Robert Mondavi: Introduction of his Fumé Blanc

Based on Clark Smith's interpretation of wine history, the "tools of 20th century winemaking" were stainless steel, inert gas, refrigeration, and sterile filtration (a product of nuclear energy) and this "modern winemaking revolution exploded out of Germany" in the form of Rieslings that were fresh, sterile-filtered, and completely without oxidative characters. According to Smith: "the idea of a light, sweet, fresh, fruity wine like Blue Nun was as world changing as color television." 

These tools and techniques were adopted by Peynaud and other scientists in France and, from there, migrated to the US. According to Smith, prior to the 1960s, 95% of California wines were either port or sherry styles. With the introduction of Blue Nunn, and the adoption of the associated technologies in Bordeaux, US winemakers followed suit such that, by 1970, the majority of California wine contained less than 14% alcohol.

It was in this environment that Robert Mondavi introduced the groundbreaking Fumé Blanc in 1966-67. I explore the lead-up to, and construct of, this rockstar-of-its-time US dry Sauvignon Blanc.

Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon Blanc has its origins in France (Nancy Sweet, Sauvignon Blanc: past and present, FPS Grape Program Newsletter, October 2010) but had made its way to the US by the second half of the 19th Century:

• It was imported to the Santa Clara Valley in the 1870s by J-B. J. Portal
• It was present in Napa (H. W. Crabb, Gustav Niebaum) and Sonoma (J. H. Drummond) collections in the 1870s and 1880s.

Sauternes was held in very high regard in California  and Charles Wetmore -- CEO to the Board of State Viticulture Commissioners -- felt that it was important that the constituent varieties -- Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc -- be available for distribution to winemakers. Towards that end, he travelled to Chateau d'Yquem in the early 1880s with a letter of introduction. On the basis of the letter, he was able to obtain cuttings -- old vines on their own rootstock --  of Sauvignon Blanc, Semillon, and Muscadelle du Bordelais from the d'Yquem vineyard. 

The US consumer preference for Sauvignon Blanc prior to the 1960s was as a part of a sweet-wine blend. It was not well-regarded as a varietal wine because, according to wine.com, the resulting wines were too sweet, too grassy, too acidic, and poorly made. This was the reputational minefield that Robert Mondavi had to navigate if he was to successfully launch a Sauvignon Blanc varietal in the domestic market.

White Winemaking in California in this Period

The dry white wine of choice in California at this time was Chardonnay. Vines had been procured from Burgundy but there was very little contact with the Burgundian vignerons so the US winemakers had to figure it out on their own.

A major point of departure for California Chardonnay was signaled by the work of Hanzell. Hanzell began planting Chardonnay vines near Sonoma in 1953 and is credited with creating the world's first temperature-controlled stainless steel tank. As regards winemaking, Hanzell (Elaine Chukan Brown, The Story of Chardonnay, jancisrobinson.com):

• Picked for acid retention
• Passed the grapes through the crusher with sulfur and then went straight to the press
• Fermented the wine in stainless steel tanks.

Mondavi's Fumé Blanc

Mondavi loved French wines and knew that Sauvignon Blanc made glorious dry wines in the Loire Valley. He intended to make "a more distinctive, complex wine, using primarily the Sauvignon Blanc grape" but, in order for this wine to be accepted by the drinking public, drastic changes would have to be made. Mondavi implemented a number of initiatives on the technological and marketing fronts in order to advance his goal.

Technology Initiatives

Robert Mondavi launched his new winery in 1966 and, as such, was in a position where he could implement some of the technological initiatives that were seeing success in the Valley. 

By the 1960s, Hanzell had perfected the use of the stainless steel tank but the winery was still small. Mondavi took the technology and applied it on a larger commercial scale to the wines in his portfolio. The use of temperature controlled tanks allowed the winemaker to favor fruitier aromas and flavors (colder temperatures) or earthy and herbal notes (higher fermentation temperatures). The Sauvignon Blanc was one of the early beneficiaries of this technology transfer. 

