Wherever you turn there he is: the missionay hustler, colorful, unsinkable, unavoidable. He’s Rober Mondavi. America’s MR. WINE

There was a throbbing sound in the sky, an ominous swish-swush-swish-swush. At the southern end of the Napa Valley, people began looking up.

Napa had already suffered a wine-maker’s nightmare: rainfall just before the harvest. Moisture on grapes can cause rot, and rotten grapes make rotten wine. The vintage, which had looked like a good one, could turn out to be a disaster.

Now that the rain had ended, wine makers were wringing their hands and praying for a miracle. But what was that swishing noise?

The sound grew louder and louder. Then, over the horizon, as in a Vietnam War movie, came a fleet of helicopters. Robert Mondavi had hired helicopters to hover over his vineyard and fan the vines dry with their propellers.

A number of his fellow wine makers begged to doubt that it made any difference to the wine. Still, it was a classic Mondavi move, bold and public, the sort of thing that has made Robert Mondavi the most famous wine maker in the country.

In fact, America’s No. 1 wine celebrity and pitchman isn’t really a wine maker at all--he started out in the business as a sales director. (He’s still a master salesman. His latest coup was the White House luncheon for Queen Elizabeth II of England on May 15. Traditionally wines of different producers are selected for such events, but on this occasion nothing was served but Mondavi: the 1989 Fume Blanc Reserve, the 1987 Cabernet Sauvignon and the 1985 Botrytis Sauvignon Blanc.)

He certainly knows how to hire wine makers--Mondavi has a brilliant palate--and he has shrewdly found a string of good winemakers, including Warren Winiarski (now owner of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars), Mike Grgich (now of Grgich-Hills) and Zelma Long (now at Simi). But even with the best of help, and despite Mondavi’s lifelong fascination with the latest wine technology, his wines did not get onto the best tables in the nation because they are always the best. They got there through the sheer force of his will.

For example: 25 years ago, when Mondavi built the first new winery in the Napa Valley since the early ‘30s, he did so with theatrical flourish; the Mondavi Winery is a huge, eye-catching Spanish-style structure. But the Oakville spot where he broke ground on July 18, 1966, was chosen for reasons quite different from those of other wine makers, who tend to look for some special combination of soil and microclimate. “Bob knew right at the beginning that for wine to be a success, you had to have the public in mind,” says his close friend Barney Rhodes. “He positioned his winery at the south end of the valley, so visitors from San Francisco would see it first.”

Mondavi is above all a promoter, a larger-than-life character on the order of P.T. Barnum or Francis Coppola, who is surrounded by hoopla wherever he goes. Honorable hoopla, basically; the sincere hoopla of a true believer. He’s a tireless promoter of “wine, culture and the good life,” as he calls it--a founding member and ardent supporter of the American Institute of Wine and Food (at A.I.W.F. functions, Mondavi wines are usually poured); a stager of cooking classes and concerts at his winery; a supporter of charities (where his name is prominent), and a speaker at lectures and symposiums around the world (and when he’s not a speaker, he’s in the front row of the audience and usually the first to stand up when it’s question-and-answer time).

He has developed the Mondavi Mission, a multimedia program to tell the history, romance and religious story of wine through the ages. His attempt to convey the message of the Mondavi Mission on the back labels of his wines has led him into a widely publicized conflict with the government, whose Surgeon General’s warnings against alcohol use he considers the work of neo-Prohibitionists. Last year he opened a Mondavi wine center in Southern California.

Mondavi’s success has embittered some in the wine industry, who tacitly acknowledge his accomplishments but are loath to praise him, viewing him as a self-promoter.

“It’s just jealousy,” counters one longtime Mondavi employee. “Every time Bob comes up with another idea that promotes his wines, he contributes to the image of the (Napa) Valley, which helps them all, but these people get jealous.”

