Michael Mondavi, 83, is the subject of a new business biography that documents his six-decade role architecting the commercial rise of Napa Valley — including deals, failures, and reinventions rarely discussed openly in the wine trade. Deals Drama Drive: Michael Mondavi and the Making of Napa Valley, written by veteran wine journalist Adam Lechmere and published by Académie du Vin Library, is priced at $35 (ISBN 978-1-917084-95-6) and goes on sale November 10, with full publication in December.
The Business Case
The biography is structured around the strategic inflection points that defined American premium wine as a global category. Lechmere, who spent months in interviews with Mondavi and longtime collaborators, covers the operational buildout of Robert Mondavi Winery, the cross-cultural partnership with Baron Philippe de Rothschild that produced Opus One, and international joint ventures with the Frescobaldi family of Tuscany. Each episode is framed not as legacy mythology but as a sequence of business decisions — some prescient, some costly.
Equally prominent are the episodes that went wrong: the Copia cultural center, the Languedoc expansion, internal succession conflicts inside a family-controlled enterprise, and the eventual sale of Robert Mondavi Winery. Mondavi's subsequent rebuild through Folio Fine Wine Partners is presented as a case study in post-loss reinvention. The candor is deliberate. "Michael has insisted that failures be cataloged as assiduously as successes," Lechmere writes in his author's note, adding that every chapter received Mondavi's personal approval.
Why It Matters for the Trade
For foodservice and beverage industry operators, the book arrives as the premium and ultra-premium wine segments face renewed pressure on volume while continuing to command strong per-bottle pricing. Napa Valley Cabernet in particular has become a benchmark luxury category, and the governance and brand-building decisions documented in Deals Drama Drive offer a longitudinal view of how that positioning was constructed — and occasionally imperiled — over six decades.
Wine author Karen MacNeil, in the book's foreword, frames Michael Mondavi's contribution in operational terms: "Robert was a man with lofty ideas, a man who flew high. But someone had to hold the kite strings. Someone had to bring it all down to earth. Make it happen. And that someone was Michael." That framing — the execution-oriented executive behind a visionary founder — gives the book direct relevance to family-business operators across the broader food and beverage sector grappling with succession and governance.
"I've spent my life building businesses, taking risks and, sometimes, learning the hard way," Mondavi said. "What I wanted was for this book to tell the whole story — not simply the successes, but also the difficult decisions, the mistakes, the people who helped me along the way and the lessons that came from all of it."
Lechmere, publishing director of Académie du Vin Library and a contributor to Decanter and The Guardian, frames the book's scope as an industry narrative as much as a personal one. "Behind the famous names and celebrated wines are very human decisions — some inspired, some difficult and some that simply did not work," he said. For context on how Napa's premiumization story intersects with current beverage alcohol market trends, the biography provides one of the most detailed first-person accounts yet published. It also speaks directly to ongoing food and beverage industry conversations around family business succession.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
