“Even under clean energy, it will still be prohibitively extractive — solar panels, batteries, all these things take huge amounts of energy to build, and the materials have to come from somewhere. The effort involved in getting people to come around to regional food systems, that would be progress in my mind.”
If wine was not exactly his destiny, Mr. Mondavi was certain early in life that was what he would do.
“I always knew, from age 7, that I wanted to do whatever my grandfather did,” he recalled. “It was his passion, and my father’s.”
When Robert Mondavi Winery was sold to Constellation Brands in 2004, after years overreaching ambition and family conflict, Carlo’s father, Tim Mondavi, Robert Mondavi’s younger son who had long played a leading role there, founded his own Napa Valley winery, Continuum. It was small and focused specifically on one wine, a cabernet sauvignon-based blend.
Carlo attended college in Aix-en-Provence, France, wanting to learn the language and the culture, but left before graduating to become, for a time, a professional snowboarder. He then worked in wineries in France and Italy. In the process, he fell in love with pinot noir.
“To join my family business was not automatic,” Mr. Mondavi said. “Continuum was a start-up and too small. I had to work outside the family. It was the opposite of being told, ‘You’re going to do this.’”
He teamed up with his younger brother, Dante, to make pinot noir, but it took them 10 years, he said, to get the blessing of his father. Finally, in 2013, they established RAEN, Research in Agriculture and Enology Naturally, which makes small lots of pinot noir on the Sonoma Coast.
