The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty

This is a great book for anyone interested in the evolution of the Napa Wine Industry. Interwoven is the high and complex price paid by highly motivated family members driven by some times mutually exclusive goals. It is a fasinating story written in a very entertaining manner. It is also very well read. One of my best non-fiction selections.

Although a fascinating story, the author tended to include too much detail (do I need to know what color the sleeves of Michael Mondavi's bride's dress were, really?), which tended to slow the story down. I think if I were reading it, rather than a captive audience during my commute, I might have finished a lot sooner with skimming. I also found the story skipped around a lot: even though the chapters were titled by date ranges, they often included lengthy material from other decades, both before and after. It made it quite confusing to follow.

On a totally un-related note: the actor who *read* this book is fabulous. He could make the User Guide for a Coffee Pot sound enthralling.

What a story. Boy meets girl and marry. Couple builds family and migrate to Napa. Children carry on the business, engage in a fist fight and in courtroom battle. Two families part ways, each build wineries and empires. Grandchildren take over and deliver revenues, bitter divorces, corporate drama, collapse of wine empire, reunion, joint venture to make wine, sold in stratospheric price at auction. Never did I finish a book with a happy ending.

This book provided a very deep dive into the history of the Mondavi family, and its rise and fall in the wine business. Full of details, you get a great taste of the family dynamics as well as a glimpse into how the wine industry works. Solid narration and well flowing story.

I am listening to this recount of the trials and tribulations of the famous California wine family and their dysfunction. This is a true story culled from interviews with the principals and other verified sources by the author. It reads like a novel. We experience dramatic highs and lows, legal wranglings, adultery and betrayals. Unfortunately, the narrator for this recording was not good. He narrates the story as though it is his first read through with emphases and pauses in all the wrong places. He has a pleasant enough voice, but his inflections and voice modulations are the same for most of the phrases and sentences and is very distracting and annoying. The content is however worth it. My choice were I to do this again would be to skip the audiobook and read the book on my Kindle.

I have only listened to the first six hours but have given up. I can't imagine what 10 more hours would be about. The most interesting thing about the Mondavi story is the legal battle between members of the family and that's over now. The author has done a lot of research, and it supposedly is written from earliest to latest times, but it skips around so much it's hard to keep track of when and where you are in the story. There is also too much unrelated minutiae (do we really need to know what one of the lawyers wore on stage when he performed with his rock band?). Add to this, the reader's pompous tone and his mis-pronunciations make this book barely tolerable. He correctly pronounced the last name Mon-day-vi in the beginning because, according to the author, that's the way the family pronounced their name. After Robert formed his own winery and broke away from his brother and mother, he started pronouncing his surname Mon-dah-vi, and now this reader started
pronouncing every family member's name as Mon-dah-vi. I don't remember anything saying they all decided on this new pronunciation. Especially egregious, is his mis-pronouncing the name of the prominent town, St. Helena. As a former resident, you couldn't be anywhere in the Napa Valley and not know that the town name is pronounced Saint Hel-eena. All in all, I'm sorry we bought this book.

I lived about 5 miles from the Napa Valley for many years and loved to tour the many wineries in the area. It's one of the most beautiful and agriculturally unique places in the US. I was sure this would be a fabulous story of the people who set out to compete with countries like France and Germany, wine makers for many centuries. However, this story is as flat as last night's champagne, with mind-numbing minutiae that requires a bottle of cheap wine to get through. The Mondavis were an incredibly boring! The "blood feud" is nothing more than the normal conflicts that any family has - even a family without money and/or the legacy of an iconic winery. The author spends the entire book trying make up conflict. She'd wastes time describing a minor person's wedding dress rather than give some indepth character development. Family attorney - and former San Francisco mayor - Joseph L. Alioto's personal foibles (about which the author goes into much detail) overshadows everything done by the whole Mondavi clan put together. My own research failed to find anything worth knowing on this family other than it did what was expected of them as world-class vintners. Brother Timothy, a member of the Christian Brothers, who maintained a winery right down the road from the Mondavis, lived a more exciting life than these people. The "four generations" live at the same time on the same land doing the same things. No mavericks, no scandals, no black sheep. The big legal battle ends predictably in a whimper rather than a bang. The only "fun fact" is that second-generation Robert Mondavi left the family's business to start the first post-Prohibition winery. This whole story could have been told in 30 minutes. Use your money to buy a 6-pack of Dos Equiis and read quotes from "The Most Interesting Man In The World".

This is a great book for anyone looking for a detailed history on the Napa wine region, the Mondavi family and Robert Mondavi wines - the subjects on which it focuses. Peter Mondavi and Charles Krug are not covered as much as I would have hoped, but the story is still engaging and worth the read. I would recommend this to anyone interested in wine and/or business.

I never knew the background of the Mondavi family and this book shed so many interesting details of their family history, California winemaking as well comparisons between French wines.

Loved it! Narrator was amazing and the story was enthralling. I couldn't stop listening to it. Great read if you're industry or not.