to play with model airplanes, but they didn't have the sophisticated little motors in those early days like they have today, so we had to satisfy ourselves with the little rubber band-power-drivenpropellers [laughs]. I was born too early for it.

As I grew up I enjoyed the engineering, but when I got to the point where I started realizing I was going to go to college and so forth, and had to pick up something, I became interested in what Dad was doing. It wasn't the grape shipping business then, but the wine business, because I entered college in '33. Dad was in the grape shipping business, which was fine, but then came the wine business, and I was in college.

I was taking the basic courses you have to take in the freshman year, and Dad approached me at that time and asked if I was interested in the wine business. Because as far as he was concerned, he and Mother had enough money to live on and enjoy life. I expressed a desire to perpetuate the wine business, and from that time on I took chemistry; I took my major in economics but minored in chemistry so that I could have the foundation for the wine industry. It was somewhat superficial; it was just basic chemistry, but I took enough of that so that I could go to the University of California at Berkeley and follow up with a wine course there. What I did there was strictly research-- analytic analyses, but mostly my research was on the cold fermentation. That's what I really concentrated on, along with the organoleptic examination of wines--you know, the normal courses.

Teiser: You started with Dr. Cruess?

Mondavi: That's right. Teiser: Did you work with any others?

Mondavi: Yes, there was Dr. [James F.] Guyman, and a Dr. [George L.] Marsh at that time. I did some work with them, but not much. There was one other professor there, Dr. [John G. B.] Castor.

Teiser: Was [Maynard A.] Joslynthere?

Mondavi: Dr. Joslyn was there at that time, but I wasn't one of his regular students. My main work was with Professor Cruess.

Industry Practices Prior to the Advent of Cold Fermentation

Teiser: He was good at getting you going on a research program?

Mondavi: Yes. He initiated the program, so we did a lot of research which was extremely beneficial. I'd say this: if it wasn't for that basic research work on cold fermentation and temperature control, I don't think the wine industry would have advanced as much as it has.

Teiser: It was new at that time.

Mondavi: It was new. Everyone was doing a certain amount of control of temperature, but it was very basic in those early years. It was just a question of controlling it at like eighty degrees, using water systems rather than refrigeration. If you're using a water system for cooling, the most you could maintain it at would be around eighty or eighty-five degrees. Because we knew that when it reached ninety degrees, why, it would probably kill the fermentation; it would kill the yeast. So you had to keep below that.

I think that was the only incentive, to keep it from killing the yeast; otherwise you would have a stuck fermentation. Of course, that was not uncommon anyway in those early days, because they didn't have enough water cooling systems to control the temperature below the ninety. Every once in a while a tank would be stuck, and then you'd have to cool it down as best you could, and then re-inoculate it with the yeast to get it started all over again.

Teiser: Did some people use ice? Mondavi: People were using ice in cooling towers, they were putting ice in the tanks, they were doing everything possible. I remember even at our winery here we wouldn't put it in the tank, but we would put it in the cooling tower. We had a cooling tower of water and it would circulate the water. Usually you could get it down to sixty-five degrees, and that was probably as cold as you could get it, even with throwing ice in the tower and drawing the juice off the fermenting tank and sending it through the coils in the cooling tower. When there was really a heat wave and it got up to 105 or 110 degrees, then we did everything possible, such as throwing big blocks of ice in the bottom of the cooling tower. So we did an awful lot of things which we've overcome as people became more knowledgeable about refrigeration and so forth. We resolved that problem by putting in heavier refrigeration equipment.

Cold Fermentation and Temperature Control Studies at UC Berkelev

Teiser: What was the nature of your experimentation? Did you go through fermentations and then taste?

Mondavi: In controlled fermentations we had different cold rooms at the University. We'd put the crocks of these different juices into the different rooms and maintain their temperatures. In a crock you can maintain the temperature; if it was a forty-five degree room, it stayed at forty-five; if it was a fifty-five degree room, it stayed at fifty-five. And you didn't have the big problem of transfer of refrigeration because you were only handling probably five or fifteen gallon lots in the crocks. We kept those all separated; I think there were four or five different rooms and different temperatures. I guess they ranged from about forty degrees up to seventy-five or eighty-degree rooms. So there was quite a variation in there.

We tasted the wines, and we did it on different whites and different reds. The reds would be fermented on the skins, of course, and the whites naturally would be the juice fermentation. We subjected that to our own tasting with Professor Cruess, and we came to the conclusion that the colder we fermented the whites the fruitier and the better was the quality. If we fermented warmer, it became more oxidized and turned a little brownish, so there was a distinct difference; as you went up in temperature you decreased in quality. Forty degrees Fahrenheit normally stopped the fermentation. This was undesirable. Fifty-five degrees tended to lessen the quality. Forty-five to fifty degrees was found to be the most desirable for winery fermentation of juices. Here we ferment rose juices at forty-five to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, too.

When it came to the reds, which you had to ferment on the skins in order to extract the color and flavor, we found that roughly seventy to eighty degrees was an optimum temperature. Because the colder we fermented, the less was extracted of the color and flavor, so when you fermented it real cold, it ended up as a dark rose, and of course that's not desirable in the production of a good red wine. Roughly seventy to eighty degrees is ideal for most red wines. You can vary that, too, but if you get too cold you end up, as I say, with a dark rose.

When you cold ferment, like we see in the whites--such as the white juices in which you drain them from the skins after you've had about four hours of skin contact for a certain amount of flavors from the skins--youdon't dare leave it too long on the white skin, because then you pick up the tannins from the skins and that's undesirable in a white wine. So actually fermentation is costly in terms of refrigeration, because it will take it about a month to ferment, as an average; sometimes it takes three weeks, sometimes it takes a month and a half, depending upon the amount of natural yeast food that's present in the grapes. So you have a lot of refrigeration power, which is quite expensive, especially nowadays in the case of the fermentation of the whites and the rosks or White .

In the case of reds, if you ferment at, let's say, seventy to eighty degrees, your fermentation lasts maybe four or five days. That's all, and then you're over with it. You get that warmer temperature and naturally you speed up the fermentation. It requires refrigeration, but the amount of refrigeration is a short period.

Industry's Adoption of Cold Fermentation Technolo~y

Teiser: The knowledge that you gained in '37, however, didn't come into general use until the '60s, did it?

Mondavi: That's right. It took a long time before the rest of the wine industry adapted to that. Number one, it meant a big investment, because refrigeration is expensive. But we geared ourselves for that in the early days, whereas the other wineries were already set up with their water cooling system and so forth. Of course, we were, too, but we knew the importance of it. But in the big to medium operations, they couldn't control temperature as well as we could. I mean, it would take a tremendous amount of refrigeration. After many, many years they realized, too, that without good refrigeration and better temperature control of the whites their wines were inferior.

In other words, what they'd have to do is probably clarify whites to remove any oxidation and so forth. And when you did that you always ended up with an inferior wine. You actually ruined the quality, because if a white wine becomes slightly oxidized and you treat it to remove this oxidation, naturally you've taken character away; you've actually lost that much character in the wine. So you want to avoid any clarification which is required to remove oxidized pigments.

Teiser: You got interested in a complicated field, didn't you?

Mondavi: Oh, yes. It's quite a profession. As many years as I've been in it, I still enjoy it, in spite of ups and downs. And there's an awful lot yet to learn about the wine industry; it's amazing. I know we're doing more research work now that we're set up with our facilities. We're going right back to studying the different woods, more about fermentation, and so forth. So it's never ending. You'd think by now we'd have a few answers. Well, we do have a few answers, but not enough of them yet [laughs].

Teiser: It's such a complex series of operations.

Mondavi: It's complex, let's face it. It's amazing

Bradford Winery. 1938-1939

Teiser: You began working at the Bradford Winery, did you?

Mondavi: When I graduated I worked at the Bradford Winery for a couple of years because there was an opening there. A friend of mine, actually, was working there as the head winemaker and production manager .

Teiser: Who was he? Mondavi : That was Dino Barengo.

Teiser : He's still around, too, isn't he?

Mondavi : Yes. He lives up in Nevada. They're from Nevada, but he was in the wine business in Lodi. It was Bradford Winery, now known as Woodbridge Vineyard A~sociation.~I worked there for about two and a half years, until '42 when I went into the service.

Teiser : What sort of wines were they making?

Mondavi : Oh, they were making a lot of sweet wines, fortified wines. Very little of the table wines. In the early days in the Lodi area--in fact, all up north and south of Lodi--it was all the production of sweet wines: muscatel, ports, sherries, and white ports. That was really where the production was, on the fortified sweet wines.

Teiser : What were you doing?

Mondavi : I was a chemist there, and I assisted Dino Barengo in the production, fermentation, and so forth. I recorded temperatures, did all the analyses of the wines, checked the stability of the wines, and of course did tastings with them on the wines. We worked very closely together on all the wines. As I say, in those days it was fortified wine, and you didn't have to keep your tanks full. A tank fortified 20 percent alcohol, you didn't have to worry about the wine spoiling. It required care, but not near the amount of care a table wine required because of the low alcohol content and it being subject to spoilage and mishandling. Whereas the fortified wine with the high alcohol will keep very well, but it has to be well made for quality. As far as handling a fortified sweet wine, you're not as concerned about the oxidation and so forth as you are in table wine. Table wine is very critical when it comes to oxygen pickup.

Teiser : Were you pleased when you went to work that you had chosen that as a career?

Mondavi : I was pleased. Let's put it this way: for a couple of years, just as any person going out to work, you would like to progress a little bit faster. For a while I was a little disenchanted because I wasn't progressing as fast as I would like to, but I

'Woodbridge Vineyard Association, a growers' organization, owned the Bradford Winery near Galt. think that's normal for anyone. But I stayed with it. Frankly, I wanted to go back to Stanford and enter the graduate school of business at the time. But after I had been out several years and trying to get back into the study routine, I figured it would be a little bit difficult. But I was debating going back in, and sometimes I wish I had. But that's behind me now. [ laughs ]

Wartime Service

Teiser: You would have been interrupted anyway by the war

Mondavi: That's right, I went into the service. Naturally I would have stayed in the wine business, even if I would have gone back to school. It was to improve myself from a business point of view, which was .important as far as I was concerned. But then I was called into the service, and I spent about three and a half years in the service then.

Teiser: Did you do anything that was in any way related to the wine business?

Mondavi: No. In the service I was in the chemical warfare division. Of course that was never utilized, so we were in the ground supply division over there in England. For all the early training it was chemical warfare.

Teiser: At least they didn't send you to cooks and bakers school.

Mondavi: No, they didn't send me there. I thank God I didn't have to enter the battlefield, I'll tell you.

