A Fine Blend

By Lisa Lapin

If credit for California’s wine industry can be given to one man, it’s Robert Mondavi. If it can be given to one institution, it’s UC Davis. Now the two join forces.

The way Robert Mondavi sees it, he’s the lucky one. It happened early on, before the Robert Mondavi Winery made his name one of the most recognized in the world, before the Opus One Winery partnered California and France. Even before the Napa Valley was on anyone’s map as a premium wine region, Mondavi says he learned lessons from UC Davis that made much of his success possible.

The man who Gov. Gray Davis said “is to the California wine industry what Cal Ripken Jr. is to baseball,” Robert Mondavi is often personally credited with the boom of California’s now $17 billion wine industry. But he, in turn, gives credit to his access to university faculty and a couple of good textbooks.

In his drive to create a respected California wine industry to rival that of France, Mondavi traveled the world. He borrowed techniques from the best wine houses in Europe, but found that the research being conducted in California went far beyond what he saw there.

“UC Davis did a tremendous amount of research work that was unique in the world, and we followed that religiously,” said the 88-year-old Mondavi . “We knew that if we stayed with that, eventually we would succeed. I knew after 25 years we had the climate, the soil, and the potential. All we had to do was learn to make (the wine)…. It was really the university that set me on the right road.”

When Mondavi and his wife, Margrit, joined an astounded crowd of wine and food scientists on Sept. 19, just minutes after the announcement that the couple had donated $35 million to UC Davis to help fund a wine and food institute and a performing arts center, the group rose in a resounding standing ovation. A humbled Robert Mondavi thanked the faculty for their contributions, saying, “We’re just lucky to be able to be a part of this.”

The way Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef views things, it is UC Davis that got lucky.

The campus received much more than the $35 million the Mondavis personally gave this past fall, a gift that will help the campus to secure its wine and food science programs’ international standings and name the Center for the Performing Arts. The greater gift to UC Davis, Vanderhoef says, is the ability to now be associated with the Mondavi name, to have it grace the showpiece performing arts center at the entrance to campus and, eventually, an institute at the campus’s front door that will build upon UC Davis’ agricultural heritage.

“The Robert Mondavi family has long been associated with the pursuit of excellence without compromise. Robert Mondavi transformed the [California] wine industry almost single-handedly,” Vanderhoef said. “That kind of leadership, that kind of innovation, is associated with the Mondavi family, and we love the fact that it will now be associated with UC Davis.”

But it wasn’t just luck that allowed the Mondavis and UC Davis to raise a toast to such an apparently perfect partnership. Parallel paths of progress and innovation led both to each other. Driving ambition prompted a scrappy Robert Mondavi, the son of Italian sharecroppers and immigrant miners, to progress from a self-described “modest, simple farming family” to the helm of one of the most respected wine empires of the world. Today, the Robert Mondavi company is still family-run and produces 16 labels and over 100 individual wines from the Napa Valley and other top regions in California, Italy and Chile.

Robert Mondavi’s story is not unlike that of UC Davis, which started as a simple university farm, fought to acquire pre-eminent scientists and emerged to become one of the greatest viticulture and enology programs in the world. Today, it’s hard to find a winery in the United States that does not have a UC Davis alum as wine maker or manager. And increasingly, the globe’s greatest wine regions, including Australia, France, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Argentina and Chile, send their wine progeny to study at UC Davis.

Both Mondavi and UC Davis began with humble origins. The story of their success is the making of today’s U.S. wine industry.

Early foundations

The university viticulture and enology program dates to 1880, when the California Legislature sensed the economic potential of California wine and mandated that the university take on the task of improving the industry, which at the time was primarily making jug wine. Varietals were mixed and fermentation science was—to put it mildly—crude. Phylloxera, the root louse responsible for killing grape vineyards in the 1980s, was also a problem a century ago. The founder of the university’s viticulture and enology program, Eugene Hilgard, focused much of his effort on developing phylloxera-resistant plants.

“Hilgard also told the Legislature that a lot of the wine being made in California was atrocious,” says California wine historian Jim Lapsley, a UC Extension specialist. “He said we could make better wine and won their support for the university.”

The early research was done by Hilgard and other UC Berkeley scientists on the University Farm, which would soon become known as UC Davis. Prohibition in 1919 put a stop to wine-making research, and the enology department was forced to concentrate on viticulture, with a focus on grape growing and fruit production over wine making. Today, more than 95 percent of the grapes grown in the U.S., and many of those grown around the world, come from plants originated at UC Davis.