In addition to fermenting in stainless steel, Mondavi aged the wines on the lees in new French oak barrels. The lees-aged wine is enriched by the compounds released during the constituent-degradation process.

The initial fermentation and aging strategies allowed Mondavi to mask the herbal notes of the variety while displaying rounder, more melon-like flavors. 

In subsequent iterations of the wine, Mondavi began fermenting and aging the fruit in used French oak barrels. In a study on barrel-fermentation of white wines (S. Herjavec, et al., The quality of white wines fermented in Croatian Oak, Food Chemistry, 100, 2007), the authors stated thusly:

Wines produced by fermentation and maturation in oak barrels have different flavor characteristics to those which have undergone barrel maturation only after fermentation in stainless steel. One reason for this is that actively growing yeasts are capable of transforming volatile flavor components, extracted from oak wood, into other volatile metabolites.

This metabolite transformation results in what Zac Brown, Winemaker at Alderlea Vineyards, describes as "better integration of the oak and softer mouthfeel when compared to a white that is finished and then transferred into oak barrels to age."

Marketing Initiatives

Mondavi felt that Sauvignon Blanc would not be a good name for his wine due to it (i) being difficult to pronounce and (ii) the negative historical associations. He called his wine Fumé Blanc instead. This was, first of all, a play on the name blanc Fumé in use in the Loire Valley and, secondly, an acknowledgment of some of the notes that accompanied barrel aging.

Mondavi did not trademark the name Fumé blanc, opting, instead, to leave it open for other winemakers to use and, thus, create a new class of wine based on the Sauvignon Blanc grape. Further, he petitioned the ATF to register Fumé Blanc as a synonym for Sauvignon Blanc.

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Where Sauvignon Blanc wines had not been well regarded by the drinking public, by 1968 there was "tremendous demand for this wine."

©Wine -- Mise en abyme

Opus One: Conception and execution of the highest order

Opus One is an Oakville-based winery joint venture that grew out of Baron Philippe de Rothschild's (at that time the owner of Mouton-Rothschild) desire to partner with an American producer to make a distinctly American wine.  I have visited the winery twice in a little over a year -- once as a member of the UC Davis Wine Law Conference team that visited the facility on June 6th, 2010 and, secondly, on a personal guided tour organized by @sdematei and led by Jim Nicolette, Guest Relations Coordinator -- and this post presents my understanding of the winery operations based on onsite discussions as well as material gleaned from secondary sources.

Based on the recommendation of his friend Harry Serlis, Robert Mondavi was the only producer who was considered by the Baron as a potential joint-venture partner (Julia Flynn Siler, The House of Mondavi, Penguin 2007).  The Baron invited Robert Mondavi to meet at Mouton-Rothschild and in the course of the visit (1978) proposed a joint venture based on equal footing (a surprising proposal to Mondavi given the size and prestige of Mouton).  The agreement coming out of the meeting was for the formation of a fifty-fifty joint venture which would produce a single red wine with a proprietary name (Siler 2007).  Robert Mondavi would provide the grapes and make the wine for the joint venture until it was able to meet its own needs and a search would be initiated to identify and procure property to house its operations.

The joint venture released its 1979 and 1980 vintages simultaneously in 1984 under the winemaking stewardship of Timothy Mondavi and Lucien Sionneau, the Mouton winemaker.  The product introduced on the market represented a compromise between Sionneau's preference for a more elegant offering and Mondavi's hankering for a California-style red wine (Siler 2007).

The climate and soils of Oakville, Opus One's home AVA, has been described in a previous post.  The estate currently owns and operates four vineyards, totaling 169 acres (68.4 ha), in the AVA.  The first acquisition was the Q Block (35 acres (14.2 ha)) of the famed To Kalon Vineyard from the Robert Mondavi Winery in 1981.


