Photo by Copia

Copia, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, has struggled with an identify crisis even since its broke ground in 1999.

Should it be a showcase for the Robert Mondavi Winery? Should it be a museum? Or, should it be a place to experience the subtle pairings of food and wine? Or should it be a community center devoted to “the good life” – food, wine, and the arts, all in one?

Copia has tried on all of these hats. Graced with a stunning building by New York’s Polshek Partnership, the architectural firm that had overseen the renovation of Carnegie Hall and a lovely site on the banks of the Napa River, one would think it would draw in many wine tourists, as well as locals.

But membership levels and visitors have been disappointing. A group of friends and I were there this past Friday, after touring several wineries. Despite free admission, Copia was nearly empty.

As my plane landed in Boston this afternoon, I checked my email and found news of the latest twist in Copia’s troubled search for its calling. It was a note from Larry Tsai, Copia’s director of marketing, announcing that he’d be leaving “in the near future.”

His boss, Arthur Jacobus, who is Copia’s president, “will be leaving the organization – effective, tomorrow, Friday, March 14, 2008,” according to Larry’s note. Gary McGuire, former Copia chairman of the Board of Trustees, would step into Mr. Jacobus’s job on Monday.

Last week, Copia’s much admired “wine guy” Peter Marks jumped ship to join Icon Estates, owned by Constellation, as its President of Education. It was Constellation that bought the Robert Mondavi Corp. in 2004.

Peter worked at Copia for seven years, living through many of the changes, yet sent a note about grateful he was to have had the “opportunity to help build the dream of Robert Mondavi and Julia Child.”

After taking a peak into Copia’s stunning lobby on Friday afternoon, one of the friends I was with quipped “this would make a great high school.” He's a high school football coach, so perhaps that explains his take on should be done with this slightly-out-of-the-way spot.

Copia was Robert Mondavi's first big philanthropic project after his company went public in 1993. His dream, modelled on the Rothschild's museum at Chateau Mouton, was one that was shared with his friend Julia Child. One can't help but wonder what Mr. Mondavi and Mrs. Child would think of the troubles at Copia now...

Green labels - coming soon to a wine label near you? Images courtesy CCOF

This morning, I climbed into my VW and headed north, to Sonoma’s wine country, where tender green buds were just beginning to unfold from the trellised vines. I pulled into the driveway of Sonoma-Cutrer, where a flock of sleek geese were pecking at shoots, and sat down in a conference room facing nineteen – yes, nineteen – glass stems, each filled with a few ounces of wine.

I love wine, but I don’t like it much at ten in the morning. Still, these were “green” wines, produced through sustainable vineyard and winery practices and on offer for tasting as part of an event jointly hosted by the California Association of Winegrape Growers and the Wine Institute, which represents vintners.

It was such a lovely spring morning that the French doors of the conference room were wide open, allowing birdsong to float through. Past the lawns and into the distance, I could see the Kunde family’s bluebird boxes – the homes they’d erected to encourage birds to nest near the vineyards -- and feed on pests.

After a quiet lunch in Rutherford yesterday, I drove back home along the Silverado Trail. As rain droplets began hitting my windshield, I passed the modest sign for the winery whose founder, to me, is an almost perfect example of the idealism of many of the early vintners who came to Napa Valley, searching for an Arcadian life.

Warren Winiarski gave up his job as a lecturer at the University of Chicago, packed up his family in their station wagon, and moved to Napa Valley to begin again as a winemaker. After a short stint at Souverain Cellars, he joined the new Robert Mondavi Winery, working through the first two crushes in 1966 and 1967 before starting a winery of his own on Howell Mountain.

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 done 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.

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.

Robert Mondavi as Bacchus, with wife Margrit. Photo: Avis Mandel for Pate International

During the three years it took to research and write The House of Mondavi, I interviewed hundreds of people, poured through legal and corporate documents, and studied old photographs from high school yearbooks and other fragments of the past, searching for clues about Robert Mondavi’s character. Along the way, I gained an enormous respect for his passion, his perseverance, and his joie de vivre.

I was lucky enough to have the last formal interview Robert Mondavi ever granted to a writer. Our meeting took place in a second floor conference room of the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville on March 29, 2005, nearly four months after the forced sale of the Robert Mondavi Corporation. Although the sale proceeds helped Mr. Mondavi fulfill his many philanthropic pledges, it also put him out of the wine business for the first time since the 1930s. It was a sad spring for Mr. Mondavi, then 91, and his wife Margrit and I left that interview feeling as if Robert Mondavi was already beginning to slip away.

Although on this visit there were no San Francisco mayors at Allegro Romano, there were plenty of people to meet and greet.

Photo from Allegro Romano

Allegro Romano, a small Italian restaurant on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, is the setting for a key scene in The House of Mondavi. The restaurant was where Timothy Mondavi broke bread with two of the outside directors of the Robert Mondavi Corp. in an effort to convince them to oust the company’s non-family member CEO. His efforts backfired. Instead of convincing them to fire the executive, his campaign only fueled the directors’ growing conviction that Timothy, himself, was a loose cannon.

I’d never been to Allegro Romano until I was invited there last week by Judy Miner, president of Foothill College in Silicon Valley. I’d given a book talk as part of the Foothill Authors Series and Judy took me there afterwards, since it was one of her favorite neighborhood restaurants. The restaurant’s ebullient Italian owner, Lorenzo Logoreci, welcomed us to a table scattered with rose petals and confetti. “Bella,” he called Judy, greeting her warmly and referring to her as his first customer. (Logoreci and Fusae Castelluccio, both from Rome, bought the long-established restaurant about eight years ago.)

Elisabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery share their James Beard award with the sweetest of their creations.

Photo from Gothamist.com

It was hard to escape “Sex and the City” even at the black-tie 2008 James Beard Foundation Awards Ceremony on June 8th at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall.

The evening’s co-host was Kim Cattrall, the actress who played Samantha in the movie and TV series. Kim didn’t disappoint her fans, at least in terms of adding glamour to the evening: she wore a short, gold-spangled dress with a plunging neckline. While it wasn’t a particularly body-conscious crowd (too many people who loved food more than fitting into size four dresses), Ms. Cattrall looked terrific.

Less terrific was the silly repartee she engaged in with her co-host Bobby Flay. The chef/restaurateur looked downright terrified by Ms. Cattrall, or perhaps just by her man-eating “Sex and the City” character.

I confess: I loved walking down the red carpet at the entrance of Avery Fisher Hall, with paparazzi snapping photos of celebrity chefs. It was very thrilling, indeed, for a plain old reporter like me. And it was even better to be accompanied by my handsome husband in his tuxedo and my beautiful, supportive sister.

David Schargel, in blue, offers "epicurean excursion" participants a sampling of Portland's culinary prowess.

(Photo by Aaron Rabideau)

The last stop on my paperback tour for The House of Mondavi was Portland, Oregon, where I can truthfully, if somewhat reluctantly, report that I found what seems to be a city even more obsessed with good food than my own San Francisco Bay Area.

Although I only spent about 48 hours in Portland, I managed to pack in a whirlwind tour of the city’s culinary delights, thanks, in large part, to a couple of hours spent with David Schargel, founder of Portland Walking Tours, and his company’s recent offering: an “epicurean excursion.”

I’d been tempted by an email pitch from David’s public relations firm. Knowing I’d have a few hours between interviews and my talk at Powell’s City of Books, I plunked my $59 fee down for a guided tour of the city’s marvelous Pearl District, a former industrial area now populated by all sorts of artisan food producers.