Post-prohibition

By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the University Farm was on its way to becoming a full-fledged campus, offering degrees and expanding the number of faculty. A few years later, in 1939, the present-day enology building was constructed, complete with a wine cellar that today houses more than 60,000 bottles produced by decades of wine makers-in-training.

It was in this era that the future of California’s wine industry was ensured with the discovery that some grapes grew better in warm climates, some better in cool. This fundamental research formed the basis for today’s appellation system—great Chardonnays grown in the cooler evenings of Napa and Sonoma counties’ Carneros region, the best Cabernet Sauvignons from the center of the Napa Valley, strong Zinfandels from the Sierra foothills. All grapes planted today follow the climate research that evolved at UC Davis in the 1930s.

As UC Davis expanded, recent Stanford University graduate Robert Mondavi was eager to improve his own family’s grape business. In 1937, he went to work at a small bulk-wine business called Sunny St. Helena. “He said in his oral history that he used to bow his head in reverence when he passed Beaulieu and Inglenook, because they were the quality leaders in the valley,” Lapsley said. “Even at that time he knew that he wanted to be in the same league.”

Recognizing the future potential of bottled premium wine, Robert Mondavi convinced his parents, Cesare and Rosa, to purchase the Charles Krug Winery in 1943. Krug, the oldest winery in Napa, would be run by Robert and his brother, Peter, for 23 years.

During that same fortuitous period, UC Davis graduated its famed class of 1940, which included alums like Louis Martini. Others in the wine industry, including Ernest and Julio Gallo, were learning from UC Davis books and information distributed free to the industry as a public service to the state. One who was voraciously taking it all in was Robert Mondavi. “My bible was [UC Davis Professor] Maynard Amerine’s The Technology of Winemaking,” Mondavi said. “I learned to make wine only because I followed that book so religiously. I succeeded because of that.”

Post-war era

“It has been said with some truth that the scientific knowledge of grapes and wines advanced more in the three decades after World War II than in the preceding 2,000 years,” writes wine authority Charles Sullivan in A Companion to California Wine. “During those 30 years, the University of California at Davis became the world’s leader in the acquisition of this knowledge.”

The way Robert Mondavi tells it, despite the breakthroughs in university research, Napa Valley wineries post-World War II were still making “tank car wine” shipped by train in bulk to the East Coast where it was bottled in jugs. Most of the California wine sold in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s was sweet, fortified, dessert-type wine like sherry and port, which became a favorite staple of vagrants. It was responsible for the coining of the term “wino” and, as a result, the California wine industry was viewed with disdain as a purveyor of cheap alcohol.

Mondavi knew California could do better. He had grown up in an Italian family where wine was esteemed, part of every meal, a staple for health and good cheer—not abuse. From the age of 3, he says, he was drinking wine with meals.

“In moderation it can be good for you,” Mondavi says. “You abuse it, it’s bad. That’s what we have to get across.”

Under the Charles Krug label, Mondavi started his one-man campaign to change the American public’s perception of wine and California’s wine industry. He sought to make the Napa Valley a tourist destination and opened one of the region’s first tasting rooms to lure potential customers from the San Francisco Bay Area.

As an industry leader (he had been chair of the Wine Institute) in the early 1950s, Mondavi helped lead a movement to improve grape quality with better grape vines. Ultimately this effort became the plant propagation program now known as UC’s Foundation Plant Materials Service, and Mondavi was on the original industry board.

One of the first in the Napa Valley to realize that more profit was to be made in bottling wine on site, instead of sending it to the East Coast in bulk, Mondavi began bottling wine at Charles Krug. He then loaded those bottles into the back of a station wagon and, joined by his good friend and colleague Louis Martini, he drove across the country, peddling California’s wine bounty to the nation’s greatest restaurants and to anyone else who would welcome the pair. He challenged the chefs to pit California wines against French in tastings and then to put California on their menus.

“Most Americans at that time knew nothing about fine wines,” Mondavi has written. “So I knew I had to be patient. And work like hell.”

While the wine industry was being marketed by mavericks like Mondavi, UC Davis research work was focusing on wine quality. Previously, “good” wine was wine that hadn’t spoiled or soured. But by the late 1950s, UC Davis had learned to manage the bacteria that cause wine spoilage, and all the prior standards of wine quality were tossed aside.

The process called “malolactic fermentation” rejuvenated the wine industry, allowing the wine-making process to be controlled chemically to produce different flavors and quality.

