Suggested wine pairing? Ask the go-to guy. Photo by justinsomnia.org

Alder Yarrow and I had lunch together today at Taylor’s Automatic Refresher at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. After noting the $100-plus bottles of Shafer Hillside Select, Quintessa, and Blackbird Vineyards wines on offer at a take-out place that serves $8.99 burgers and $3.99 hotdogs wrapped in paper, Alder modestly mentioned that he’d just heard that morning that his brainchild, Vinography, had been named the best overall wine blog in 2008 by Tom Wark’s American Wine Blog Awards.

I started reading Vinography a few years ago after meeting Alder at the very first Symposium for Professional Wine Writers in 2006. We were both participants then; Alder has gone on to be one of the most generous and well-liked speakers at the 2007 and 2008 Symposiums. A corporate web designer and consultant during the day, Alder started Vinography in 2004 after realizing he had become the “go-to guy” for his friends who wanted wine or restaurant recommendations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger greets Margrit and Robert Mondavi at the December ceremony inducting Robert into California's Hall of Fame. AP Photo by Steve Yeater

One of the questions I’m often asked when I talk at library fundraisers or with book groups about The House of Mondavi is how Robert Mondavi is doing.

Still referred to respectfully as “Mr.” by some of his former employees, Robert Mondavi will celebrate his 95th birthday on June 14th of this year. But it’s unlikely to resemble the birthday parties of decades past – such as at the one to celebrate his 85th birthday in 1998. “Mr.” donned sunglasses, burst onto the stage, and started jamming with the band.

Since the takeover of the Robert Mondavi Corp. in late 2004, he’s had a series of health scares resulting in trips to the hospital. And although he and his wife Margrit still attend many functions and can be spotted dining out at restaurants such as Redd in Yountville, Mr. Mondavi is now confined to a wheelchair and doesn’t say much anymore.

The Palazzo Antinori in Florence, Italy.

Imagine a family business that has passed from one generation to the next twenty-six times, surviving everything from the scourge of Bubonic plague, to the invasion of Napoleon, two world wars, and even the birth and death of the wine cooler.

The Wall Street Journal’s deputy bureau chief for Southern Europe, Gabriel Kahn, profiled such an enterprise in a fascinating story this weekend: “For more than six centuries, the Antinori family has managed one of the most delicate feats in business: passing on a company from one generation to the next,” he writes.

Succession planning is one of the obstacles that trips up so many family businesses, leading the vast majority to break up, fail, or pass out of family hands by the third generation. Italy’s storied Antinori family, which now owns wineries in Tuscany, Napa Valley, Hungary, and Chile, is a remarkable exception.

“This is not textbook management,” notes Harvard’s John A. Davis in the article. “Some of its planning, some of it is just luck.” Even so, the success of the Antinoris has made them into a fascinating case study for other vintners, including Napa Valley’s H. William Harlan II, the founder of Harlan Estate.

Gareth Blackstock, aka Lenny Henry Photo from Siegler.net

Some people find gardening shows relaxing. Others love watching playful otters frolic with each other in nature documentaries. Give me the red meat and raw savagery of the kitchen anytime.

First, I tore through Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which I found hugely enjoyable and not a little bit scary. I’m assured by his longtime spokeswoman, Rosemarie Morse, that these days it’s safe to order fish in restaurants on Monday.

In recent weeks, I began watching the BBC series from the 1990s called “Chef!,” starring the British comedian Lenny Henry as the character Gareth Blackstock, a chef in a two-Michelin starred restaurant in the fictional Le Chateau Anglais in the English countryside.

Harvard case studies probe for the veritas behind business decisions.

The Harvard Business School has six case studiesMichael Porter, a Harvard professor who wrote The Competitive Advantage of Nations, a book that I read and found fascinating after being assigned it many years ago in business school. Although I wouldn’t recommend them as bedtime reading (unless you’re hoping to be lulled to sleep) I purchased them for $6.95 apiece and read each of them carefully as part of my research for The House of Mondavi.