Acam~oWinery and Distilleries

Teiser: You had not been involved in the Sunny St. Helena venture, had you?

Mondavi: No, I was not. The Bradford Winery was my first job; then after that I worked at the Acampo Winery and Distilleries. So I guess I spent a couple of years at the Bradford Winery and then a couple of years at the Acampo Winery and Distilleries. That was before I went into the service. Then in '46 when I got out of the service I came up here.

When Dad owned the Sunny St. Helena Winery, my brother [Robert] was operating it, and there wasn't much point in the two of us working there--you know, it was a small winery. Then Dad was the president of the Acampo Winery and Distilleries, so he figured that would be the best place for me, which was fine with me because it was in the Lodi area. It would have been overstaffed for me to be up here, with the smaller winery. I worked down there before entgring the service, and then when I got out of the service, Dad having purchased the Krug property here (it was a much larger operation), I came up here to take care of the production of the wine.

Teiser: Your brother had been working here at this winery then?

Mondavi: Yes. When my brother finished school he took charge of the Sunny St. Helena Winery, and also got involved with sales in those early years. In the meantime I was working in the Central Valley.

Teiser: The purchase of the Krug winery was in '43. Was he working here when you were in the service?

Mondavi: Oh, yes. He was here in charge at that time. I1 CHARLES KRUG WINERY

Purchase bv Cesare Mondavi

Teiser: In 1946 you came home. But you were here at the time this winery was purchased, were you not?

Mondavi: I was in the service at the time. Dad purchased the property in '43, and I entered the service in '42. We had a meeting in San Francisco, and I was in uniform at the time. I had a day of absence and went to San Francisco. I forget the month in 1943 when Dad purchased the property after a meeting with Mr. [James K.] Moffitt. We were at his bank in San Francisco, and I guess that was probably one of the first meetings that Dad had with him, at which I was present. They concluded the purchase of the property at that time in 1943.

Teiser: Did you have any influence upon that?

Mondavi: I think I was a factor in the thing inasmuch as I was in the wine business and Mr. Moffitt was interested in a family that would perpetuate the Charles Krug Winery, and that I was definitely sincere in the production of fine wines. I think that was an important factor, rather than just selling to a person that didn't have a son or sons that were interested in the business. We were definitely interested in the wine business and the future of the wine business.

Renovatinn the Pro~ertv

Teiser: It was fairly rundown property at that time, wasn't it? Mondavi: Oh, it was well rundown, believe you me. The main building had nothing but dirt floors, and there was a partial second floor and partial third floor in which a lot of the timber had been taken out. It had to be completely renovated on the interior, and structurally they had to reinforce the whole building for earthquake and so forth. All the walls had to be resurfaced and reinforced, plus concrete flooring, and a new second and third floor.

Teiser: You must have wondered what you bought.

Mondavi: Yes. Well, Dad knew that it would take a lot of money to put into shape. I believe the price was $75,000, which was at that time a lot of money. It would probably cost double that to fix it up, but he was devoted to the wine business and wanted to see it perpetuated with the family. He went ahead with that during the difficult war years and did a lot of renovation.

Vinevard Plantinns

Teiser: How much land was involved?

Mondavi: It's about 147 acres. The vineyard was completely rundown and there were mixed plantings of this and that.

Teiser: When you say mixed plantings, do you mean different varieties?

Mondavi: It's what they call typical vineyard plantings. You have a certain amount of this red grape, that red grape, and none of them were really , that I recall.

Teiser: You mean not those that we consider fine varieties now?

Mondavi: Certainly not the varieties that I recall. All I recall is a Carignane, some Zinfandel, and there may have been Gamay in it. You know, just vineyard blends that didn't really make any sense. In those early days we started doing some replanting, and started planting varietals, variety by variety.

Teiser: Like what?

Mondavi: I mean Cabernet, Cabernet being important; Johannisberg Riesling in the early days was important; of course Chenin blanc was important in those early days; and of course , that was another one. The only one we didn't plant of the varietals when we did the replanting was the Gamay and the Zinfandel, because there was enough of that around. We were interested in Johannisberg Riesling, Grey Riesling, the Chenin blanc, the Muscat Canelli, and Gewiirztraminer. When it came to the reds we were interested in the , Pinot noir--and Gamay we were interested in, but decided it was better to buy that rather than to raise it ourselves.

Teiser: Which are you calling Gamay?

Mondavi: They call it Gamay Beaujolais, but they're going to have to call it Napa Gamay, I think, before long. Of course, Cabernet was the all-important one, really; that was the biggie, Cabernet Sauvignon. was important, but not to the extent of the Cabernet Sauvignon. It had its place, but on a limited basis.

Teiser: Today people perceive it a little differently. -... ' Mondavi: That's right. Let's face it, what we planted in those early days, we'll probably have to replant and readjust our inventory, because things have changed drastically. You have to roll with the punches, so to speak, what the consuming public is liking. Look at the craze that's going on over the , but we don't know how long that's going to last. I think it has its place, but it's too much like a wine.cooler. It has its ups and downs, though, just like the Thunderbird and the like. They've come and gone; they're still around, but to a very limited degree.

Initial Responsibilities

Teiser: It must have given you an interesting challenge when you returned from the service.

Mondavi: It was quite a challenge, believe you me. As a matter of fact, I was wondering if I was fit for anything anymore. After being in the service for three and a half years, coming into civilian life was quite a change, especially jumping from the basic life in the service and coming into the wine business. I found it very, very difficult the first year to adjust.

Even though I had spent four and a half years or so in wine production, this was a new ball game. There were the different grape varieties, wines that we were interested in, and really taking full charge of production--I found it confusing, to tell you the truth. The adjustment from a military life into production I found frustrating for, say, the first year, and especially the first three or four months. Trying to absorb everything that was going on at that time I found very difficult. But gradually I became adapted to civilian life.

Teiser: Did you and Bob ever sit down and decide who was going to do what?

Mondavi: Not really. I think it just fell into place. Because he had been traveling, besides producing wine. For instance, this cold fermentation and the like, which we determined with the final research at the University, I passed this information on to Bob. Then he started that. He saw the benefit, too, because I showed him the results on things. So he started using the cold fermentation method based upon my research work at the University. He followed up on that because he was aggressive from a production point of view at that time.

In those early days we didn't do any bottling; it was actually bulk wine shipments. We shipped wine in tank cars-- very little by truck; it was practically always by tank cars. We didn't do any bottling until Dad purchased this winery in 1943. Then they started bottling wine here at the winery. We were still carrying on a pretty good amount of bulk business, even out of Charles Krug Winery--becauseit was mostly ordinaire in those early days. The program was to get into the varietals, but it wasn't something that you could do overnight.

Dad was at the head of the Acampo Winery and Distillery in those early years, but then started the family business up in here as well because he wanted to perpetuate a good business for the family members. Dad had a lot of contacts in the East, naturally, with the bottlers back there. Then my brother started doing a lot of traveling. He had some people that were handling the production, and my Dad as well was doing quite a bit of traveling. My brother got involved with a lot of traveling because marketing was important. It's just as important today, even more important than it was in the early days. It's always been a necessary thing.

When I got into the picture, I took over the production slowly. As I say, it was very frustrating the first year, becoming familiar with all these different types of grapes and so forth. We had studied them before, but not in the actual production and really getting to the nitty-gritty and taking charge. Then it became more of a responsibility. Teiser: I remember that Dr. Creuss would keep up with people. Did he keep up with you here?

Mondavi: Yes. He was very much on the go; he'd always travel around and keep contact with all the winemakers and so forth. He was quite a professor. I have great admiration for him.

Teiser: Was he helpful to you when you came back here?

Mondavi: Oh, yes. He was very helpful, because he would make trips periodically. We were in contact in many of the early years. After that we all got busy and were busier than ever. Even today, we are all so busy we have a hard time catching up with everyone. And you had a hard time catching up with me [laughs].

Teiser: That's right.

Did you have a plan for rehabilitating this winery, or did you just do what you had to do when you had to do it?

Mondavi: Actually, during those early years there was a lot of rehabilitation that my brother and my dad worked on, rebuilding this whole place. I didn't get involved with that part of it.

Teiser: That was pretty well done by the time you got--

Mondavi: That was pretty well done by the time I got out of the service in '46.

Barrel Aning

Mondavi: From there I would say it was just a question of hard work, the fermentation of this and that, and doing a lot of research on barrels, too. We did a lot of barrel aging in the early days, which was somewhat premature for a lot of the vintners. We were the first ones to bring in the French oak barrels here in 1963.

Teiser: Did you come into a lot of redwood when you took over this?

Mondavi: The winery had a lot of old redwood tanks, but they were all replaced. All the tanks we have in the cellar were replaced since '43.

Teiser: What did you replace them with originally? Mondavi: They were replaced with redwood, which we still have. The historical building was built in 1861, one of the first wineries built in the Napa Valley, and had all redwood tanks. That's only used for temporary storage, not for the real wood aging. Because you don't want to leave it in redwood longer than maybe three to six months, just for cleaning up the wines. That's as long as we dare keep them in there. If you leave them too long they pick up character from the wood, which is not desirable.

Oak is far more desirable, but even there you don't want to over-age, because you pick up excessive oaky flavor; you can pick up excessive tannins and the oakiness, and that's undesirable, too. Redwood has its own character and you want only limited aging. Thereafter, if you want to do more wood aging you go into oak. If you don't go into oak, then you go into glass. Then you bottle it.

Experimentation with Cold Fermentation and Bottling of White Wines

Mondavi: We did a lot of research in our early years, when I came out of the service. Number one, we were cold fermenting the whites and the rose juices and so forth, and the reds were fermenting between that seventy and eighty degrees. Then I did a lot of research on the bottling of wine, because in the early days some of the early vintners had oak casks in some of the other good wine regions. We saw that they were aging white wines in oak casks excessively. We thought they were just too heavy in oak and tended to be on the oxidized side, et cetera. These wines were probably four or five years old, I guess, at that time.

We experimented with the bottling of white wines after they had been aging in just redwood tanks for periods of three months, six months, nine months, twelve, and fifteen months; it was the same wine, but we kept lots of it and bottled portions of it as we went along. We found that the wines, especially all these white wines that we were producing in the early days, were best when they were bottled after they had about three months of wood aging. It wasn't a question of real aging; it was a question of just mellowing it so that you overcame that greenness of that fresh, newly made wine. Once it reached that point, which only took about three months, we found it was much better put into glass. Jnstallation of Glass-Lined Tanks

Mondavi: As we grew in size, it became impossible to bottle all these wines at the optimum time--when they were all becoming mature after three months--withina given month or so. We finally decided in 1957 to install glass-lined tanks. We definitely preferred glass-lined over stainless steel, because in our experiments we found that wine that was left about a year in stainless steel developed what you'd call a metallic, flinty taste. Analytically there wasn't much difference as far as metal pickup and all, but it was in the taste.

