Friday, March 09, 2007

"The House of Mondavi"

Something near and dear to my heart is the time spent working at Robert Mondavi. Now there is a new book by Julia Flynn. The brief description from Julia is listed below. Look for this book in June 2007.

If there was a single mantra that I heard over and over again in my interviews of former Mondavi employees for “The House of Mondavi,” it was that working for the Robert Mondavi Corp. was the single best job they ever had.

I hoped to discover why. In the course of interviewing more than 250 people, I searched for clues that would help me explain what was unique about Mondavi, particularly in the decades before the company went public.

I learned about the weekly donuts, the quarterly wine program, the harvest parties, and the way that members of the Mondavi family would reach out to employees in trouble or in need. I also got a feel for Mondavi’s sheer velocity in those days, when it was leading the way in the global wine industry.

My book tells the story of the rise of the House of Mondavi, as well as its fall – explaining how the Mondavi family ended up losing control of the company as it headed towards a sale. It looks at the group that some dubbed “The Raiders” – the outside directors led by Sir Anthony Greener – who ended up ousting Michael Mondavi as chairman and installing Ted Hall.
It is a fly-on-the-wall narrative of what went on in Mondavi’s boardroom, in New York hotels, and at Ted Hall’s Long Meadow Ranch that led to a painful split between Michael and the rest of the family.

“The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty” will be published by Penguin’s Gotham Books on June 21, 2007. It is available now to pre-order on Amazon.com.

If Robert Mondavi alums would like to sit down with me for a reading and a question and answer session after the book is published, perhaps during your next reunion in June, I’d be happy to participate. More information about the book can be found on www.houseofmondavi.com.

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posted by The Office Grapevine at 11:04 PM  

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