In particular, I found the study on the Mondavi’s adventure in Chile, and its creation of the Caliterra brand with the Chadwick's family, to be particularly helpful. My researcher and I found it fun and challenging to match the pseudonyms used in the study to the real executives I’d interviewed for my book.

Lunch in The Grotto Photo from sfgrotto.org

This month, I’ve been spending time at The Grotto, the famed San Francisco writers' community which is home to such West Coast literary luminaries as Po Bronson, David Ewing Duncan, ZZ Packer, Jason Roberts, Julia Scheeres, Ethan Watters, and many others. One of my favorite parts of making the trek to the Grotto’s offices on 2nd and Bryant Streets is lunchtime, when Grotto dwellers emerge from their offices, where they’ve been tapping away in the dim glow provided by their laptops, to gather in the brightly painted conference room for brown-bag lunches and conversation with other members of the tribe.

It’s not unusual for guests to join Grottoites over lunch. On Monday, Van Jones, founder of Green for All and co-writers of a forthcoming book called The Green-Collar Economy, joined us. Van, who lives in Oakland, was recently a guest on The Colbert Report and admitted to having been flummoxed by his host’s comments (including one about “green” love machines and another about “unicorn herding”). That prompted Laura Fraser to share her experience of having to strip down to her knickers while her suit was being ironed prior to her appearance on one of the network morning shows.

The future of community? Photo from smh.com.au (Sydney Morning Herald)

Writing, by its nature, is a solitary undertaking. Reading, too, is done mostly on one’s own. So why not bring writers together with readers in a virtual community?

Redroom.com is the one of several social networks devoted to the love of literature. Yet, it is pulling ahead in the race by attracting big names. Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Jon Stewart, Salman Rushdie, and even Barack Obama are Redroom.com members. So are lesser known writers such as Belle Yang, author of The Odyssey of a Manchurian and Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders; Bill Hayes, author of The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatomy; and Peter Coyote, best known as an actor but also the author of Sleeping Where I Lie.

Kim Stare Wallace -- is she drinking a Meritage? Photo from Dry Creek Vineyard

As a newcomer to the wine world when I began The House of Mondavi, I discovered that its inhabitants spoke in a distinct language not so easily grasped by outsiders. When Michaela Rodeno, CEO of Napa Valley’s St. Supéry winery, first introduced me to the word “Meritage,” I had no idea what it meant. But she patiently explained it to me … almost, but not quite, concealing her surprise that I didn’t know it already.

“Meritage” is an invented name that grew out of a national contest to come up with a way to describe blended wines. As so many other things in the wine industry, it was born out of a response to government regulations. In 1985, U.S. federal regulators restricted the wording used on wines containing less than 75% of a single grape variety to the not-very-elegant sounding “table wine,” rejecting such descriptors as “Bordeaux-blend.”

Michael Chiarello with guests at a past Bud Break Party (above) and with his own budding progeny, Aidan (below) Photos from NapaStyle.com and ChiarelloFamilyVineyards.com

Michael Chiarello is at home, making risotto alla primavera for 130 or so of the best customers of Chiarello Family Vineyards. He tastes a bit of the rice and parmesan cheese mixture, finds it to his liking, and orders it dished onto the scores of white plates which are laid out and waiting, where it will be topped off with a soffrito of spring vegetables.

Wearing his white chef’s coat emblazed with a burgundy emblem signifying his kudos from the James Beard Foundation, he dashes out of his modern farmhouse-style St. Helena home, navigates around the swimming pool, and bounds down a few stone steps, to a 125-foot table set up in the vineyards where he and his wife Eileen are hosting a late-afternoon supper for their best customers in the vineyards.

Barely pausing to say a few words to his guests, most of whom have bought a case or more of his wine to qualify for an invitation to join the day’s hospitality, he dashes back up the steps, towards the kitchen.

“Now, now!” he snaps at the waiters ferrying plates of risotto to the table. The temperature in the vineyard hovers around 85 degrees, even at five in the afternoon, so there seems little risk of the dishes cooling down in the moments it takes to deliver them from kitchen to table. He’s paired the course with a 2006 Giana Zinfandel, named after one of his three daughters.