That's why in 1957 I went East and purchased our first glass-lined tanks, which were installed in 1957. They were true glass-lined tanks, and there couldn't be anything better than a true glass-lined tank. It's just like the larger the bottle, the better the wine. Actually, it's a slower maturing--you can put it that way--and longer-lived wine. This gave us the capability of moving the wine out of either the redwood or the oak barrels at what we considered the optimum period of wood aging. We put it in glass-lined tanks, and then we could bottle it at will; as we needed it we could bottle it. It's proven ideal.

The first installation was something like seventeen tanks, a total of about 125,000 gallons only. Once we had installed them we actually outgrew them within a couple of years. In 1969 we made another big addition of glass-lined tanks because we knew the importance of it, and the results that we were getting. Then in 1980 and '81 we made another addition. So over 50 percent of our storage is glass-lined tanks.

Refrigeration

Teiser: Is any of that refrigerated?

Mondavi: We had temperature-controlled rooms. We were using some of those glass-lined tanks for the fermentation then, but we didn't actually have enough refrigeration to really do the job. Those rooms were temperature-controlled rooms because the glass-lined tanks are not built with jackets. We experimented, oh, about seven years with fermenting in the glass-lined tank room with a temperature control, but we didn't have as much refrigeration as we needed to keep that room down real cold. Because once the fermentation starts then it starts warming up the room. So we had a limited amount of refrigeration, but it was a definite improvement over the other system, which was circulating.

In the early days we had to circulate the refrigeration-- in other words, send the juices through wine chillers, for instance when you're talking about whites and so forth. We had to circulate the juice through wine chillers and then pump it back into the tanks to cool it. That was in the redwood tanks. When we started fermenting in the glass-lined tanks we had a certain amount of refrigeration for the room itself, and that assisted the circulating system.

The last installation was in '80 and '81, when we installed about seventy-five glass-lined tanks, and we do all our fermentation of the juices in those rooms. But we can bring those rooms down to twenty-four degrees if we want. We maintain those rooms at around thirty-eight degrees at the time of fermentation so that we can control the temperature of fermentation on those juices between forty-five and fifty degrees. It does a very good job now, because we have ample refrigeration for this. It's taken a long time to add on refrigeration. We made three large investments--in '57, in '69, and then in '80 and '81. Our last one was our biggest investment here, and we went all out in heavy refrigeration and so forth to satisfy all of our needs. It's worked out very, very well.

Production and Market Demands

Teiser: When you were doing this, were your sales keeping up?

Mondavi: Before my brother started his own winery, we each had had our respective positions: he was in charge of sales and marketing, and I was in charge of production. In the early years there, when he broke away for his own operation, I was putting all my time in production and then had to also take charge of overseeing sales. We had a pretty good sales staff, though, at that time. The important thing in those years was production-- in other words, to meet the demand.

The industry was growing quite drastically, especially in certain periods, say shortly after '65, in the '70s. So I devoted all of my time, really, to the production. I had to oversee the general operation, but we had a sales staff. Of course, the wineries were limited in those early days, and the demand for California bottled wine just catapulted. I did do some traveling, but I couldn't devote anywhere near the time that would have been good, because of the requirements for production. I devoted, say, 95 percent of my time to the production in order to get the wines out to meet the demands.

Revocation of Fair Trade Laws##

Mondavi: I think it was in '81 or '82 when they took the fair trade off. Then it became very, very competitive, and there were more wineries being set up. In the early '70s the industry was

',-. , catapulting in every direction. Sales were really increasing dramatically, and a lot of people came into the business. A lot of boutiques started coming into the business, so competition became keener. Then when they took off this fair trade, it became a dog-eat-dog business in which everyone was selling wine at all different prices, and no one knew what the price was. When you had fair trade, everyone established their prices and there was no real chiseling against those prices. Now everyone is chiseling prices and doing everything imaginable since they took off this fair trade.

There've been new people who've come into the business, especially some of the big companies like NestlB, et cetera, and they have a lot of money that they can devote to it. But I think one of the major factors is having taken off this fair trade. Well, it's done the same thing to the airlines and everything else. It's made it very, very difficult in competition.

In earlier years shipping the grapes east via the trucks became a better service than the rail service. After 1986 we didn't ship grapes because the price of Zinfandel was so high, but when we were shipping by truck, every day was a different rate due to deregulation of trucking rates. You'd have to call the different trucking firms and get your best rate possible in order to ship. That's the same thing in the wine business today! Everything seems to be a different price--programsfor this, programs for that, and everyone is trying to outsmart one another.

Teiser: Has it had any effect on quality, do you think? Mondavi: I think it has. I think people are more price conscious. I will say this, though, that only in the past couple of years have people wanted a better wine, but they want it at the lower price. This is where the mid-premium class has come in now. You have and Cabernet in that classification. Those are the two main ones. Then, of course, you have the White Zinfandel that is in that mid-premium field, in which you are getting more into the varietals. So business has not grown these past couple of years for hardly anyone over-all; it's been very flat.

The shifting has been laterally, from the vin ordinaire over to your mid-premium now, and the premium, too. But the volume of the premium--dollarwise,yes, it's good. But as far as the real gallonage it's not a huge volume. For the vintners up in this area here or in the North Coast counties, and even in some of the other coastal areas, the mid-premiums have become very, very important.

Teiser: If the fair trade laws had not gone off, would the market have been larger, do you think?

Mondavi: No, I don't think it would have been larger; I just think the fair trade gave peace of mind to the vintners, so to speak. It stabilized the market. The prices were published; you knew what people were doing, People were not out there undercutting one another to take the market away. Now you don't know who's doing what, because there's so many things going on that are legal. We call it maybe under the table, but they are legal, and you don't know who's doing what. You can surmise, though. Now it has become very, very competitive in all these fields, even the mid-premium now. I'd say the wine industry is undergoing quite an adjustment now, and I think it's an adjustment for the better. But there's always an imbalance.

As I say, I think the business could very well have been hectic, but at least you would have something concrete: when they published their price, that was it, and it was easy to follow. Now you have to extrapolate; you have to study back and forth what they are doing [laughs]. And there are new people in the field, too. Others have come and gone, and some of us have been and will be here forever.

Today there's not as much of the in and out, people coming and going. People seem to be more here to stay, like NestlQ. Coca-Cola got into the business and they pulled out of it; Seagrams got into the business, but they changed their program altogether and are finding their proper niche. Nestles now, with the mid-premiums, have found their niche. So they got into the right category--themid-premium and the premium categories.

Winery Promotion. Tastinns. and Advertising

Teiser: To go back to your earlier days, you were pioneers here in winery promotion.

Mondavi: I would say that we were. I think we were probably the most aggressive in pioneering quality, and staying in it, being a family business. I would say that we were an important factor here in the wine industry in the Napa Valley.

Teiser: You had, I think, your tastings on the lawn and so forth.

Mondavi: That's right. When I got out of the service, people didn't know much about wines, let's face it. Although people in the service that were over in Europe became more acquainted with wines, which was helpful. I remember the first years when I got out of the service we started with our heavy advertising campaign in the Bay Area, but we really didn't feel the result from it. Then we decided that if we were going to spend a lot of money out there on advertising, the best thing to do was start off with tas t ings . Our cellarmaster here went out to start selling wine. Even Mr. and Mrs. Gould did; Francis Gould started our Bottles and Bins. Frank [Francis] and Romie [Romilda] Gould were probably really the forerunners on marketing of our wines in the Bay Area, because they went around visiting restaurants and buyers in the early days. So we started to devote more attention to sales by personal contacts because we were producing the wines of quality, but people weren't familiar with wine.

Then we started off with these tastings. We started building up a little sales staff and doing tastings in order to educate the people. I mean, just looking at advertisements didn't mean an awful lot. We started tastings here on the lawn in those early years, and also with the distributors and the restauranteurs; we were doing a lot of tastings to educate them on the quality of the wine, and also the serving of the wine and so forth. But mainly on the quality of the wines, because very few knew about it. We're seeing the same thing today with the younger generation. We're starting to teach them all over again, you know. It just dawned on me not too long ago. I keep repeating these things, and I say that people must be getting awfully bored listening to these things. But I find out that these people are all the newer generation, they're all interested in learning, they're all interested in more details than ever before. We're going through a learning stage from one generation to another.

I still find people are .very enthusiastic. I've had some wine dinners on one of our trips, and it's amazing how knowledgeable these people are--restauranteurs,buyers, and so forth. They've become much more knowledgeable today than they have been in past years, but they are also hungry for more knowledge. It just dawned on me that we're starting off with another generation of consumers and wine buyers.

Teiser : There are always more where the others came from.

Mondavi : That's right [laughs].

Teiser : Do you remember Mallette Dean, who did the ad and label illustrations?

Mondavi : Oh, yes, sure. Oh, I remember him very well.

Teiser : Those were very notable illustrations for your ads.

Mondavi : That's right. In fact, he did our Christmas cards and so forth. He did a lot of work for us. Then as time goes on things change. He passed away some time ago, didn't he?

Teiser : Yes, in 1975. I think you still use some of his illustrations.

Mondavi : We still have some of them. Now both my sons are in the business, and they're going through all these different sketches that we have; we're trying to catalog everything now, to find out just what we've done and what we have [laughs].

Teiser : The University of San Francisco library has a collection of his material. You might tell them.

Mondavi: Oh, that's interesting. Yes, he was very good. He did a lot of fine work for us. Wine Marketing Pioneers: Frank Schoonmaker and Francis L. Could

Teiser: At the time that you started publishing Bottles and Bins, there were not many winery newsletters, were there?

Mondavi: No. The only ones I recall were Frank Schoonmaker's at that time. I think he was the only one at that time. He was quite a pioneer himself.

Teiser: Did you know Frank Schoonmaker? What was he like?

Mondavi: He was very attached to wines, and he had a very good palate. But I'll tell you, he had a straight line on doing things. I got a kick when he tasted some wines with me one time. I asked him, "How do you score these?" He says, "Well, I don't want to reveal my scores." [laughs] He was tasting our wines, and he says "I don't like to reveal any of my scores anyway." He was very well educated and had a terrific background in wines.

I think in a way he reminded me of Dr. [Maynard A.] Amerine. Dr. Amerine, you know, was very much on a straight line, and I think Frank Schoonmaker was similar, in that he was very intense on business--onquality wines and so forth. I think he did an excellent job in the promotion of wines.

Teiser: Was he helpful when he tasted with you?