Robert Mondavi began his odyssey at the family-owned Charles Krug Winery, where, as sales director, he was constantly poking his nose into younger brother Peter’s production techniques. Later, when the brothers split in an infamous “Falcon Crest”-like scenario, the obsession to make quality wine drove Robert as it has perhaps no other man in California wine history.

“Quality was in Bob’s mind from the beginning,” says friend and neighbor Belle Rhodes. “It was Bob who pressured his father (Cesare) to buy Charles Krug (Winery) in 1943, because he wanted to make better wine than they had in Lodi. And when Krug became an important winery in the ‘50s, it was Bob and Marge Mondavi who hosted all the distributors. There were no restaurants here, so Marge did all the cooking.”

The conflict between Robert and Peter came to a head in 1965 when Peter, joined by the matriarch of the family, Rosa Mondavi, asked Robert--a Stanford business school graduate--to take a six-month leave of absence.

While on leave, Robert investigated the possibility of starting his own winery. When he returned, he was informed that although he was still on the board of directors, there was no job position for him at Krug. So with borrowed money, Robert moved to build the winery that would become his destiny--and the destiny of the Napa Valley.

Today, Mondavi has turned his small winery into an empire estimated to be worth more than $325 million, and himself into a legend. Not just in Napa, either: In his “Wine Diary,” published in 1987, British author--and wine authority--Harry Waugh compares a dynamic Burgundy producer to “that other powerful personality of the wine world, Bob Mondavi.”

It took all the force of Mondavi’s personality to build the winery into what it is today. “For the first few years after the winery was built, we spent half the year on the road, shaking hands with people,” said Robert’s son Michael, now president of the winery. “Dad and I went to every wine shop in the country that carried our wines.”

Meanwhile, Mondavi was often close to bankruptcy. “In his first year in business, Bob bought some equipment that was state-of-the-art,” recalls Steve Mirassou, who then was with his own family-owned Mirassou Winery in San Jose. “A few months later, Bob sold it to us at half price because someone else had developed equipment that was better. It drove his partners nuts.”

Mondavi’s three partners sold their shares in the early 1970’s to Rainier Brewing of Seattle, but Mondavi had a buy-out option that had to be exercised in 1975. Mondavi hustled like mad, selling his own wine in bulk to his neighbors, even selling off equipment, to keep ownership of the winery. Eventually he bought back every one of Rainier’s shares and bought out all his partners as well.

In 1973, with the Rainier problem still in the future, Robert sued his brother to claim the inheritance he felt he rightfully deserved. The case was acrimonious, splitting the family further and pitting mother Rosa against her older son.

The case dragged on for years. Before it was settled, the court mandated that a three-man board of trustees run Charles Krug, and it barred Peter and his sons from entering the winery doors.

“Peter had socked away $3 million in cash so he’d have something in reserve if he needed to pay Bob if he lost the suit,” says one insider. “But the trustees felt Krug needed renovations, and without consulting Peter, they spent the $3 million on capital improvements.

“When the court ruled (in 1976) in favor of Bob, there was no money left to pay him, so some of Peter’s best vineyard land had to be turned over to Bob. That put Krug in a bind it took 10 years to recover from. Is it any wonder that Peter is still bitter?”

It took a long time for the relationship to start to thaw. But in 1985, Belle Rhodes and her husband Barney staged a retrospective tasting of older Krug and Mondavi Cabernets at Mondavi. Among the invited guests was Peter Mondavi, who surprised everybody by actually showing up.

At dinner that evening Robert got up and welcomed his brother. Then Peter arose and said, “We’ve been apart too long.”

“There were tears around the room,” says Rhodes.

This is not to say that the relationship does not remain thorny. Peter declined to be interviewed for this story, and Robert would say only: “I’ve always gone forward; I visit him at the Christmas holidays; we get along fine. I’m the one who goes forward, much more so.”

Going forward has always been Robert’s trademark. One day in 1968, Belle and Barney Rhodes, who had just returned from a trip to Germany, mentioned that they had seen a new but expensive machine there that permitted white wine to be made with less sulfur dioxide, a chemical traditionally used in wine making to kill microbes. The resulting wine, they said, was supposed to have a cleaner, fresher taste.

