JamesSuckling Interviews: Carlo Mondavi

James Suckling Interviews features innovative and influential winery owners, winemakers and industry notables representing the new generation that is shaping tastes, trends and techniques in the greater wine world. 

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Carlo Mondavi founded the Sonoma Coast winery RAEN in 2013 with his brother Dante, with a goal of farming coveted coastal sites that purely reflect the unique terroir and growing conditions of the California region. A fourth-generation winemaker and farmer, Carlo grew up under the tutelage of his grandfather, Napa pioneer Robert Mondavi, and his father, Napa Valley winemaking legend Tim Mondavi, both of whom instilled in him a love and respect for Burgundy, for the importance of site selection and expression, and a commitment to protecting the environment. A leader in sustainable practices, the 44-year-old Carlo is a co-founder of the Monarch Tractor, an electric solution to traditional farming tractors. He splits his time between California and Piedmont, Italy, where he makes wine at Sorì della Sorba, a project with his wife, Giovanna Bagnasco, whose family produces Brandini Barolo. Susan Kostrzewa caught up with Carlo recently to discuss the 2022 vintage, his innovations in permaculture and no-till farming, and why he still has his father on speed dial, among other topics.

Current vintages of RAEN, including the Pinot Noir Sonoma County Freestone Occidental Bodega Vineyard 2022, have scored very high with James and his teams. How did you maintain freshness in such a hot year, when temperatures on the coast reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit?

We are so close to the coast and it’s so cool that that kind of heat is a very rare occurrence. But while I think with climate chaos and all the challenges we're facing that everything you do along the journey is critical, the picking decision is certainly the most critical. If you blink your eyes with pinot noir, it's not like nebbiolo or some other clusters that can really ride out the weather. It reacts quickly and with the sugars, it just does a slow accumulation and then it spikes. In the case of 2022, it reminded me of 2017, when the Labor Day heatwave set a record. 2022 broke that record. When 2022 came along, we were ready and we aligned our crews. We knew what was going to happen.

In 2017, we had just finished veraison and I remember going out and beginning the sampling process and everything was looking incredible. Beautiful dark clusters, very similar to what we saw in 2022. And then this heatwave came and essentially what happens when it gets that hot is you perspire acidity through the cell wall, but you also perspire to a magnitude of order greater than the water in the berry.

And so it perspired water faster than acid, concentrating sugars at low brix. I've never seen anything like this in my life. And I remember tasting and thinking to myself, we have to capture this now! The pH was perfect. Everything was perfect. A lot of people were talking about irrigating to plump up the grapes, but we’re a whole-cluster house and try to use whole bunches whenever we can instead of destemming. We don't irrigate because it yields resinous, sappy stems. And so we picked then and it was the single best decision that we made. I love that vintage so much. We had a similar situation with 2022 and made a call. 2022 is buoyant, fresh and light but also denser than 2017. You get this concentration, but at low ethanol levels.

Can you talk about why you decided to go 100 percent, or nearly 100 percent, whole cluster in your fermentation?

For me it's the aromatics. I think what attracts me the most in wine is the aromatics – when you smell a wine with complexity, nuance and depth. If a wine is mute aromatically but texturally complex and amazing, I'm not as enamored by it. It goes back to a visit I did in Burgundy and Bordeaux with my grandfather [Robert Mondavi]. He wanted to show us what he saw in ‘62 that gave him this fire in his belly. On that trip, we visited Anne-Claude LeFlaive [of Burgundy’s Chardonnay producer Domaine Leflaive], who is one of my heroes. I always say the women of Burgundy changed the way that the world farms, because it was Anne-Claude really pushing biodynamics before anybody. I just fell in love with her vision and farming. And our second stop was with Aubert de Villaine  [of Domaine Romanee-Conti] who is another one of my heroes in wine, and we visited the vineyards. Absolutely beautiful. Remarkable. Then we dropped down into the cellar and the wines were explosively aromatic. I couldn't get over the aromatics – the rose petal, the  tea, the lift – and the thing they were doing different was whole cluster. So when Dante and I began RAEN, I thought, can we can make a liquid that has this lift and this buoyancy and this freshness?

This is why we've selected hillside sites – well-drained sites. Because I don't think whole cluster does well in all vineyards. And it doesn't do well in all circumstances, all vintages. Whole clusters also allow you to to pick earlier, with 12.5 percent to 13 percent potential alcohol, but there’s usually so much total acidity that if you destemmed it, it would be angular and abrasive. Because of the clusters, there's a little potassium in the stems that binds to the tartaric acid, forming potassium bitartrate, raising the pH slightly and giving this incredible texture. You get all of these dimensions: aromatic lift, freshness and brightness and then texture and richness on the palate, which I love.

You and Dante refer to yourselves as winegrowers as opposed to winemakers. Can you explain the importance of that distinction to you?

It comes from my father [Tim Mondavi of Continuum], really. He tells a story that when he took over as director of winemaking [in 1974 at Robert Mondavi Winery] that the only time the vineyard manager and the winemaker met was essentially when the vineyard manager was handing the fruit over to the winemaker and said, now you go. He very much believed the wines are grown not made and began the journey of spending a lot more time on the farm. I'm really proud of my father because this was during a time when herbicides were beginning to ramp up. 1974 is the very same year that the patent was filed for Roundup and there was a herbicide uptake. At the time, my family was a larger winery and the farming that he was doing was so high level. I'm very proud that we're four generations of herbicide free, that my father has been beyond organic, and Dante and I are permaculturalists and biodynamic and no till. Dante and I use the “winegrower” term to kind of honor that, and while there is challenge and difficulty and work that has to happen in the cellar and in the winery, the farming piece is without a doubt the most important part. Because without a great site and great honoring of the site, you cannot produce great wine in the cellar.

