Wine and History

Abstract

EVER SINCE I was a youngster, I wanted to excel-whether it was nailing boxes, playing football, or making wine. In 1936, I graduated from Stanford University and entered the business, first at Sunny St. Helena and then at Charles Krug Winery, which my father purchased in 1943. I founded the Robert Mondavi Winery in 1966, with a desire to make wines equal to the great wines of the world and to educate the American public about wine. This has been my dream and my goal, and my family and I have worked tirelessly to achieve it. I have always had a love of history. Though I majored in business at Stanford, I enjoyed the history courses I took because they helped me to understand what took place in the past and why, and also to understand human nature. Both are important. However, we grew so fast in the business that we were always looking ahead-during the 1970s there was a great renaissance in the industry. So we did not develop a history program at the winery until 1987. In the 1980s I began to recognize the importance of what we were doing and the role we could play in developing the cultural image of our country. I began to look at history to help me analyze-to understand the present through the past. At Robert Mondavi Winery, we had always employed the research approach to grapegrowing and winemaking and had incorporated the arts, music, and gastronomy with many positive results. When historical researcher and cultural affairs specialist Nina Wemyss came on board in 1987, she began to research wine's history and wine's role in art and literature through thousands of years. We wanted to educate ourselves and the American people about the importance of in history. The more we learned, the more we believed that wine is the temperate, civilized, sacred, romantic mealtime beverage recommended in the Bible. Wine has been