House of Mondavi

The House Of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty
Author: Julia Flynn Siler 2007, 452 pp.
My rating 2.5*
Started December 24, Finished December 28, 2007

An account of how immigrant pluck begat a leading producer of premium American wine, only to have the business destroyed through nepotistic incompetence and overreach. This reader’s conclusion after reading the book is that Mondavi was done in by the dynamics of a family business, where seat of the pant decision making ruled and each generation felt a greater sense of entitlement.

For me the story lacked drama, probably because the family members were almost entirely the instruments of their own fate – emotional self-indulgence and capricious decision making leading inevitably to collapse. Another reason for the lack of excitement is that the author seems too intent of moving the story along to pause and explore the more interesting parts of it, for instance when the retired Robert Mondavi, the driving force behind the family’s glory years, find that due to a sudden decrease in the company’s stock price, his charitable commitments exceed his net worth, the reactions of the family member to this potentially humiliating development are given no more play than any of the innumerable petty squabbles also chronicled.

The author seemed to have applied most of her efforts in interviewing all the participants, within and without the family so that almost every point of view seems fairly represented.
However, more effort could have been spent editing and polishing the manuscript which felt like a very extended magazine or even newspaper article. Examples of sloppy writing, editing and reasoning abound:

“Robert assuranced Adams he wanted to keep him whole.” The word should be assured.
“Construction overruns drove the final cost up to as much as $26 million, vastly more than what the architects had originally estimated.” The author would have made a much stronger point had she provided the original estimate and let the readers judge for themselves the scope of the overrun.
A perfectionist design decision leads to buying “specialized tractors that cost $150,000 to $200,000 apiece.” Those numbers are meaningless without knowing how much standard tractors cost, information the author does not provide.
The company provides surprise earnings guidance that “1998 results would be 15 cents below analysts consensus estimates”. No context provided as to what expected earnings were or how big a percentage shortfall this was. If estimates were $5 a share this is not nearly as big a deal as if they were $.50 a share.
“From its record high of $56.75 …., the stock lost nearly a third of its value, tumbling to below $30 a share …” Should read “nearly half of its value.”
[Around the year 2000] “ …, the Oakville facility was bursting at the seams. In the late 1970s, it had produced only about a hundred thousand cases of wine a year.” The paragraph ends here and no mention is made anywhere near this figure as to what the winery was currently producing – only half of the comparison is provided.
The book contains many pointless architectural and decorative descriptions of the buildings and rooms in which meetings were held.

Another gripe of mine is the assumption that the reader is versed in the jargon of the wine world. Terms such as appellation are used without being defined.Different types of wine are often mentioned in the broader picture of business development, without explanations of the differences between the types, e.g. the author mentions that Mondavi was one of the first American companies to concentrate on dry wines instead of sweet ones, without explaining how the two differ.