“I called the Mondavi winery a few days later to chat with Bob, and he wasn’t there,” says Barney. “He was in Germany.” The device, called a centrifuge, was essentially unproven and none were in use in the United States at the time, but Mondavi bought two of them. At a cost of $100,000.

Mondavi was also the first to use high-tech equipment such as computer temperature controls for fermentation tanks. He conducted myriad experiments on dozens of wine-making and grape-growing methods--from styles of vine trellising to barrel-charring techniques. In 1980, when many Napa wineries had problems with fermentation, it was Mondavi who convened a countywide symposium to brainstorm the problem.

In the ‘70s he even invested in a winery in Australia in order to get access to Australian wine-making techniques. One that he adopted was the use of the rototank, a fermentation tank on its side that gently extracts juice by the use of baffles and rotors. It’s commonly used for making red wine in Australia and, by now, in Napa. (Oddly, Mondavi uses it for white wines.)

These days, Mondavi likes to talk about the advances made in wine making. “We used to make our wines so hard, and then one day we discovered that they have soul, heart. We have to make our wines more gently. They should be as tender as a baby’s bottom but have the forcefulness of a Pavarotti.”

Last December, Mondavi formally stepped down as president of the winery, leaving the daily duties to sons Michael, 49, president, and Tim, 40, director of wine making.

“There were a lot of reasons why Dad wanted to step down,” says Michael. “My mother’s passing on Oct. 22 was hard on him. Even though Dad and Mom had been divorced 15 years and Dad had been remarried for 10, that affected him intensely--and it made him realize he’s not going to live forever.”

Actually, Mondavi had already tried to step down as head of the winery in 1986. But bickering between his sons--which reminded him of something bitter in his own past--stopped him.

The brothers are a study in contrasts. Tim, who wears his hair long and has a full beard, is the wine maker. Michael, who wears conservative suits and has a business degree, is the promoter. It was he who in 1985 called Marc Mondavi and Peter Mondavi Jr., his cousins at Charles Krug, and invited them to join with the Mondavi winery in a joint venture to market the wines of both wineries. It was a bold move, because Robert and Peter still weren’t on speaking terms.

“We offered . . . to help them, to work together to see whether we could help them marketing and selling, because we seem to have been pretty successful doing that,” said Robert. The offer was rejected. Two years later, Krug signed a national marketing agreement with Jos. Seagram & Sons.

Robert Mondavi will turn 78 on Father’s Day. He is still a vigorous man who looks and acts a decade younger and swims daily in his huge indoor pool. Three years ago, he decided that hobbling about on knees weakened by years of packing grapes for Cesare Mondavi & Sons was hampering his peripatetic lifestyle (he regularly traveled around the globe, often tracked by Robin Leach), so he had his knee joints surgically replaced with titanium ones. Within weeks he was boogalooing in the valley--and promoting with fervor.

Today Robert Mondavi sits in his office, a sparely decorated Spanish-style room at the winery, passionately promoting the Mission. He speaks about it at the slightest excuse and flies anywhere to promote it. Sources say he has spent $1.5 million on it.

The other project that consumes Mondavi’s time is a $20-million cultural center he hopes will be built at the south end of the Napa Valley. The multiuse facility would include a wine museum, a symphony hall, and a graduate cooking school affiliated with the Culinary Institute of America of Hyde Park, N.Y. He’s already sunk thousands of dollars of his own money into the project.

Clearly, retirement has not slowed Mondavi down. Even his son Michael finds keeping up with him somewhat overwhelming. On a recent trip overseas, he says, the schedule included a morning meeting, a luncheon, afternoon tea and a black-tie dinner, all in different locations, and all necessitating changes of clothes.

Says Michael: “Dad had no trouble with all the running around. But I couldn’t keep up with him.”