Mondavi: Actually, not any great help, I don't think. Because we were just tasting the wines, and he didn't like to reveal his scores. I remember one day we tasted wines and he said, "No, I prefer to keep my scores personal." [laughter]

Teiser: He certainly did give a boost to California wines, though.1

Mondavi: Oh, yes, he did. I think he was employed, wasn't he, by Almaden at that time?

Teiser: He was involved with it, yes.

Mondavi: He did quite a bit of publication. I don't know whether he brought out a quarterly or not, but I know he was doing it and doing a good job of it.

'~e was co-author of the influential book, American Wine, published in 1941. Teiser: I guess he helped market Louis Martini's wines, too.

Mondavi: I think he did.

Teiser: How did you find Francis Gould, though? He had had an interesting background, had he not?

Mondavi: I wished I knew more about it. It was back in Boston where he started. I think he was importing wines and he was the local wine distributor. Then he came to California in the early years. I have a vague recollection of when I got out of the service and he came up here and started tasting wines. I guess he was retired, and he loved wines and loved the area here. He was here for a good many years.

All I remember is that I met him in my early, early years of tasting wines. He was very devoted to wines and he liked what we were doing. He was the one who originated, I guess, our Bottles and Bins. And he was very good at it. Of course, Romie, too, was very good. She was right along side of him, and she was very good and assisted him in writing.

Teiser: You're keeping it going very well, too.

Mondavi: Yes, we're keeping it going. We have to hire some people now to have it done. It's a little different style, but we're still trying to follow through with an educational little pamphlet to explain the wines and so forth. Of course, the important part is the tastings on the lawn, which we still perpetuate. I think tastings are very important.

I think things are changing; I think that the wine methods are changing, wine aging is changing, and we're finding a lot of new, interesting things. The only way you can educate the people is to really have them taste it. Because you can read all the books you want, and the wine may not suit your palate. I11 WINE FILTRATION AND CLARIFICATION METHODS

Sterile Filtration Svstem

. -.Teiser: I believe that you put in an early sterile filtration system.

Mondavi: That's right. This was one of the important things in the early days. Take the Chenin Blanc--sterile filtration became a major factor in that. It was a cold fermentation. In order to be able to bottle this Chenin Blanc or anything with the residual sugar, sterile filtration was an important phase of the production.

They had a lot of methods here in the U.S., but they were completely unsatisfactory because all they relied upon was chemicals to sterilize equipment. So we adapted the German method of--let's face it, it's just a basic method of steam or hot water to sterilize and kill all the yeast cells, and allowing it to cool down. The other important thing was the pads. The filter pads being produced in the United States were not capable of sterile filtration. They were not properly made. We imported our pads from Germany, which we still do because they were highly sophisticated in the production of their pads. They were producing the pads that would sterile filter, that would remove the yeast cells. Basically it was a German technique, either hot water or steam, and of course sterilizing the pads and equipment and all the machinery that was involved. The other major factor was the pads themselves, that they were properly constructed. De~thFiltration

Mondavi: Then came the membrane filtration. The difference between a pad and a membrane is that the pad is a depth filter. In other words, they're interwoven fibers that create a mesh. If you use a low, constant pressure they are fine. But if you have equipment, like pumps, that will pulsate, then it will tend to force yeast cells through. These glass-lined tanks are steel tanks with true glass lining, not epoxy. We can apply nitrogen pressure to those tanks and force the wine through the filtering machine. That way we can control the pressure within one pound.

With the diaphragm control on the nitrogen gas, why, we can control the pressure so it is just basically static at fifteen pounds. If they stop the filling machine it doesn't affect the pads; it stays at fifteen pounds. But if you have pumps, then you get a jump in pressure. Besides, even if you don't stop the filling machine, you have a pulsation effect from most any one of the pumps and they will build up pressure. If you don't really control them with a lot of different controls they will build up pressure, and then you naturally force the yeast cells through. That's what you call depth filtration, with those pads.

Membrane Filtration

Mondavi: Membrane filtration came in the early years, too, but it was some time after we set up our sterile filtration with the pads. One of the problems with the membrane filtration is that the wine has to be tightly pre-filtered because all you have is a thin sheet of membrane. All it is is a flat surface with pin holes. The pin holes are maybe four microns, and the wine has to be perfectly clean in order to send it through a membrane. You can send a lot of wine through a membrane, but it has to be really tightly pre-filtered before you can use that membrane. That's one of the drawbacks about the membrane, because if the wine has a little bit of anything at all in it,' look out; you're going to plug it up. I'm not sure, because I've lost track, but think a membrane set-up can be a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars. So if you plug it up--look out, you may have to throw it away [laughs]. You have a big expense.

We are starting to use that as security now. One of the reasons we didn't go into the membrane until more recently was the fact that you had to pre-filter the wines real tight before you could send it through. We didn't care for that, but it seems now that the processing we do now with wines--we try to minimize the processing, but with all the filtration that everyone is doing now it seems like the wines are adaptable to the membrane filtration. More so today than they were in the early days.

Siltinn Indexes

Mondavi: In the early days we used what they called a silting index in the testing of whether wine could be membrane filtered. Today people are not talking about using a silting index, because they don't feel that it gives us a true answer. But in the early days the people who were selling membrane filters at that time said that you had to pass a silting index test. It was a very simple test, testing the viscosity of the wine and one thing and another. The vin ordinaire passed most of the silting index tests, whereas our premium wine did not. So you would end up half of the time plugging up, so we decided not to.

More recently, I don't know if it's the composition of the grapes or what it is--we have not started using a silting index-- but we go through a normal process of clarification and filtration that seems to satisfy the membrane. As a matter of fact, we use a pad before the membrane now [laughs]. I think everyone's doing that now--using the pad, which is followed by a membrane filtration to make darned sure.

Importance of Wine Claritv

Teiser: Do you think the public demands too much clarity?

Mondavi: I think you need clarity in wine, there's no question. The only place where I think the public has to be educated is on the old red wines. Because when you're aging an old red wine in the bottle you're bound to get some precipitation. It's a natural reaction that you're going to get some color precipitation, tannin, and maybe some cream of tartar. So those wines should be decanted. That's the only place.

Otherwise I do feel that the clarity of wine is important, be it the natural clarity of wine or whatever. 'If it's naturally clear, then fine. If it has to be filtered--andmost wines have to be filtered nowadays--you can do some with just simple clarification and just racking, but that's limited because you're going to get that much more sediment eventually. I do think clarity is an important factor in a wine in order to give it its honest taste.

Teiser: A few years ago there was a kind of a rage for unfiltered wines.

Mondavi: That's all right as long as your wine is healthy, like a red wine. If you put it in the barrel its tendency is to self- clarify, and you come out with a very clean wine. You can do that with some of your red wines that show that they self- clarify. From my experience, if you have it in a barrel it will tend to self-clarify. Some people will use egg white or sheet gelatin to clarify a red. If you get a good, clean wine I think it's fine. But I do think that you can be asking for trouble, because the wine may be clear and then start throwing some more sediment. The public doesn't want it, and I don't blame them, because it has an effect upon the flavor.

I will say this: an old red wine is great, but if you disturb that sediment it alters the flavor altogether; so you have to decant it. A lot of people don't realize that about decanting. And some of the waiters in restaurants don't realize the importance of careful handling of an aged red wines, that it should be decanted before it's served. If you don't, it has some sediment and if you stir it a little bit it alters the character of the wine altogether. IV VINEYARDS [Interview 2: 3 June 1988]##

Land and Grape Prices

Teiser: Was it about 1962 when you purchased additional vineyard land?

Mondavi: Yes. I could research that, as to when we purchased the vineyard land. l It was in those years that we did acquire a fair amount of vineyard land. It was before the '70s, because in the '70s things started moving up; people started coming into the valley. That was one of the early spurts and in the last few years there's been another new spurt of investors in the valley here that have just accelerated the grape prices and the land prices.

At one point Gallo was the one who set the prices of grapes because they were such a large buyer. But with so many boutiques that have come into the valley over these past twenty years, they are actually the ones that are setting the prices. And of course it's all based on varietals ,2 really, too.

Teiser: Gallo set the price through the co-op?

Mondavi: Yes, for the Napa Valley Co-op. He was the biggest buyer here in the valley. Most of his grapes were vin ordinaire, but he also bought some of the varietals. There were an awful lot of vin ordinaire grapes in those early years. And then it related also to the varietals. You know, if your standard price was

'see page 36.

h he term "varietals" is frequently used for grape varieties used in premium wines. such-and-such,why then your varietals would be so much more. So it had an effect.

I think in 1965 there were something like twenty-nine wineries, and now there are around two hundred. So there's been a tremendous growth of boutique wineries. Now they are the ones that are really establishing the varietal prices here in the Napa Valley.

In the meantime, Gallo has acquired substantial lands over in Sonoma County. My opinion is that he felt that they were just demanding too much here for land and for their grapes. He's always been associated with Sonoma County, but I do think when he balanced it all out between what he liked about the wines over there and the grapes that they were buying--and of course now he's probably raising quite a few of his own--that he had a definite preference over there.

Teiser: When you speak of "he," are you speaking of Julio?

Mondavi: Yes, I'm speaking of Julio. Julio is the one, as I understand it, who is in charge of production, grapes, and so forth.

Teiser: Does the buying?

Mondavi: Yes, does all the buying. I've never seen it, but I understand they have acquired a substantial amount of land over in Sonoma County.

Teiser : Yes, the Frei Brothers vineyards. I guess it was one large holding available.

Mondavi: I think so. And he had bought quite a hillside, too, I understand. Julio told me that. They were doing an awful lot of work on the land. They bought these great, huge Caterpillars to work the land.

Acquisition of Vineyards

Teiser: What vineyards did you buy in the '60s?

Mondavi: I think I'd have to go over that so it would make more sense, Ruth. I wouldn't be able to put it into sequence. I'll break away and ask the office to make a list of the acquisitions. [tape off ] Here's a list of the family vineyards and the ones that we acquired as individuals.' Let me see [reading]--one of the vineyards was acquired in June of 1966. These are what we call the family vineyards, where several of us members are owners or lessees. So in June of 1966 we purchased about a hundred acres, in 1968, fifty-seven more. The next one was in 1969 when we purchased another hundred acres. And in 1974 we leased seventy-five [or eighty] acres. That is the total acreage we have as family members, aside from the corporation. Between the family and the corporation we have a total of twelve hundred acres. I wouldn't want to buy them today [laughs].

Teiser: Which of those are in the Carneros?

Mondavi: None of these family vineyards are in the Carneros. These are all in the Yountville area. We have about 145 or 150 acres of our own property here in St. Helena, right in the northern part of the St. Helena city limits. Then we have two vineyards in Carneros. One is known as a Cabral vineyard, because that was the family we purchased it from. That was about 195 acres, and adjoins Martini and B.V. [Beaulieu] vineyards. The other one is what we refer to as the Brown property of about 175 acres. That's quite hilly.

