The Salad Days

I was, quite innocently, leafing through the current Food & Wine magazine at the dinner table (usually a no-no in the Rittmaster household, but Anne was doing the sudoku, so sue me) and amongst the 'hey this would be fun to try' recipes (what was up with Bob Foley making wine in Red Hook, Brooklyn last month?) was a lot of wine stuff that both intrigued me (Lettie Teague exposing Gruner Veltliner for what it is....the Emperor's new Riesling) and ho-hummed me (what's up with pizza and Pinot Noir when there are at least a hundred Italian reds that simply scream for pizza). But I'll tell you what I saw that just flat out made my butt pucker.....the Mondavi ads. This poor winery has been raped and pillaged and left to flounder at the hands of some of wine's great Philistines and yet they have the nerve to quote Mr. Mondavi's great bon mots as if he were still still holding forth in the Vineyard Room before Jancis Robinson. Makes me really sad to see his cameo holding a glass of wine in those ads as if he were validating the plonk they are selling under his name these days. OK.....we know you've sold your soul, just quit rubbing my face in it.

Well, in the interest of making own little waves here in Blogland, I've decided to dedicate these next couple of episodes to relating for posterity some of my modest history with the Mondavis. As I have already mentioned, my four years with the 'small, family-owned winery' as we ironically referred to ourselves, coincided with a particularly dynamic period in their long history and, by virtue of my unique position, managed to experience a rather larger cross-section of the winery's activities than many others might have done.

The Robert Mondavi Winery was sort of a breeding ground for winemakers. Just from the top of my head (I have never claimed this to be a research paper- just a blog!) and in no particular order I can name Mike Grgich, Zelma Long, Ric Forman, Helen Turley, Warren Winiarski and Sandi Belcher as some of the figures that at one time or another lugged hoses around the Oakville winery. In my own tenure I got to know Michael Weis, Karen Culler, Jim Moore, Steve Lagier, Charles Thomas, Pat Maheny and a host of others, virtually all of whom have gone on to bigger and better things. In fact, there are few wineries I have visited in the Napa (or even Sonoma) Valleys that have not avowed some debt of gratitude to the Mondavis. I was, in no way, a winemaker, but during my six months in Oakville I helped make plenty of it, including punching down plenty of Pinot Noir, racking (and nearly drowning in) Cabernet and stirring up a boatload of Chardonnay lees. (My only start-to-finish wine was a couple of barrels of Opus One second crop that Greg Imbach and I made in his garage that we called 'Raid Red' thanks to the rather draconian solution we employed to deal with the four inch deep trail of nasty ants that attacked our ferment. Let's put it this way...the wine sucked and we definitely couldn't call it 'organic.' ). But Mondavi in those days was like that. It was a big laboratory for experimentation and there was enough latitude for everyone to advance whatever crazy theory they had. We tested screw tops of longevity, made wine both filtered and unfiltered, whole cluster or no-cluster, harvested early, harvested late. Blending trials were conducted on a round white table in the lab where the winemakers would trot out lot after lot (there were something like 300 distinct lots of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon alone for example) poured from tiny jars into glasses and anyone that happened by and had the time and knew their way around J-North or Plot P could write their comments with dry-erase marker right on the table. Who knew? You may have just created that year's Cab Reserve blend!

But make no mistake about it.....if your name wasn't Tim Mondavi, you were never going to truly hold sway as Mondavi's winemaker. And that's what made it such a great place to build your resume. Unending funds with which to screw around and nothing to lose.....eventually you'd be scouted and made an exec somewhere else and your resume would be that much richer for your time making Fume in Oakville.

I was scouted in Japan to look after the winery's interests there (and later 21 other countries) thanks to my rather unique skill set that included experience as a teacher ('education' is what they called 'sales' at Mondavi in those days) , Japanese language and total wine geek-dom. The interview process took some six months and included no fewer than three business class flights from Tokyo to Oakville to meet all kinds of people ranging from PR to HR with a bit of National Sales and the winemaking team thrown in, eating four-hour lunches and downing Echezeaux alongside Mondavi Pinot.

It was on the first one of these junkets that I met Gary Ramona, the V-P who pioneered Mondavi's export markets and the man who quickly convinced me that I wanted to torpedo my real career and dedicate the rest of my life to the Mondavis. I mean, I met the Mondavis repeatedly during the interview process, got along well with Tim (and still do), sparred with Michael (and still do) and paid homage to Mister and Margrit ( I ALWAYS will), but it was Gary that brought out the Kool-Aid with the Chardonnay Reserve and made me drink it from Riedel crystal. Gary bled Mondavi Cabernet and would do anything for Mr. Mondavi and it was his sheer passion for all things Mondavi that really turned my head.

