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A mix of art, tradition, and engineering in Napa Valley

There is no name in California winemaking more steeped in tradition than “Mondavi,” yet at the Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena, Calif., co-proprietor Peter Mondavi Jr. (BS ’80 ME, MS ’82 IEEM, MBA ’93) is not resting on any laurels. Under his guidance the winery is making major changes, not only in the way it grows grapes (the idea is to stress vines to produce fewer, smaller berries), but also in the grapes it grows. At this family-owned winery, Peter Mondavi Jr. is focusing on Bordeaux reds and is integrating some high-tech engineering into what remains a fine and traditional art.

What are some of those wines you are focusing on?
We are focusing on Cabernet Sauvignon and our Vintage Select Cabernet. We also have Generations, which is a proprietary blend of Bordeaux red varietals which includes cabernet, merlot, cabernet franc, and petit verdot. And of course we have our Napa Valley merlot as well. Basically those four items represent about two thirds of our winemaking.
You are working on a $21.6 million replanting.
That’s not a budget we’re working on, that’s actually what has happened. This year we planted more acres. We’ve replanted a little over 400 acres since 1997. These vineyards were planted initially back in the late sixties and early seventies. The way they were planted, the methodology of planting and farming, and most importantly the varieties that were popular back then are radically different than what it is today. We have changed varieties, planting techniques, planting densities, row orientation, and many other aspects. The various growing areas within California are starting to focus on what they do best; Napa Valley is world class when it comes to the Bordeaux reds: cabernets, merlots, and blends including these two.

From a technical standpoint how has viticulture and winemaking changed since the sixties? What are some of the innovations you’ve instituted?
I think that viticulture has had the most radical change. First and foremost it, has become a direct extension of winemaking. If you go back 20 to 30 years, the grapes grew in the vineyard. Then in September or October you’d call the grower up to harvest, and the grapes would show up on your doorstep, your first interaction with the grapes. You’d crush them and make them into wine. Now winemaking has truly extended into the vineyard. There are winemaking decisions being made in the vineyard beginning with pruning. There are a lot of various types of canopy management protocols today. How you position your bunches and chutes is critical. It is much, much more labor intensive today than it was 30 years ago.

Additionally the number of grapevines per acre has increased three-fold, from approximately 500 to 1,500 to 1,800 vines per acre. What you don’t want for a grapevine is deep, rich fertile ground in which the grapevine can grow unbounded. That can give you some very negative characters in the wine. What we are trying to accomplish is to literally stress the vine, whether it’s increasing the density so there is competition from one vine to the next or putting a cover crop in — a blend of native grasses that we plant in the vineyard — which, in turn, will compete with the vine.

This reduces the yield in the vineyard. You get fewer grapes and smaller berries, which are much more concentrated. A lot of the character is extracted from the skins, especially with red wines. Color and tannins originate from the skins. If you have a small berry, your ratio of skin to juice is much higher.

The way we monitor vineyards is more technically oriented. We actually do Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) sensing once a year. It is a “vigor index” so we can understand the health down to small areas within a vineyard block. Before, you’d look at a vineyard as a block and treat it all uniformly. Now we do flyover sensing and get a NDVI vigor index, which is a color-coded aerial photo. In the past, you’d treat it as one monolithic block. For example, we may now realize there was a historical creek that meandered through the center of it and so there are different soil structures within block. So we may farm a little differently in these specific areas that become visible. We might plant more cover crop, less cover crop, harvest at different time, things like that.
This sounds like engineering.
Yes it is, but on the flip side, all the winemaking decisions like the “pick decision,” when to harvest … is made by physically visiting the vineyard, walking through and just tasting grapes as you walk up and down the rows. It even gets to the point where, depending on row orientation … you could have one side of the row that gets the morning sun and the other side of the row gets the afternoon sun. So you’ll pick the afternoon side first, the grapes that are exposed to the afternoon sun on one side of the row, and then wait a week for the other side that gets the morning sun, which is less intense, to ripen up. You really don’t see that in the numbers. You just have to go and walk and experience the vineyard. It is a fascinating blend. I think it is getting more technical and more scientific on one end but it is clearly getting more artful on the other end.

I hear you’ve followed Gravity Probe B. What interests you about it?
Some of my professors in my undergraduate days — Professors Cannon, Beach and DeBra — to various degrees have touched Gravity Probe B. In fact professor DeBra is very, very active in it. I knew a little about it in my undergraduate days, because it has been going on for a long time. Moving forward many, many years, I did a fundraiser, the Napa Valley Wine Auction, and we created a 27-liter bottle to be auctioned. A 27-liter bottle is about a 100-pound bottle of wine so it raises the question of how do you pour it? I called one of my old professors, Professor Beach in the design department, and posed this as a problem. This was in 2002. He assembled a team of graduate design and engineering students as a study project. They designed and created a very elegant pouring device for this bottle. They went on to manufacture it. They did a beautiful job. It was a very, very successful auction.

One of the things that happened is that Professor Beach created an advisory panel of professors; Professor DeBra was on that advisory panel. We had a big dinner when the project was concluded and DeBra was there, we started talking about Gravity Probe B. I was inquiring about it, and he invited me down to the launch. My son and I went and have been following it ever since. In fact, I have extended an invitation to Francis Everitt to have the GP-B team come here for a wine tasting and luncheon at the winery now that the science gathering portion has come to an end. Hopefully, they’ll get up here soon. I try to stay in touch a little bit with the engineering school.
   

November 2005
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