Teiser: When did you buy in the Carneros, then?

Mondavi: We purchased the Brown ranch in 1968, and the Cabral ranch in 1970, The Krug ranch was purchased in 1943. Then in 1971 we purchased what we refer to as the Volz property. The original name was Jenks-Volz. then we purchased the Fracchia ranch at Yountville. There are ten parcels all together. The first ones I gave you were held by various members of the family, and these last ones are corporation.

Company Incorporation. Ownership. and Board Members

Teiser: Was it earlier an unincorporated family company?

Mondavi: It was unincorporated at the very, very first stages. I'm trying to think as to when it was incorporated. I know we have a corporate stamp over there--I'm trying to think if it was in

'see Appendix I. '46 or thereabouts when it was incorporated. At first it was just a family partnership, and then we were incorporated and all became stockholders. Mother and Dad, of course, were the majority, and then we children were involved as stockholders at that time.

Teiser : After your brother left in 1965--

Mondavi : After my brother left, and my younger sister also left, we bought them out. The remaining ones are my older sister1, who always worked with Dad in the business, along with myself and my family.

Teiser: So it's still a family corporation?

Mondavi : Yes.

Teiser : Are there any members who are not family members?

Mondavi : No, there is no one. There is just myself, my older sister, and my two sons.

Teiser : Are we in the board room?

Mondavi : Yes.

Teiser : There are eight chairs around the table.

Mondavi : There aren't eight members; we don't count chairs for the board members. [laughter] The board.members are just ourselves. There was a period when Mr. [Fred] Ferroggiaro was on our board. He was retired from the Bank of America, and he was on the board for several years. We also had another controller that was on our board. I think it all started when my brother broke away. During that time we had these gentlemen on the board to work with us, and then after everything was settled we went back to strictly family members. So we're strictly family members now on the board.

Mother and Dad had known Mr. Ferroggiaro from the early days. I think he came from Stockton. When Mother and Dad lived in Lodi they knew him; Dad had always had a banking relationship with him for many, many years.

l~ar~Westerbrook. Teiser: Well, your organization got put back together again. That was quite a job.

Mondavi: It was quite a job. I mean, it's always a challenge in this business [laughs]; if it's not one thing, it's another. I think the big challenge today is the competition with the big firms coming in now. Of course, we went through that in the early years, too.

Experiments with Vine Nutrition

Teiser: I'm looking now at the recent period on our interview outline, 1966 to the present. I came across some material on your experiments with vine nutrition. Were you involved, or was that your sons?

Mondavi: I was involved to a certain degree, but being so preoccupied with the production itself, we weren't really able to follow through 100 percent on that. In the meantime, now that my sons are in the business, Marc is following through with plant nutrition, moisture content and the petiole testings to see the productivity or the health of the vine. He's doing quite a bit of work on that with his vineyard manager, Paul Vanderschalie. Marc oversees our vineyards, but his main effort is really on marketing and sales. That's his specialty. Pete, Jr., is in charge of the finance and administration.

Teiser: Have you profited from the research?

Mondavi: I can't really pinpoint the progress as far as the vineyards are concerned. Marc would be the one who could say more about that. I know in the early days, although we did do some experimenting, of course, the important thing was selecting of the necessary root stock. The only way we could do that was to confer with the University and the experience of the nurseries as to what they found best for the different territories. I know the Lodi territory takes a different root stock than the Napa Valley and so forth. I think it was more in contact with the University and also with the nurseries as to what was doing best in those particular areas and soils.

I would say, as far as actual experimentation, I know that the University did some experimenting here on the home property, but I don't think anything was really conclusive, such as the root stock and the like. It takes a long time for some of these projects to give you the results, and sometimes you never know whether you've gotten the right results or not. Because you can get some positive results, you can get negative results from different years. It's all variable.

You'd think we'd know by now what root stock to use, how to prune, how to do this, how to make wine, et cetera. But every year is so different, even in the production of wines. I find everything so different every year. Sure, you have a basic rule, but there are so many deviations from it that you have to research everyday decisions. You'd never come up with a nice, clean-cut answer.

Phvlloxera and Pierce's Disease

I.-.., Teiser: Have you had any phylloxera?

Mondavi: Not that I'm aware of. The rootstock that have been planted are resistant to phylloxera. I know that some of the growers with basically new land had put in natural root stock, but they only expected it to last maybe fifteen years and then they were going to turn it over to real estate or something like that. In other words, they had other things in mind. Natural root stock is fine, but there's always the danger of phylloxera, and it's prevalent.

We do have a virus, Pierce's Disease, which seems to be the real troublemaker around that I recall. Pierce's Disease is still around and I think still gives everyone trouble, especially on Chardonnays. That seems to be the one that is always attacking the Chardonnay vines. We were exposed to that virus here on the home property, on Chardonnay. On the Yountville [property], too, they had Chardonnays, and Pierce's Disease was always getting to those. They couldn't seem to control it. I don't know about the Carneros region yet. The only problems we've encountered there so far is water. You need a drip system or some kind of a water system down there because there is a lack of water, shallow soil. It's excellent for Chardonnays and Pinot noirs, and even , but you need a drip system, which we eventually will put in. Mechanical Harvesting

Teiser: Have you been involved with mechanical harvesting and mechanical pruning?

Mondavi: Oh, yes, for a number of years. I can't recall the number of years--tenyears or more--thatwe've had mechanical harvesters. I was always in favor of them because of the difficulty in having the grapes hand harvested. It became a real problem. For one thing, you always have to have meetings with the field workers because they always wanted more money. If you went from one vineyard to the other you'd have to argue about the wage scale, et cetera, et cetera. And it took so many people to do it. I mean, there was a period when we were having something like a hundred pickers. Just to handle a hundred pickers--theycome and go, come and go. You have a lack of control.

I would say that today it's more stable, because in those early days there were migrant workers. Now, today, the fact that you have can harvest quite a bit of your grapes with the mechanical harvester, depending upon the terrain, you actually have more permanent workers. In our case, where we used to bring in, say, a hundred temporary field workers, that was really very difficult to handle. But with mechanical harvesters you maintain a smaller crew but a steadier crew all throughout the year.

Teiser: Do you notice any difference in quality?

Mondavi: No, I don't see that there's any. As a matter of fact, we could expect better quality in the mechanical harvesting. In the early days when they had field workers, you had leaves and everything else in your gondola. Whereas with the mechanical harvester they harvest the grapes much cleaner; in fact, you never have leaves. The beauty about the mechanical harvester is that when your particular vineyard is mature and ready for harvesting, you can get in there and harvest day and night. The only problem at that point is that you have to have larger crushing facilities, which we have, and also fermenting tanks, because the grapes come in in large amounts.

You can harvest at night, which is particularly beneficial for the whites. Because the whites should be harvested when they're cold. If you harvest them in the daytime, they probably come in at easily 85 or 90 degrees temperature, and that's just too warm. Because when you crush those grapes you've already started an oxidation process going with the excessive heat. When you harvest at night, you'll probably come in at around 60 degrees. The first thing we do when those white grapes are crushed is to cool them down as rapidly as we can, regardless of temperature. We try to get them down to almost 45 degrees, so the colder they come in the better. If they come in at 85 or 90 degrees, when you get the hot spells, your grapes are over-maturing. That's the other thing: in mechanical harvesting you can get in and really harvest day and night, to harvest them at the better sugar and acid level.

Mechanical harvesting, I think, is a big asset to the industry, because there's no way you can handle all these things. It's just like bottling lines: if you didn't have automatic bottling lines you could never hand-fill these bottles; you could never catch up. [laughs]

Teiser: About what percentage now of your crush is mechanically harvested?

Mondavi: I would guess that at least 75, possibly up to 80, 85 percent. The only one that really stymies us is the Brown vineyard, because it's quite hilly. At the lower levels you can mechanically harvest, but when you get to the steeper areas it becomes dangerous to use a mechanical harvester.

Purchasinn of Gamav and Zinfandel Graves

Teiser: Do you also buy grapes?

Mondavi: Yes, we do buy grapes. The twelve hundred acres is devoted to breed the varietals that we need. The only two varieties that we do not raise are the Zinfandel and the Gamay. At one time Zinfandel was not that important; today it's very important for the White Zinfandel. As for making a red Zinfandel, it doesn't have the importance of premium or super-premium wine. There's limited amounts around, but it's very limited.

And Gamay is not a demand item. There seems to be an overproduction of Gamay. I think it makes a delightful wine, properly made. It's a very nice wine, similar to a certain extent to the Pinot Noirs because they are light and pleasant to drink. But the public does not seem to go for it; they seem to go for the outstanding wines like the Cabernets. The Pinot Noirs and the Gamays take a back seat to the other reds. Of course, Zinfandel, also to a limited extent, produces a very nice wine, but it just is not an accepted item by the public.

Teiser: Do you buy wine, too, sometimes?

Mondavi: Very seldom do we buy wine. Our practice has always been to crush and produce all of our own wine.

Pneumatic Pruning

Teiser: What about mechanical pruning?

Mondavi: We had what you call pneumatic pruning--inother words, semi- automatic. These pruning shears had a little four wheel drive unit with a compressor and so forth, and they had a boom overhead with about four man-operated pneumatic shears on one side and about four on another side. They'd go down the rows and prune. But the bad part about that was that the cuts would not be as clean, and the fact that the little four-wheel dolly, so to speak, was traveling along at a certain pace, be it one mile an hour or whatever, made it difficult. The people would have to prune fast, and then of course the quality of the pruning was very poor. So we discontinued that.

I don't know of anyone that's using this pneumatic pruning. In other words, these are power-driven shears. The only one that could be of some benefit, and maybe in some cases is, is what I call a hedge pruner. It's something like a mechanical harvester that goes overhead, or a vine trimmer that cuts the long shoots off, but then after that they have to do the real pruning. But these pneumatic pruners were always going too fast and the people cutting got a little reckless, so the quality of pruning was not satisfactory. V NEW FACILITIES AND TECHNICAL ADVANCES##

Teiser: Can you briefly summarize your use of computers?

Mondavi: When Pete, Jr., came into the business here, after he graduated from Stanford where he took mechanical engineering in '80 and '81, we were undertaking additional construction, so around '82 and '83 we started with the computer. The first computer we had was an HP 1000--HewlettPackard. Subsequently we had an HP 3000 for business purposes. The first move on the computer was actually for the temperature control and production operation, mainly, recording the receipt of the grapes and so forth. That was our first major step, and then following right behind that was actually the business end of it.