This was followed by the acquisition of the 50-acre (20.2-ha) River Parcel in 1983, the Ballestra Vineyard (49 acres (19.8 ha)) in 1984, and the To Kalon K Block (48 acre (18.4 ha)) in 2008.  In 1995 the Q Block was replanted with low-yield, high-density, phylloxera-resistant rootstock.  The density of the re-plantings was five to six times higher than is normal for Napa but was pursued in order to produce smaller berries with resultant higher skin-to-juice-ratio which, in turn, would translate into more intense flavors and aromas. Overall vine density ranges between 500 and 2400 vines per acre.  Vines are spur-pruned with new plantings going to Guyot.

Source: Opusonewinery.com

The goal of Opus One is the production of an extraordinay wine and the person leading that charge today is the Winemaker and Viticulturist Michael Silacci.  Mike has a Masters degree in Viticulture from UC Davis and Undergraduate degrees in Enology from UC Davis and the University of Bordeaux.  Mike spent 6 years as the winemaker at Stags Leap Wine Cellars and 1 year as the winemaker at King Estates in Oregon but is especially mindful of the years (6) at Beaulieu Estates where he got to work alongside the legendary Andre Tchelistcheff.  Tchelistcheff had come back to Beaulieu Vineyards as a consultant and Mike worked alongside him for approximately 3 years and came out of that process a Tchelistcheff disciple.

Mike came to Opus One in 2001 and put the vineyard team together, drawing extensively from Mondavi personnel. Mike sought out committed vineyard workers who were willing to take on responsibility and ownership.  In 2004 he placed the cellar workers into teams and gave each team four barrels of wine (value approximately $250,000) with the goal of having "their" wines included in the Opus blend.  According to JIm Nicolette, since that initial assignment, only one team has missed the blend.

During my initial trip to Opus I was mesmerized by the corporate strategic management skills exhibited by Mike.  These are not the type of skills that you encounter in a winery on a daily basis.  First, he was very strategic in his thinking and every action that was undertaken was part of a larger plan.  He related the story of how he eventually got the executives in France to commit the financial resources to replanting the vineyards and it was brilliant.  Second, his management style was highly motivational.  Rather than pulling folks along, he gave them a sense of shared ownership and responsibility and a "we all win together" attitude.  He spoke very highly of his staff and their successes to the UC Davis team where a lot of winemakers would have used the opportunity to laud their own accomplishments.  And that love is returned.  A fair amount of the time that I spent with Jim was taken up with favorable stories about Mike's effect on and in the workplace.  According to Jim, Mike's motivational management style has dramatically changed the culture at Opus One.

Harvesting of the grape berries are done by hand by teams working between 3:30 and 10:00 am.  The berries are deposited into small picking boxes for transport to the winery where they are hand-sorted before being placed in the destemmer.  The berries are gravity-flowed from the destemmers to stainless steel fermenting tanks on the floor below.  Each tank is dedicated to a single lot and is only used once during harvest.  The berries undergo a warm maceration at the conclusion of which the tanks are raised and the free-run juice is gravity-fed into new French oak barrels.  The remaining solid material is placed into basket presses and the resulting juice is itself placed into oak barrels for aging.

The wine is kept in oak casks for 18 months during which time it is racked and topped-up as needed.  In turbid years the wine is subjected to egg-white fining. The final blend is determined by a tasting team comprised of the winemaker, two assistant winemakers, and a contingent from Mouton-Rothschild.  The blend is generally 85% Cabernet Sauvignon with the remainder being some mix of the other Bordeaux varietals.  A general practice is to co-ferment the best Cabernet Sauvignon with Petit Verdot.

The wines are bottled after the 18-month residence in cask and spend an additional 18 months in bottle before public release.

Opus One bottles its vintage Bordeaux blend for worldwide distribution and a non-vintage second wine -- Overture -- which is only avaiilable for purchse at the winery or on the winery's website.  The flagship wine is generally concentrated with apparent black fruit and silky tannins but ages well, as demonstrated in a recent Masters of Wine tasting in London where Mike's favorite vintages were showcased.  The wines are generally favorably received by the critic-class and have developed a faithful following worldwide.

In closing I should note that, with Constellation's purchase of the Robert Mondavi Winery, the joint partners in the endeavor are now Constellation Brands and the Baron Philippe de Rothschild organization.


©Wine -- Mise en abyme