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I worked in the grape trade for 5 years. Yeah. the Mondavi varietals and reserves are good wines, though overpriced for the quality, and almost always over-oaked and over-extracted for me. Opus One was a silly idea. Never got why that was $100 a bottle, except that it was for rich folks who buy by price.
Mondavi, like many California wineries marketing to the premium sector, sat on its ass in the 90s as American taste got more sophisticated and global competitors kept pace with better and better products at lower prices. The very transformation of the American wine market Mondavi started in the 60s and 70s caught up with him, as did the extraordinary quality of wines from Chile, Australia, and even South Africa. And while Americans began to get more adventurous about varietals and wine-making styles, Mondavi kept cranking out blowsy, over-oaked chards and cabs (the Fume was always pretty good, however), especially at the "reserve" level. In any decent wine shop in any major city, the selection of superbly crafted wines with more diverse varietal characters and a wider range of possible food pairings is extraordinary, and the best of them come from (gasp) France, Spain, and Italy. Mondavi was competing with Bourdeux and Burgundy while the action moved South to the Rhone, Cahors, Languedoc-Roussilon, Provencal, etc. and as the Spanish (and Italian and Portuguese) industries came roaring into the late 20th century with new technologies and the same UC Davis-trained winemaking science that California had used to rise so rapidly in the 1980s. I drink mostly $10-15 southern French wines these days, and not only to piss on Freeper France-haters. The wines are cleaner, better, and more diversely characterful than all the cookie-cutter $20-25 varietals from Napa and Sonoma. I honestly don't remember the last high-end American wine I bought (I do have a soft spot for Zinfandels which are American-only, with some kinds of meat dishes, and the $12 Ravenswood vintner's blend is a damn good buy).
California wine: a victim of its own success, and the pretentiousness that accompanied it, as if the Europeans were never going to catch up. The WIne Spectator, which reports the demise of Mondavi premium above, was a huge part of the problem.
On the other side of the coin, the Mondavi "lifestyle" wines -- the under $10 lines -- taste like they were made in factories and have zero character. They're clean, and in a lousy store in a podhunk town they are sometimes your best choice. But even smallish cities now have good wine stores in most states where you can score a tasty $10 mourvedre-based or syrah-based French vin de pays that kicks ass. California wine for me now consists of two options: "Two-Buck Chuck" (yuck) and top-of-the-line serious stuff from Ridge and Ravenswood etc. And even then, you do better spending the same $50-75 a bottle on European wine if you seriously want the best. (You can spend more, but with rare exceptions you are throwing money away when you do unless you are a serious collector with adequate storage to hold the stuff for a decade -- industry insider tip.)
My two cents. American business dies when it thinks it doesn't have to innovate, as with the auto industry in the 70s and 80s. And I don't mean innovate only in marketing. I'm glad I got out of the trade in the early 90s.
RCM
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