My first preference, of course, being so devoted to production and quality control of production, was to install that computer system as much as we could for the production phase of it. Because in my early years production control got very, very difficult with all the temperature readings and going around checking this and checking that. They were just so time- consuming. But right behind that came the business computer, which was so important.

Teiser: What does it do?

Mondavi: It gives us an awful lot of information. As far as the computer and production, that saves man hours because we get all the temperature readings for all the fermentors automatically. It prints out, so we have no problem whatsoever. As far as sugar testing, we still have to go around and sugar test. I wanted to install a system where it would automatically read the sugar, but they do not have any units that are successful enough to tell you what the sugar content is, especially because of the alcohol content. You have the combination of alcohol, extract, one thing or another. You have a complicated setup there, so you cannot get automatic sugar readings.

That saved a lot of man hours as far as production. When it came to the office work, either we don't have it programmed the way we want it or we have so much programming in it, instead of saving time it takes full time. It has not eliminated any work. It's given us an awful lot of information, which is great. I do think we have to study our program. I think that is one of the problems with computers, that there's constant programming and re-programming--gettinginformation and then finding out that you need more information, and this and that. There's an awful lot of paper involved with it, too, just huge volumes of paper. That's one of the bad things about computers. You have a tremendous amount of information, but if you don't sit down and study it and execute it, make your decision based on that--I'm talking about a lot of things--it gets very, very complicated. And if you don't spend enough time to study a thing, it's a lost cause.

Winerv Additions and Construction

Teiser: Your original building was the one out here, wasn't it?

Mondavi: No, that's the carriage house. That was built in 1881.

Teiser: Did you actually add any buildings before the 1960s?

Mondavi: It was '57 when we made our first addition, but it was not adjoining these buildings. These buildings are entirely separate from the new construction. This complex where we are now was built in 1981, but the adjoining buildings here are really one unit; 1957 was our first construction year on this site. Then in 1969 we made another big addition, and in 1980 and '81 we made our final addition here, on this particular complex here. Those two historical buildings are completely independent.

Teiser: The tanks you have behind and to the south of this building-- when were they installed? The outdoor, free-standing ones.

Mondavi: That was part of this 1980 and '81 construction, those big stainless steel tanks that you see outside. During that construction we actually installed a complete winery, you might say. The only thing that we didn't put in, and which we have yet to put in, is the new bottling line. Otherwise it was a complete winery.

The carriage house has aging barrels and the original cellar is used for temporary aging or temporary storage of wines. The old constructions from 1861 and 1881 are merely storage cellars. We had what we called a lean-to over there which was a lean-to on the original cellar and which was the fermenting room up until 1980. (The lean-to is now being dismantled.) Since the construction in '80 and '81, all our crushing and fermentation has been in the new facilities. So the historical buildings are 'only used for aging of wine.

Teiser: You still have exterior housing for a lift over there.

Mondavi: The conveyor? We still have that on the original 1861 building, a belt conveyor for moving the cases up and down. Up until 1957 we did all of our bottling upstairs on the third floor of the original cellar.

Teiser: Does the conveyor still work?

Mondavi: Oh, yes, it still works. We still have a few cases up there, but it's just merely storage up there on the third floor now, odds and ends.

Teiser: You don't see many of those still.

Mondavi: No, not any more.

Mondavi: But on case goods here, an elevator like that--that's unusual to bottle up on the third floor and convey down. But there was room on the third floor, so the practical thing was to utilize it.

Crushinn Bay and Fermentation Technolony

Teiser: I have here under new facilities, which I got from a news release, "Crushing bay, fermentation tanks, computer recording, transfer lines, and pressurized tanks." Did the crushing bay represent a technological advance?

Mondavi: Not the crushers themselves, but I would say that the fermentors that we have out there that receive the crushed grapes, the must, are quite advanced in their own operation. They were especially designed by us; they were double-wall tanks, insulated throughout, and with the ammonia jackets, which was one of the important things there.

Other plants have an auger system for the removal of the skins and seeds after the fermentation is completed. It eliminated the hand labor. Our original fermentors 'were open wooden fermentors and they had to shovel the pomace out; once the juice was drained, then the skins and seeds had to be shoveled out. Whereas with this new setup over here, it's a combination of ideas from what we saw in Europe and what we've seen in the U.S., as far as the design of these new fermentors.

I think the heart of it is in the computerization through the Allen-Bradley computer that operates all the valves automatically. I think that's a big asset here. It's a push button affair for the crushing and also for the draining and the transfer of the juices. A lot of the others were on a kind of manual system. Especially in the larger wineries they are probably manual, but ours are all set up on a computer system. I think that's one of the important features of our fermenting setup.

Pressurized Tanks

Teiser: What are meant by pressurized tanks?

Mondavi: I think that refers to our glass-lined tanks, which withstand about thirty-five pounds of pressure. Whereas I think stainless steel would withstand about a pound of pressure, because they're not built for pressure. Not the standard tanks in the wine industry. They are using stainless in the brewing industry, where they use thicker stainless steel. You can get it, but it doesn't pay. Just for temporary storage of wine. But our glass-lined tanks, which are actually brewery tanks, are the true blue glass lining, not epoxy.

What's important in that case is that sterile filtration basically requires constant low pressure. In other words, you should not fluctuate the pressures in what we call depth filtrations and pad filtrations. With the glass-lined tanks that will withstand up to thirty-five pounds of pressure, we apply maybe fifteen or twenty pounds of nitrogen pressure on the tank, which will then force the wine through the filter to the filling machine. That way we have a constant pressure. If we set it at fifteen pounds, it stays at fifteen pounds; if we set it at twenty pounds pressure, it stays at twenty pounds pressure. So you have perfect control as far as the pressure is concerned. When you're talking about tanks that will take pressure, you're referring to the glass-lined tanks.

Teiser: There are various technical advances that you mention--pumping over.

Mondavi: In the new setup we have stationary pumps. It took a couple of years of research to find out which pumps could handle the juice and the fermentation and not plug up. It's the reds we're talking about now, because you ferment all the skins. In the crushing of the red grapes you always have some of the little particles of the stem and so forth that tend to plug up the pump. When we found the special pump that would handle the juice along with these little pieces of stem or whatever, we installed them to pump the juice over the top.

During red fermentation your skins will rise to the surface and tend to dry out. You do not get the color extraction with the pomace floating above the juice, so you have to pump the juice over maybe two or three times a day so it soaks the cap, which is the skins, and extracts that much more color and flavor. We have such pumps installed, and it's a permanent setup with a pump for each tank, with a stainless steel transfer tube that goes all the way up to the top and enters into the top of the tank and then sprays the fermenting cap. They do that with a push-button system. Eventually that will be put on the computer, too, so it will be pumped over automatically without any personnel having to be around.

Malolactic Fermentation Controls

Teiser: You have special controls for malolactic fermentation?

Mondavi: All of our red wines undergo malolactic fermentation. We don't do anything special about it. We did research work in the early days. As a matter of fact, the University didn't know much about it. I happened to come across the fact that the new wines were losing a tremendous amount of acid. They would start with a .7 and dropped down to about .4 or .45, which seemed to me quite abnormal. I checked with the University, and between them and myself we realized that these wines were going through a malolactic fermentation.

We did some experimenting with the Lactobacillus from laboratories, but we found that when we applied that in our cellar--we did some experimenting with that versus just a natural malolactic fermentation on its own--that the cultured strain was not nearly as good as our own natural strain. I think one of the reasons was that we kept our wooden tanks really healthy and sound, and the grapes were sound, so the Lactobacillus that was present was healthy and gave us the nice malolactic clean fermentation. Whereas the cultured bacteria developed off odors. As a result we stayed with our own natural culture in the tanks, or on the grapes, you might say. Malolactic fermentation takes place usually during the winter months, right after the harvesting. All the reds undergo that. We watch it to make sure they go through the malolactic completely. That goes through within probably a couple of months, and by February or March those wines that will have gone through it are probably filtered or clarified and clean enough to go into barrels for their barrel aging.

For the whites we do not want malolactic fermentation, because we feel that it lowers the acid much too much. It seems to be beneficial for the reds but not for the whites. As far as the malolactic fermentation on the whites, a limited amount of sulfur dioxide seems to control it. And of course you don't have all the extract in the whites that you do in the reds. There seems to be a lot of malic acid in the reds, so if it doesn't go through a malolactic you have the danger of it going through it in the bottle, because the Lactobacillus is very difficult to filter out.

In the case of whites being low in extract and having probably more free sulfur dioxide in the wine, it prevents it from going through the malolactic fermentation. I'd say some wineries like to have their whites go through a malolactic, but in my experience so far I'd prefer not to go through a malolactic in the whites.

Teiser: Did you do any work with Andre Tchelistcheff on malolactic?

Mondavi: We did work very closely together. He was interested in our work, and we were interested in his knowledge. We worked very closely together in all those early years, when he was with Beaulieu Vineyard. We used to have tastings and so forth, and we used to discuss the wines. We had developed that cold fermentation, which he was very much interested in. We were very ambitious, doing as much experimenting as we could, and so that created his interest, too. We'd do the work, and he had a lot of good ideas because he'd had tremendous experience in the production of wine, no question about it.

Teiser: I think it was Beaulieu's problems with fermentation in the bottle that may have brought him to California.

Mondavi: Oh, is that right? I wasn't quite aware of that. I knew they were having problems. I just have vague recollections of where he was having to go through all of his tanks and really clean them up. You're probably right, that probably was the problem. [laughs]

Centrifuning

Teiser: Do you use centrifuging?

Mondavi: Yes, we do. The reason we came across centrifuging is that in our early days, with the cold fermentation, we wanted to arrest the fermentation. We could stop it by chilling it down cold, but then we had to clean that wine out. If we didn't clean it up, it would start refermenting. That meant that we had to clean that wine, and the only way we could remove all, or 99.9 percent of the yeast, was to filter it. We found that very, very difficult. In the early years, naturally our volume was small and we were able to filter these lots.

Even with a large filter that would normally filter around twenty thousand gallons of wine that was reasonably clean--say, hazy--we could only filter about fifteen hundred gallons of this very cloudy fermenting juice that had been stopped by chilling. Where you would normally filter twenty thousand gallons, all we could filter was about fifteen hundred gallons.

We did some research work when I got out of the service with some of the centrifuges from Europe, but they were completely inadequate, their volume and capacity. Then Westphalia was introduced here, so we tried it out and were quite satisfied with it. You set it automatically, and you could remove a tremendous amount of the cloudiness--theyeast, the pulp, and so forth--fromthe fermentation, and then follow up with the filtration. We were able to centrifugally remove a good percentage of that cloudiness; it still left a haze, though. We could powder filter then around twenty thousand gallons. Because it was impossible to filter all these wines with a powder filter, even if we went to a large, huge filter; it would have had to have been just an enormous filter. So centrifuging has been a big help in this respect.