“Had UC Davis not invented malolactic fermentation, today’s wine-tasting room workers wouldn’t have much to talk about,” said wine expert Darrell Corti of Corti Brothers in Sacramento. “People don’t realize that although wine is a very simple product—you take grapes, ferment them and bottle them—it’s actually very, very complicated.”

1960s

In his autobiography, Robert Mondavi summarized this complexity with a list of all a wine maker must know: “Wine making is both an art and a science, but it is not just one science . . . . You have to learn geography, geology, meteorology, agriculture, botany, biology, chemistry. A bit of physics . . . soil qualities, water tables, rootstocks, grape varietals, insect control, mold and fungus control, trellising and pruning, irrigation…intricacies of fermentation, yeast varieties, acid level . . . engineering, refrigeration and even welding.”

By the 1960s, all of the subjects Mondavi mentions had been integrated into the viticulture and enology curriculum, and enrollment was booming. The entire campus was experiencing a growth spurt as it evolved into a comprehensive university.

Mondavi was still on his own industry-improvement campaign, traveling to the best chateaux in Bordeaux, France. He brought back to California the concept of aging wine in new French oak barrels instead of steel tanks. He worked to fuse the American science and technology emerging from UC Davis with the Old World art. But his brother, Peter, was content to continue making wine at Charles Krug the way they always had, and a rift was starting to grow between them.

Ultimately, Robert Mondavi left Charles Krug in a very public split from his brother and sought investors to go off on his own. In 1966, at the age of 52, he founded the Robert Mondavi Winery. He located it on a prime Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard at To Kalon in Oakville, right next door to UC Davis’ new 40-acre experimental vineyard, where test vines still produce top-quality Cabernet today. Since the 1960s, Robert Mondavi and UC Davis have been neighbors.

“There was always a communication back and forth with the faculty and the students,” said Margrit Mondavi. “We feel very close to the institution.”

Mondavi’s first wine under his own label was a $1.79 bottle of Gamay rosé. In the next few years, he also developed a trademark Fumé Blanc and produced popular Chenin Blancs—drier than the sweet whites and reds for which California had been known.

“The Mondavis woke up the industry to white,” said Jess Jackson, who founded the Kendall Jackson winery on that white wine tradition, going on to produce his own first trademark Chardonnay in 1982 with UC Davis training.

Wine’s modern era

The 1970s saw another wave of prominent UC Davis alums entering the wine industry—Robert Mondavi’s son, Tim, among them. Tim Mondavi graduated in 1974 and today is at the helm as wine maker for the Robert Mondavi Winery, while guiding wine making at other top company properties. Another early 1970s alum, Zelma Long, was one of the first female wine makers in the Napa Valley and an early hire at the Robert Mondavi Winery, where she was chief enologist from 1973 to 1979 and the primary mentor to Tim. Long is one of the state’s most revered wine makers, moving from Robert Mondavi to Simi Winery and now making Zelphi Wines in Australia and South Africa.

Along the way, Robert Mondavi shared his own discoveries.

“He is one of the most open guys in the industry,” said James Wolpert, current chair of the viticulture and enology department. “He didn’t try to capture the whole market by keeping knowledge to himself. He always shared what he was doing. As far as he was concerned, the more the merrier.”

A major turning point in the California wine industry—and a fulfillment of one of Mondavi’s dreams—came in 1976, when a blind wine tasting pitting the best of the Napa Valley against the best of France put California wines on par with the French.

From there the California wine industry was anointed, and those skeptical East Coast restaurateurs began scrambling to put Napa Valley labels on their menus. Further enhancing wine’s place in American culture, Mondavi, under the guidance of Margrit Biever, his wife for the past 21 years, merged the arts with wine. The Robert Mondavi Winery became host to musical performances and showcased the work of California’s leading artists, including UC Davis’ Wayne Thiebaud.

To meet the demands of this burgeoning industry, UC Davis continued to broaden the scope of its research. In 1984, Professor Ann Noble’s sensory research led her to develop a wine aroma wheel that helped amateurs and professionals alike to discuss wine characteristics with new terms: buttery, oaky, berry flavored, citrus scented.

“She gave us all a common vocabulary to talk about wine,” said historian Lapsley.

In 1988, the UC Davis faculty turned the tables and looked to Mondavi for further inspiration, inviting him to take a prestigious position as a Regents Lecturer. In two separate speeches, Mondavi prophesied about the next big evolutions in the wine industry: the scientific confirmation of the health benefits of wine and the realization that food and the culinary arts would be a perfect pairing for wine.

“What we did in the wine business we can do in our culinary endeavors,” he said at the time. “And UC Davis can be extremely helpful in food, as it was in wine.”

