The House of Mondavi by Julia Flynn Siler

Author:Julia Flynn Siler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2007-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Less than a two hours’ drive to the south of Napa Valley, a flood of young executives in Silicon Valley made millionaires on paper by stock options were also breaking the rules of conventional corporate conduct. Most famously, W. J. Sanders III, the chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., threw a twenty-fifth anniversary party attended by eleven thousand employees and family members, California’s governor, thirty-six magicians, and the British rocker Rod Stewart. The star of the party was Sanders himself, who grew up poor in Chicago, and found himself hoisted to the stage on a cherry picker amid fireworks, a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and shouts of “Jerreeee, Jerree.” It was a period of exuberant optimism, but one that, at least in Silicon Valley, tended to celebrate self-made millionaires, rather than those who inherited their wealth and positions.

The Mondavis, on the other hand, were inheritors. They had gotten their start through Cesare and Rosa Mondavi’s hard work. Although Robert was a first-generation American, his offspring had comfortably settled into the right universities, clubs, and paths laid out for progeny of the upper class. By the third generation—Michael, Marcia, and Timothy—their father’s wealth and success had turned them into royalty in the small realm of Napa Valley. Robert was genuinely respected for his passion and hard work, but not everyone felt the same regard for his children. Some Mondavi employees, for instance, would call Michael and Timothy members of the “Lucky Sperm” club.

When the opportunity arose for the Mondavis to associate themselves with other members of the international wine crowd through a new organization called Primum Familiae Vini—Latin for “first families of wine”—they were among the earliest members. The idea for the group was hatched by Miguel Torres, of the Spanish family that had been cultivating vineyards since the seventeenth century, and Robert Drouhin of Burgundy, in 1990. The Mondavis, Italy’s Antinoris, and Britain’s Symington family were the next to sign on when the organization formally got off the ground in 1993. The Mondavis recruited the Baroness Philippine de Rothschild, and eventually membership was limited to a dozen families who positioned their group as an exclusive wine aristocracy.

The Mondavis were the sole American representatives of Primum Familiae Vini. Aside from fabulous black-tie dinners and the opportunity to rub elbows with European aristocrats, the group’s stated goal was to help one another with advice on how to successful pass a family business down from one generation to the next. Contrary to the bootstrap mentality of Silicon Valley, the Mondavis were embracing Old World values and seeking guidance on a question that Michael, in particular, had become preoccupied with: How to build a family dynasty?

The logical disconnect between family ownership and Wall Street’s short-term demands troubled some Mondavi employees. As the family gathered its Oakville staffers together in the bottling room in the spring of 1993 to explain why it had decided to take the company public, it naturally attempted to spin the news as a positive development in their evolution as a family and a company.

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