Other Production Techniques

Teiser: Have you used ion exchange at all?

Mondavi: No. We experimented with it, but we didn't like the results so we just stayed away from it all together.

Teiser: Are there other production techniques that we should ask you about?

Mondavi: Well, the main things that I feel we developed were the cold fermentation, which is so important, and sterile filtration, which was very important and is being used today. French oak barrels, I think, is another major step in the industry, and I don't know what we'd be doing without those in this wine business, to tell you the truth.

I will say this, the real research that we are working on now--whichwe've done in the past years, too--is skin contact time on the whites. We know that skin contact time on the whites is quite important. The other important thing is the tasting of the reds to get a proper tannin content during the fermentation. We'll taste the red when it's gone through maybe two-thirds of the fermentation to try to control the amount of tannin in there and to avoid the bitter tannins which result from too long a skin contact time. I understand they now--I forget what you call it--keep the skins in contact with the juice for a period of maybe four to six weeks. It tends to soften the tannins that are picked up. We did some research work on it with one of the varieties, but we really didn't care for it that much. So we're staying with the traditional production methods.

Experimentation with Barrels

Mondavi: One of the other important things is the barrel fermentation of Chardonnays. I think that's something that's of interest. Even more so is my interest in doing a lot more research on the barrels themselves--the French oak barrels. I think that there's an awful lot yet to be learned--orstrai'ghtened out, let's put it that way. In the early days, in the '60s, we had excellent French oak barrels for our Chardonnay. We found that just fermenting in our glass-lined tanks, or even in our redwood tanks, and then aging it in those French oak barrels, we had excellent, really top-quality Chardonnays. We have very nice Chardonnays today, but of a different style. So now we're going back and trying to find the producer in France that will supply us the type of wood that will give us the quality that we feel is even superior to what we have today.

Teiser: What kind of French oak do you prefer?

Mondavi: Actually, Nevers seems to be the basic wood. Then there's Allier and Vosges. Those are the three that we're really working on. We've worked with Limousin, and it has a very strong character, very tannic. I think more work has to be done on that, but when you use the Limousin you don't have that softness that you do with Nevers, Allier, or Vosges. So we've kind of eliminated Limousin, although we're running some tests on it.

We have some of those barrels, and as a matter of fact we did some bottling of those wines and we're studying the maturing quality of those wines. We had new Nevers barrels and new Limousin barrels, so we aged the same Cabernet in both of those barrels, and then we bottled some of them independently. We found that the Limousin was very tannic. As one person said, it kind of zaps you; it hits you in the nose, in the aroma, and also in the taste. It's so pronounced, as against Nevers, which is milder and softer. We're aging it in the bottles now just to see if the Limousin will outdo the Nevers in the long run. It'll probably take another five years before we really know.

We experimented using Yugoslavian barrels, which are considered very good, but from the information we have they don't seem to impart any particularly better character than some of these others. Yugoslavian was recommended for Cabernets at one time, but I think it was more the availability and the dollar value.

Mondavi: In the French oak barrels we want them thoroughly air-dried. We're running research on air drying and also research on the toasting.

It's not only the toasting, but it's the length of the toasting. If you slow toast it, versus rapid toasting, you get a different effect, because you don't get the penetration of the heat into the wood if you do fast toasting. VI MARKETING IN THE 1980s

New Directions

Teiser: Have you been involved yourself in the Wine Institute or ASE [American Society of Enologists]?

Mondavi: I was a member of both, and now I've put Marc in as a director of the Wine Institute. Quite frankly, we never seemed to find the time--ourbusiness keeps us so preoccupied--todo what we would like to do. However, now with both Marc and Pete, Jr., in the business we're finding more time. Before, I carried the full load myself, which was not too bad in the early days because it was devoted essentially to production and I was well- versed on that. I wasn't marketing and sales oriented; it was a question of production, moving out the merchandise in the '70s.

I would say that in '81 or '82 the market changed completely. Fair trade was ended just a little bit before that, though. Then the marketing and business conditions changed altogether, and since the early '80s marketing has become very important. Marketing and sales have always been important, there's no question about that, but it's become so much more important today. I guess for one thing there are so many wineries around now, and they're all doing a good job on their wines. Every wine's a little different, but they're all doing a very good job on their wines.

I don't care what size you are, a little boutique or the others. I know that some of the small boutiques have to spend so much of their time on the road selling. It's amazing. A lot of them didn't realize it was going to take that much time. They say, Jesus, if they'd known that they might not have gotten into the business! It's taking an awful lot of time in travel. Even my sons now are having to travel. I would have loved to travel in the early days, but I was so tied down with all the requirements here. Between vineyard buying, construction, and one thing or another, it seemed like we were always either buying vineyard land or constructing and working along those lines because of the necessity to have your own supply of grapes, which was very important, and equally important today.

Teiser: Is either of your sons interested in production?

Mondavi: They are interested in production, but they were more interested before. Now they've gotten so involved with sales and marketing, which is so important. Pete is involved with the financing, which is very important--projectionsand so forth-- and Marc is involved with the vineyards but more so on the sales and marketing. Actually, we're all stressing the sales and marketing now. All these years, really, we've been devoting ourselves to buying vineyard land, producing wine, and distributing it because the demand was there. Marketing was there, but it wasn't as intense as it is now.

Let's look at how many wineries you have now in California, and even right here in the Napa Valley. How about Sonoma County? Probably as many wineries as we have here now. Sonoma County maybe had around twenty-five also in the early days, just as we had over here. Now I would imagine Sonoma County probably has 150 or 200 wineries, just as we have about 200 over here. You can imagine the competition in these past fifteen years, and especially now in these past few years.

If you don't get out and sell your wine, nobody will. The distributors are not sales people, so to speak; they're order takers. People we've done business with have told me that the best they can do is deliver our wine. Sure, they try to sell it, but they have so many items to sell. If we were to sit back they would probably sell someone else's because they were over there pushing or getting the consuming public to taste their wines and get their attention.

Of course, let's face it, we weren't backward either in that respect. When I got out of the service in '46, one year we spent quite a lot of money advertising in the Bay Area. But we didn't seem to see any results, so then we started lawn tastings, and we started tasting with our distributors and also tasting with groups that were interested. I'd say that in those days they were interested because it was a growing thing, something new. The only way we could get to the consuming pubic was to have lawn tastings. In the early days that was part of sales and marketing.

That today is equally important, because the way I look at it we're teaching a new generation. Now the younger generation that is so involved with wine, they like to know more about the wines as wines become more sophisticated and so forth. I'd say the premium field, thank the Lord, seems to be the important field now, versus your vin ordinaire. Because they're always going into the varietals. The volume is not increasing, but the dollar is moving laterally from the vin ordinaire over to your mid-premium varietals, and to your premium and super-premium varietals. Everything is getting better. It's just a question of what's going to happen with the cost. Whether the consumer will accept higher prices, especially with the mid-premium, which is now starting to elevate in cost. Who knows what's going to happen?

Arrangement with Seanrams

Teiser: This leads in to your arrangement with Seagrams. How did you happen to decide to go into that?

Mondavi: Well, we were not looking for that, to tell you the truth. We were approached. Mr. Sam Bronfman called me over the telephone and said he wanted to meet with me. I said fine, if he wanted to come visit, because I'd seen him at the Wine Institute meetings and so forth, and they were up in the valley here all the time anyway. He expressed interest in marketing our wines. He felt that we had the history, the knowledge, and the know- how for producing wines, but he felt that with their strength we could progress faster than we were progressing.

We had a pretty good sales organization of about twenty- two people all together, including the secretary. We were at the point of making good progress, and we had balanced our inventory. In the early '80s and up until, say, two years ago, there were so many new wineries that the competition became keen. Those who were really marketing-oriented maintained their growth.

In our case here, we were devoting too much of our time to production and to acquiring vineyard land, as well as construction of facilities--and,believe you me, this facility doesn't look very complicated, but it represents years of study. Even during construction we underwent numerous changes to fit the ultimate on the entire operation. It took of our time, the three of us. We were just so occupied with it that we could not devote the time to marketing, although we had sales staff. We had to rely on them to market our wine, but with competition being as strong as it was, why, we lost ground--as did a number of the others.

Let's face it: when you're a boutique winery you can usually get rid of your wine; you can sell it. You get preference on that because you are a boutique. When you are a larger winery they don't look at you. It's like a has-been. Although now I think it's kind of changing around, because everyone is getting properly set with their marketing and sales organization.

So Sam Bronfman called me and said they would be interested in marketing our wines because they felt that they had the staff. We reviewed it back and forth, back and forth, because we were approached by others, too. Naturally, it's just like the consolidation of these chain stores, buying one and buying the other. In this case here, I told Sam that if he was interested in our company, we were not interested; but if he was interested in circulating sales and marketing, fine. If he took that off our hands, fine, because I'd say they had about fifty people. Then they'd add on another ten of ours and that would give us strong selling power.

The brands that they have didn't compete with ours. For instance, they have Sterling Vineyards, and they also added on Mirassou and had their imports. So they don't compete against our wines. One of our concerns is that when you're dealing with someone, you don't want their brands to compete with yours. We do have distinctively different types of wines. Their style of winemaking is different from our style of winemaking.

They specialize in marketing, point of sale material, and so forth. They are large enough to do it, and with their background and with their other businesses they have the strength.

After a number of meetings we felt it was the best thing to do. As I say, it's not something that necessarily goes on forever. It's a seven-year contract, and if it doesn't work out we split and establish ourselves--start off with a new sales organization.

Teiser: Meanwhile it's saving you--

Mondavi: It's saving us a lot of headaches. We still have a lot of things that we're resolving here right within our organization. I'm talking about the vineyards, and this and that. It's taking a lot of attention. This way a lot of the mental burden is taken off as far as sales and marketing. Of course, then they have to produce. So we'll make sure that they do produce. [laughs] We watch figures.

Meanwhile, the boys started about a year ago to make trips, which are so important. Oh, they started before. It's taken this many years to get our plant organized, all the facilities in order, and balance our inventories, get our wines back into the quality that we were capable of producing. Now I'd say everything has been very well straightened out. We just got to the point about a year ago where both my sons were able to start going out into the market, carrying on tastings. That was building up very, very nicely. Then when Seagrams approached us, we felt maybe that would help that much more. We had a good staff, but when you add another forty or fifty people something good is bound to come out.