His first prophecy was fulfilled just a few years later, when it was confirmed that, in moderate amounts, wine can actually be good for your heart and health. Since the 1990s, Professor Andrew Waterhouse has been studying how phenolic compounds in both red wine and chocolate act as antioxidants to prevent coronary heart disease and possibly cancer.

The latest research is in the area of grape genetics, where Professor Carole Meredith has discovered the parentage of some of the world’s finest grape varieties. Her work, in finding that Chardonnay, for example, is a descendant of a lowly grape once banned in France, has very practical significance both for preserving old and for developing new grapevine varieties.

“The research going on now, with genetics, I’m just amazed at what is being discovered,” Mondavi said. “And there is still so much more we can learn.”

A high priority for wine makers and grape growers is continuing research into devastating plant diseases, which continue to plague California’s vineyards and challenge scientists. UC Davis plant pathologists and viticulturists are working to control Pierce’s disease, a bacterial disease transmitted by an insect, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, that threatens not just California’s wine industry, but table grapes and raisins as well. Bruce Kirkpatrick, an associate professor of plant pathology, and Andy Walker, an associate professor of viticulture, are working to breed grapevines that resist the disease.

Two other grapevine diseases that have grown increasingly troublesome to California wine-grape growers are also the focus of UC Davis research. Black-foot disease and young grapevine decline, nicknamed “Black Goo,” are both characterized by a slowdown in growth, smaller trunk size and a reduction in foliage. Of the university’s many accomplishments, the industry is most interested today in the development of disease-free plants.

The next generation

In a speech on the 100th anniversary of the university’s wine program in 1980, Maynard Amerine said that “the university has more than fulfilled the legislative mandate of 1880” to assist the wine industry. Since its founding, the department has produced nearly 4,000 papers and bulletins covering every aspect of the grape and wine industry. In the past 25 years, 1,000 people have graduated with viticulture and enology degrees from UC Davis. Hundreds of alumni, all current wine professionals, also come back each year for short courses on the latest techniques.

But like a fine wine, the program promises improvement with age. The Mondavis’ gift will fund a portion of new state-of-the-art facilities, ensuring that even more students will benefit from discoveries yet to come. It will also help fulfill his 1988 prediction through a long-awaited pairing of the viticulture and enology and the food science and technology departments. Faculty in both areas are already buzzing at the prospect of the scientific synergy that will result from being in the same building.

“They do sensory, we do sensory. They do chemistry, we do chemistry. They do microbiology, we do microbiology,” said viticulture and enology department chair Wolpert of his food science colleagues. For example, the lactic acid bacteria studied as part of malalactic fermentation come from the same group of organisms that make yogurt and cheese. “Merging wine and food was always a goal of Bob Mondavi’s. Now it’s going to happen on the scientific level.”

Wolpert says new wine-making facilities and laboratories will also resolve a shortcoming and frequent criticism of the UC Davis wine program—that it teaches science, but not art.

“Philosophically, we’ve wanted to do more with the art of wine, but we haven’t had a place,” Wolpert said. “How do you teach the nuances of barrels without a barrel room? It’s like teaching painting in a classroom without easels and paint, or teaching theater without a stage.”

And planning is under way to build on the Mondavi gift. A proposal is being prepared for consideration by the UC board of regents this winter that would allow UC Davis to actually sell the wine produced by its students. The plan calls for creation of a nonprofit organization that would reinvest income in student scholarships and new equipment. The campus also hopes that others within the industry will join Mondavi in contributing to the program, which aims to raise enough funds to build a new teaching winery to replace the outmoded wine facilities built 62 years ago.

One day soon, before UC Davis celebrates its centennial in 2008, visitors to campus are likely to stop in at the campus winery for tasting amid a vineyard at the campus’s front door. They will also benefit from the fruits of wine makers worldwide who got their start at UC Davis.

For the world’s wine makers, says Darrell Corti, “Davis has reached the enviable, or perhaps unenviable, position of being the last word on wine. Really, it’s the Vatican of wine.”

And who knows what talented young wine makers may then be building on Robert Mondavi and UC Davis’ legacy? Last Sept. 19, when Robert and Margrit Mondavi signed the papers to make their generous gift to the campus official, Tim Mondavi came to join the celebration. After the festivities, Tim and his family spent a couple of quiet hours with a student tour guide, showing Robert Mondavi’s college-bound grandson, Dante, what UC Davis has to offer.

Lisa Lapin is director of the UC Davis News Service.