CHEERS TO MONDAVI
Purveyor of great food and wine
If you’ve ever enjoyed the tenderly blistered pizzas at Tinhorn Creek Winery, the perfectly seared duck breast at Quails’ Gate, or the endless charcuterie boards at Hester Creek’s Terrafina restaurant, you can probably thank Robert Mondavi.
He was not only the father of California wine; he was also a passionate advocate for fine food, good art, and most importantly, how each should complement the other and enjoyed to the fullest.
“If you go back to the Greeks and Romans, they talk about all three — wine, food, and art — as a way of enhancing life,” Mondavi, who died in 2008 at the grand age of 94, once said.
“We still follow the philosophy of Mr. Mondavi, which is that great wine should be paired with great food,” says Geneviève Janssens, who for more than 20 years has been the winery’s director of winemaking.
“So it’s important the food doesn’t dominate the wine, and the wine doesn’t dominate the food.”
When Mondavi opened his Napa Valley winery in 1966 — before Alice Waters ever topped peppery fresh greens with baked goat cheese at Chez Panisse or Wolfgang Puck lavished pizza dough with smoked salmon and caviar at Spago — he helped launch a North American revolution in how we eat and drink and live.
And California was the place to do it.
The state is big — 423,970 square kilometres in size, or about half the size of B.C. — only a whole lot warmer. Its nearly 40 million residents are spread across a dizzying array of geographical and climatic regions, many with ideal conditions for growing everything from salad greens to citrus fruits. Indeed, California’s 77,500 farms grow most of the United States’ produce, and much of what we eat on this side of the border, too.
But it’s not just the produce that has created what we now call California cuisine.
It’s the people. California is a land of immigrants, who brought culinary traditions and flavours from all over Europe, Latin America and Asia. It is also a land of visionaries, freethinkers and dreamers, like the hippies and other back-to-the-landers who were among the first to encourage farm-to-table dining.
Nowhere do all those elements come together more deliciously than in wine country. And that goes well beyond California.
Here in B.C., Mission Hill’s Anthony von Mandl was heavily influenced by what Mondavi was doing in Oakville when he opened the winery’s Terrace Restaurant in 2002.
It is dramatically situated in a building designed by legendary architect Tom Kundig and overlooks both an amphitheatre, where concerts are held, and Okanagan Lake.
The recognition it received, along with much-needed changes to provincial regulations, inspired other wineries to follow suit. Today, more than 30 wineries around B.C. operate bistros, bakeries, cheeseries and fine dining restaurants, all serving the kind of fresh, creative, locally inspired wine-country cuisine Mondavi championed half a century ago in California.
A little ironically, Robert Mondavi Winery doesn’t have a restaurant. In fact, because of local restrictions, relatively few Napa wineries do, even though the region is known for exceptional cuisine.
Mondavi does have a winery chef — the talented Jeffrey Mosher, who harvests many of his ingredients from gardens on the property — and guests can book culinary “experiences,” such as a private tour followed by lunch, dinner or a picnic in the vineyard.
Most importantly, though, the winery fulfils Mondavi’s vision. “We want to raise the art of living well,” he once said.
It’s an art that you’ll be able to celebrate at the Vancouver International Wine Festival.
But it’s also one you can savour long after that, as the seeds planted by those early wine country pioneers continue to bear fruit for generations to come.
It’s important the food doesn’t dominate the wine, and the wine doesn’t dominate the food.