Case Solved 'robert Mondavi & the Wine Industry'

1. Robert Mondavi

The development of the Robert Mondavi winery was based on the family’s philosophy that the purpose of wine is to accompany food. In this respect, Mondavi totally committed to quality, dedicated his energy to create consistent brands and to enlarge the market for his wines. Mondavi’s strong dedication to producing quality and to operational excellence, stimulated various innovations of the value delivery chain of wine. Many of them were rapidly copied by competitors and became standards of this industry.

i) Innovative Approaches of Grape Growing

Looking at Mondavi’s case, innovation began in the vineyard. Robert Mondavi is famous for being the most aggressive planter of denser spaced vineyards in Napa, this was done, however, after research was undertaken. Firstly, consideration was taken into arrangement of the vineyard and its unique environmental characteristics, while diverse low-impact viticultural techniques were developed in an attempt to let each harvest express the synergies between the essential character of the varietal and each vineyard’s “terroir”. Secondly, many experiments were performed in vineyards to identify the effect of increased pruning and various levels of sunlight or irrigation, on the flavor of the final crop.

31

Natural wine growing programs were also developed to move away from synthetic chemicals and pesticides to natural fertilizers, stimulating the development of natural flavors. Finally, Robert Mondavi improved the precision of decisions related to the vineyard (grape harvesting, application of fertilizers, irrigation or pest control) by developing a cooperation with NASA to create highly accurate digital maps of its’ vineyards.

Mondavi outsource also qualitative crops, securing their quality through sharing knowledge with partner growers. Mondavi’s vineyard specialists act as consultants for their partner growers, while the latest taste the wines created from their grapes. Thus, they can understand easily the opportunities for improvement and successfully apply the new technologies and techniques developed in Mondavi’s vineyards. In search for quality, nowadays in both the partners’ vineyards and in its’ own vineyards, Mondavi emphasizes the organic growth that adds more value to the wine.

ii) Innovative Approaches of Winemaking

The importance of the relationship between the way grapes are grown and how they are subsequently turned into wine is enhanced by Mondavi, who has been adopting various innovations in the winemaking process. His philosophy was to preserve the character of fruits in the final flavor of the wine by gently handling the grapes during the various processes. The manual harvesting (as opposed to the mechanical harvesting) is stimulated especially for grapes designed for highly qualitative wines38, while gravity, rather than pressurised pumping, is used to transfer must from the crusher into the fermentation vat.