Can you talk about how much your love of Burgundy informs your work at RAEN?

Burgundy has taught me that site is paramount. It's everything, and once you have that great site, it's also about the farming. And I think that they've been probably one of the best in the world in terms of telling that story and not just using words, but showing it in the bottle via the transparency of those wines and the connection to the place, the terroir. I'm very proud of our California terroir but I think we have a lot to learn from the Old World.

You are deeply rooted in driving and innovating sustainable practice at RAEN, leading the way not only in Sonoma but in Napa and beyond. What have been some of the recent innovations in the RAEN vineyards on which you are particularly focused or about which you’re particularly excited?

The holy grail of farming for me is permaculture, where a farm permanently sustains itself, where there's so much biodiversity that the good and the bad live in symbiosis. So when Dante and I and our team begin to approach farming, we think of it from a permaculture remedy. If there's a challenge in the field, what can we use within this field? What kind of nature along the Sonoma Coast exists that can help us battle this? Like bluebirds for blue-green sharpshooters is a great one. We have riparian habitats, which is where blue-green sharpshooters like to live. They're the vector for Pierce’s disease. In the last 30 years, there's been some nasty insecticides that are neurotoxins that are harmful for bees and our planet's biodiversity that people might have used. We learned that bluebirds love blue-green sharpshooters, it's their filet mignon! And so we installed bluebird boxes and we’ve seen an increase in bluebirds and a decrease in blue-green sharpshooters. This is just one example.

Another example: we've partnered with the Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue. They try to release animals that have been injured or orphaned and then rehabilitate them back to the environment in which they came, but sometimes the environment in which they were found is not suitable for release. Our first release was Doris the Bobcat. We now see her hunting in the fields all the time. We have a gopher and vole problem in the dry months, when they like to bite the vine root to try to get water which often kills the plant. So we're just trying to keep them at bay.

Can you talk more about your no-till farming approach? Why is it important?

If we can't find a permaculture remedy, we go to a biodynamic remedy, and if we can't find a biodynamic remedy, we base that as a no-till farm. This allows us to encourage the mycelium network and the mycorrhizal fungi and that pathway within the roots to communicate. And there's a lot of really cool stuff coming out on agroforestry and how the roots – certain roots in trees – actually share a similar mycorrhizal network, allowing the vineyard to be connected deeper into the forest. Also from an organic matter and a nutrient density and overall health perspective, no till really helps the chemistry. And all of this helps the environment.

FROM THE VAULT: CARLO MONDAVI AND THE RAEN TOUCH [2022]

I think agriculture is arguably the most important sector, because it represents 30 percent of our planet's carbon footprint. It's tied to and responsible for the collapse of the monarch butterflies, among other things.

That leads me to my next question about the Monarch electric tractor. What was your process for coming up with the idea and eventually launching the business? What were the challenges?

I’m one of four founders. It’s an all-electric, driver-optional tractor company. We're now six years into it. Last year was the first year that we began commercializing and selling to our partners, the farming partners. This year we're scaling. We have orders from 98 countries around the world. In our first two months, our customers drove the tractors over 45,000 linear kilometers, which is greater than the circumference of earth, saving farmers in that time $200,000 in fuel and removing 3,000 cars’ worth of emissions. A small [traditional] tractor the size of Monarch is like turning on 14 cars. So it's a big emitter. I think 15 percent of the total fuels burned on our planet are from farming. It's responsible for a third of our planet's carbon footprint. We are facing this massive collapse right now. 70 percent of our planet's insect biomass has disappeared since the year 2000, and 50 percent of the bird population.

Seeing increased herbicides in Napa when younger, I got interested and learned about the environmental impact. And that's when I began a movement. But the movement was going to fail because there was an economic divide; it costs more to farm without herbicides than to spray Roundup, A pre-emergent and a burndown herbicide costs less than to mow. I learned that 42 percent of farms in America are profitable, meaning 58 percent of the farms in America, with subsidies fully loaded, are struggling. Large farms have shareholders to report to and there was also a carbon footprint divide.

So saving farms money also helped you with buy-in?

Saving money while doing good is a win-win.

Many of your wines are named after family members, including your grandfather Robert and grandmother Marjorie. Can you talk about what you consider to be the most important philosophies you learned from the previous generations of your family and how those impact what you and Dante do at RAEN? Does Tim drink your wines?

My greatest teachers were my father and grandfather. My grandfather instilled in Dante and I that you can make wines that sit in the company of the best wines in the world if you find great sites and you focus on making wine at the highest level. That helped us when we jumped into the deep end of beginning RAEN. And then my father taught Dante and I the fundamentals of the science of viticulture and enology. I think my father's very proud of what we're doing. He does drink and collect RAEN and we still have him on as an advisor, informally. I can call him and stand outside the cellar and ask questions. I did that a lot more in the early days, and he was incredibly helpful. And he still remains one of my first calls if I see something that I haven't seen before.

What’s your feeling about the current concern that wine consumption is decreasing in the U.S. and abroad? What can we do to mitigate that?

Right now the anti-alcohol sentiment feels kind of reminiscent of the 1918 Spanish flu and then 1919 Prohibition. We had Covid, and once again there's a Prohibitionist kind of talk. We’ve all seen the French paradox. My great-uncle Peter lived to be 101. My grandfather lived to be a month shy of 95. Some of these studies feel very myopic. As Margrit [Biever Mondavi – Carlo's step-grandmother] would always say, “there are more old winemakers than there are doctors.”  So to me, wine is health, in moderation. There’s also a symbiotic relationship that happens with wine and food when we digest. We know about polyphenols and resveratrol. When you look at the data and the Blue Zones around the world and who's having the best life, it's the zones where good food and wine are on the table. Right now we need as winemakers to get out and talk about that. But I think that this is cyclical.