But Gary was, I need to say here, dealt with not long after I was hired, in a very shabby manner by the family thanks to some classic Mondavi infighting, when his personal life came tumbling down around him in a singularly bizarre set of circumstances that involved his estranged wife, a for-pay psychiatrist and a set of 'recovered memories'. I am not here to pass judgement on Gary; what the hell do I know? But we had an event at Auberge du Soleil with a bunch of Mondavi importers and I wound up drinking old Cabernet on the balcony of the Auberge private room late at night with Gary, who was being tortured by having to be 'on' for a bunch of European agents who wanted nothing more than to suck down Opus and Mondavi Reserve Cabernet while, at the same time, deal with the events unfolding before him while being handed a resounding FUCK YOU from .....well, one of the family members. He was kind enough to divulge, quite diplomatically, the depth of his disbelief at the circumstances in which he found himself, and it was with utter shock that Gary told me only weeks later that he was 'going on leave' never, of course, to return. (I caught up with Gary a few years after I joined PRIMA, maybe 1995? and he was involved with some Chilean wine venture but I haven't heard from him since).

Anyway, Gary was very much with Mondavi when I accepted their offer and moved my wife and infant daughter from (pre-earthquake) Kobe, Japan to Yountville. By the way, I am deliberately avoiding talking about the V-P Export that actually hired (and eventually fired) me because....well, just because I don't like the guy and in four years at Mondavi he was the only one to whom I never I could relate. What a shame he held such sway over me. But I don't need to write about him. I am sure he is being a phony-ass bastard in New Mexico or where ever it was he went when he was finally axed at Mondavi and I don't care. Besides, it is my blog and if he wants to write one about me, he can.

We moved to a sweet little house on Mount Street (still there- I drive by whenever I have a snoot-full of Rose and fried smelts at Bisto Jeanty) and set about my six months training. Considering my position was newly created and there was no training manual anyway, I was pretty much left to my own devices and created for myself a program that involved lots of winemaking, visiting lots of other wineries, giving tours and tastings to the public (my greatest joy) and entertaining anyone that visited the winery from Asia. I used the Mondavi expense account to drink all of Mustard's 1970 Mondavi Cabernet, lunch at (the now defunct) Piatti's and using the Vineyard Room (and its wine cabinet) to advance the family's aims in the Far East. And in doing so I found an immense community of others passionately involved with the Mondavi cause. The afore mentioned Greg Imbach and good friend William Craig made up the 'Education' section and they spent hours in our trailer behind the winery showing me how winemaking had changed over the past decade. They are still great friends twenty years later. Winemakers like Steve (Lagier-Meredith) Lagier, Jim Moore, Charles Thomas and Karen Culler spent literally hours with me both during and after work hours. Connie, Kurt, Bill, Ralph and Roger (now Opus' director of PR, poor sod) worked me on the tours while Opus' Stu Harrison gave me the keys and the code to the just-built winery so I could sample barrels, pick grapes and lead tours, although it also became my favorite private picnic spot on the weekends when no one was about. I made friends with others selling Mondavi like Greg (T-Vine) Brown, Gary (Coho) Lipp and many others, many of whom I run into now as they try and sell their current wine at PRIMA. And then there were the others around the Valley (Jan Shrem at Clos Pegase was sooooo impressed that I recognized the Hans Hoffman painting above his desk but thanked Mr. Mondavi for helping clear the opposition to his Michael Graves designed winery) that opened their doors to me strictly on the strength of the Mondavi name.

Those were some great times. My daughter spoke English for the first time to someone other than Anne and I at Yountville Elementary and Anne was as relaxed as I've ever seen her. I drove the Mondavi company yacht (some sort of Oldsmobile) and we ate meat loaf at the (now Bistro Jeanty) Yountville Bar and Grill when we weren't shopping at Ranch Market in Yountville or Nob Hill in Napa and cooking for ourselves. It seems like every one of our friends from Japan found a reason to visit Northern California that summer including Rika-chan, a student of ours from Kobe, who thought it would be convenient to get her driver's license while staying with us. I will go to my grave remembering hitting the cantilever on the Pope Street bridge in St. Helena at 60 miles an hour with Rika aiming the Mondavi-mobile and my shitting a pickle. She actually failed her road test four times before being given a mercy license and told NEVER to drive again in the States.

Lots of other stuff happened. I mapped phylloxera from a hot air balloon, flew in Michael Mondavis new plane to Woodbridge (one of several great trips to Woodbridge....David Lucas...you're the MAN!), met my good friends Donald and Heather (no longer together) Patz at the now defunct Trilogy restaurant where they proudly showed off their very first vintage of Patz and Hall Chardonnay, drank two versions of Joseph Swan Zin- one harvested before and one harvested after the rain with Jim Moore and Charles Thomas and generally immersed myself in the wine current that ran under the Napa Valley. Anne and I genuinely dreaded flying back to Tokyo to start our 'mission' there that November.

Do I miss it now? Well, sure. But those were different times. I like to think it was a lot more innocent in those days. Opus One cost $50 and was the most expensive wine in the Valley. Bill Harlan was still selling real estate and Screaming Eagle was still in the nest. But so what? Though I am older and a helluva lot more jaded, I still get a kick out of seeing Greg Brown when he comes by to deliver his wine or when I bump into Michael Mondavi, out there being, well, Michael Mondavi.

We all knew there was a moment there where anything was possible. And as long as a kernel of that possibility exists, it's all good, man.