They've made some changes in distributors. We made a number of changes in the past three years in distributors, because they were changing. They've had problems, too, of handling wines and doing a good job for all their customers. Some of these distributors had three or four thousand items. Now they're going to watch that. You know, it's pretty hard to watch all those things. We saw the problem that they had, and I'd say they were getting themselves straightened out. And if they didn't straighten themselves out, we made some changes in the past few years. Now with Seagrams they've made some more changes which we were going to watch.

But it took the burden off of doing all these things. We were doing all the posting of prices and things like that, so now it's their responsibility. It's kind of cleaned house. They have to take care of that and do all the point-of-sale material, all the bins, and all those things. And let's face it, they probably have all these artists on their payroll to do their artwork, and if not they go commercially and can get it done. You have to specialize in that, you have to spend time with all those things.

Teiser: You and your sons, then, can do personal sales.

Mondavi: That's right. We will be out there for personal appearances and carry on tastings, which we like to do. Of course, the boys will be doing more of it. They have their trips planned, I know. Well, they figure that they will probably be gone at least six one-week trips a year, each of them, if not more. Locally, in California, it will probably be that much more; that's in and out, so it's not so bad. Everyone's doing that, and in the past year we've found ourselves in the position where we were able to do those things. Everything is on the right track now. It didn't come easy. They say you have to work for all good things, anyway.

Transcriber and final typist: Judy Smith TAPE GUIDE -- Peter R. Mondavi

Interview 1: 31 May 1988 tape 1, side a tape 1, side b tape 2, side a

Interview 2: 3 June 1988 tape 2, side b tape 3, side a tape 3, side b APPENDIX I 6 0

CHQRLES URWG QnD C-U t?lOnDFlVl UJlnES

POST OFFICE AREA CODE 707 BOX 191 963-2761

ST. HELENA -- CALIFORNIA 94574

CORPORATE VINEYARDS DATE OF PURCHASE LAND ACRES

1. Charles Krug Winery & Property Sept. 18, 1943 2. Fracchia Ranch June 30, 1971 3. Jenks-Voltz Property April 19, 1971 4. Trubody Property (leased) April 30, 1971

., 5. Brown Property May 21, 1968 6. Cabral Property July 8, 1970

SUBTOTAL

FAMILY OWNED VINEYARDS DATE OF PURCHASE LAND ACRES

1. Mondavi Properties June 1966 2. Page Home Finders Property Jan. 1969 3. Slinsen Property May 1968 4. Mrs. Page (leased) May 1974

SUBTOTAL

GRAND TOTAL APPENDIX I1

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Mike Rubin The Seagram Classics Wine Co. 415-378-3800 Marc Mondavi 707-963-2761

CHARLES KRUG AND SEAGRAM CLASSICS ENTER INTO WORLDWIDE AGREEMENT

ST. HELENA, Calif. March 21, 1988 -- C. Mondavi & Sons, Inc. and The Seagram Classics Wine Company have signed a long 4 b term agreement for worldwide marketing and sales of the famed

Charles Krug and C.K. Mondavi table wines, it was jointly announced today. "We look at this as an exciting venture between the Napa Valley's most historic winery and the finest premium wine marketing organization in the country, which makes this more than a traditional distribution agreement. Our agreement will benefit both C. Mondavi & Sons and Classics now and into the future," said Peter Mondavi, president and owner of Charles Krug . He-emphasized that the Peter Mondavi family, with sons Marc and Peter Jr., will continue in its full ownership and operation of the Napa Valley's first winery, which dates back to 1861, and would remain highly visible in the marketing of Charles Krug and

C.K. Mondavi varietal and generic wines. - more - Sam Bronfman 11, president of Seagram Classics, said, "The Peter Mondavi family and the Charles Krug name are as recognizable and honored as any in the fine wine business. The family's reputation and commitment to the future, combined with the Kmg heritage, provide the basis for continued strong growth of their premium Napa Valley wines.I1

"For Classics, this is consistent with our desire to be the preeminent marketer of fine wine brands in the United States," Bronfman added. Peter Mondavi said Classics8 "exceptional portfolio of premium California and imported wines and its skills in sales and marketing give us the confidence to focus our energies on grape growing and winemaking in which we specialize. Most importantly, we have established a strong sense of trust and rapport with Sam Bronfman and his people at classic^.^ The Charles Xrug Winery, just north of St. Helena, was the first in the Napa Valley and such industry giants as Carl Wente, Jacob Beringer and Charles Wetmore, founder of Cresta Blanca, all received early experience there. The winery fell into disuse following prohibition until it was purchased in 1943 by Cesare Mondavi, Peter's father, and the family restored the winery and its quality reputation. In more - more - recent years, the winery pioneered Chenin Blanc as a varietal in California and has been among the leaders with its Vintage Selection Cabernet Sauvignon. It was also a forerunner in planting the now well-known Carneros area. Peter Mondavi likes to balance both innovative technology and traditional techniques. For example, he was the first in California to employ cold fermentation of white wines, cold sterile filtration and French oak barrel aging, as well as the use of ultra modern glass-lined tanks. Krug currently produces more than one million cases of premium wine each year. Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., Classics marketed more than two million cases of fine wines in 1987. The company manages and markets the Seagram-owned Mumm Cuvee Napa methode champenoise sparkling wine and Sterling Vineyards wines from the Napa Valley, The Monterey Vineyard wines, Mumm Champagnes, the wines of Barton & Guestier and Julius Kayser German wines. Classics also markets Mirassou Vineyards and Bandiera California wines, Camel wines from Israel, and the Classicos of castello-d'~1bola from Italy's Tuscany region. "With the addition of Charles Krug and C.K. ~ondavi,no one has a more dynamic portfolio of ~aliforniawines -- and especially Napa Valley wines -- with such strong quality reputations and consumer franchises," said Bronfman. ### INDEX - - PETER R. MONDAVI

Acampo Winery and Distilleries, 14, Ferroggiaro , Fred, 37 15, 19 filter pads, 30 advertising, 26 filtration, 30-33, 49-50 , 28 fortified wines, 13 American Society of Enologists Frei Brothers vineyards, 35 [American Society for Enology and Fresno area, 2-3 Viticulture], 53 Arnerine, Maynard A., 28 Gallo, Julio, 35 Gallo, E. & J. Winery, 34-35 Bank of America, 37 Gould, Francis (Frank), 26, 29 Barengo, Dino, 13 Gould, Romilda (Romie), 26, 29 barrels, 20, 50-52 grape prices, 34-35 Beaulieu Vineyard, 48-49 grape shipping, 2, 4, 8, 24 Bottles and Bins, 28, 29 Guymon, James F., 9 bottling, 19, 21-22 Bradford Winery, 12-14 Bronfman, Sam, 55, 56 Helzer brothers, 3 bulk wine shipment, 19 home winemaking, 3-5

Carneros area, 36, 39 ion exchange, 50 centrifuging, 49-50 irrigation, drip, 39 clarity of wine, 32-33 Coca Cola Bottling Company, 26 consumer preferences, 6 Krug, Charles, Winery, 15-59 cooperage, 20-22 passim Cruess, William V., 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 computer system, 43-44, 46, 47 construction, 44, 55 historical buildings, 44-45 Dean, Mallette, 27-28 viticultural research, 38 distributors, 54, 57

labor, vineyard, 40 fair trade laws, 24-25, 53 Lactobacillus, 48 fermentation Lodi area 2, 13 barrel, 50 controlled temperature, 7, 8, 9- 12, 21-23, 49, 50 marketing and sales, 53-57 malolactic, 47-49 Marsh, George L., 9 skin contact time, 50 Martini, Louis M., 29 tannin control during, 50 mechanical harvesting, 40-41 membrane filtration, 31-32 tanks Mirassou Vineyards, 56 fermenting, 46 Moffitt, James K. 16 ' glass-lined, 22-23, 31, 46 Mondavi, Cesare (father of tastings, 26-27, 29, 54, 57 Peter R.), 1, 16, 17, 19, 20, 37 Tchelistcheff, Andre, 48-49 Mondavi, Marc, 38, 53, 54, 57 trucking rates, 24 Mondavi, Peter, Jr., 38, 43, 53, 54, 57 Mondavi, Robert, 15, 19, 20, 23, 37 University of California, Berkeley, Mondavi, Rosa (Mrs. Cesare), 1, 37 7, 8 Mondavi-Helzer shippers, 3

Vanderschalie, Paul, 38 Napa Valley area, 2 and passim Napa Valley Co-op [Cooperative Winery], 34 Westerbrook, Mary Mondavi, 37 Nestle Co., 24, 26 Wine Institute, 53, 55 night harvesting, 40-41 Woodbridge Vineyard Association, 13 phylloxera, 39 Pierce's Disease, 39 prices, wine, 24-25, 55 produce shipping, 2 Prohibition, 2 promotion, 26-27 pruning, pneumatic, 42 pumping over, 47 redwood cooperage, 21, 22 refrigeration, 8, 10, 22-23 root stock, 38-39 sales, 23-24, 26 Schoonmaker, Frank, 28 Seagrams [Classics Wine Co.], 26, 55-57 silting index, 32 Stanford University, 7, 8, 43 sterile filtration, 7, 30-31, 46- 47 Sterling Vineyards, 56 sulfur dioxide, 48 Sunny St. Helena Winery, 14, 15 Gra~eVarieties Mentioned in the Interview

Alicante Bouschet, 4 Cabernet Sauvignon, 17, 18 Carignane, 17 Chardonnay, 39 Chenin blanc, 6-7, 17, 18 ~Gamay, 17-18 Gamay Beaujolais, 18, 41 Gewiirztraminer, 18 Grey Riesling, 18 Johannisberg Riesling, 17, 18 Merlot, 18, 39 -.. a Muscat, 4, 5 Muscat Canelli, 18 Napa Gamay, 18 Pinot noir, 17, 39 White Pinot, 7 Zinfandel, 4, 17, 18, 24, 41, 42

Wines Mentioned in the Interview

Bravissimo, 5 Cabernet Sauvignon, 25, 41, 51 chablis, 5 Chardonnay, 25, 50-51 Chenin Blanc, 5, 6-8, 30 Fortissimo, 4-5 Gamay, 41 Pinot Noir, 41 Riesling, 5 ros6, 11 sauterne, 5 SBmillon, 5-6 Thunderbird, 18 Vouvray, 7 White Pinot, 7 White Zinfandel, 11, 18, 25, 41 Zinfandel, 41-42 Ruth Teiser

Born in Portland, Oregon; came to the Bay Area in 1932 and has lived here ever since. Stanford University, B.A., M.A. in English; further graduate work in Western history. Newspaper and magazine writer in San Francisco since 1943, writing on local history and business and social life of the Bay Area. Book reviewer for the San Francisco chronicle, 1943-1974. Co-author of Winemaking in California, a history, 1982. An interviewer-editor in the Regional Oral History Office since 1965.