Angelina Mondavi Takes the Helm at Charles Krug Winery Amid Industry Headwinds
By Dave Stoneberg
Summary of Today’s Story: Angelina Mondavi was named head winemaker at Charles Krug after longtime winemaker Stacy Clark retired. With 35-plus harvests from Argentina, Australia and Italy to Napa, she brings a lean, transparent cellar approach, keeps most wines under 14.4% ABV and is steering through a soft market by prioritizing vineyard regeneration and block-by-block blending for “Generations.” The family is phasing leadership to the fourth generation as Marc and Peter Jr. step back, extending the legacy of Peter Mondavi Sr., a pioneer of cold fermentation and early Carneros plantings.
Programming Note: Dan Berger’s Wine Chronicles returns next week. For those who can’t wait — or want a different lens — our sister publication, “Sonoma County Features” runs its own Wine Chronicles with a perspective distinct from Napa’s. Berger’s latest there explores how American Viticultural Area boundaries, shaped by past conditions and assumptions, may no longer reflect present-day realities.
Angelina Mondavi Takes the Helm at Charles Krug Winery Amid Industry Headwinds
By Dave Stoneberg
ST. HELENA, Calif. — For roughly 25 years, Angelina Mondavi has worked more than 35 wine grape harvests across the globe — in Argentina, Australia, Italy and the Napa Valley. This year, though, was different.
Stacy Clark, who had been the winemaker for Charles Krug Winery since 2011, retired a week before the start of this year’s harvest.
Mondavi, who since 2017 has focused on the family’s reserve and limited-release wines, was named head winemaker for Napa Valley’s first commercial winery, founded in 1861.
“Our family philosophy is that we have to have a minimum of three to five years of experience outside the family business. I just happened to take closer to 25 years,” she said. “Obviously, you have to cut your teeth elsewhere, but it took me years of trying to get back in, and now I’m back.”
2025 Harvest Ends
The Mondavi family owns and farms 850 acres of wine grapes throughout the Napa Valley, from Willow Lake Vineyard in Carneros to its vineyards surrounding the winery to Cold Springs in the Howell Mountain AVA.
“Harvest went very, very smooth,” Mondavi said. “Of course you’re going to have Mother Nature throwing curveballs at you, between the mini heat spikes and then little bursts of rain.”
The 43-year-old said one of those curveballs involved their petite sirah grapes, which “just love to produce a lot of fruit, so you have to manicure them yourself to make sure they don’t overproduce to the point where they don’t ripen.”
The thin-skinned, tightly clustered grape is vulnerable to mold from humidity or a late-season rainstorm, as happened this year.
“We thought we were only going to get half an inch,” Mondavi said, “and we ended up getting over an inch.”
As she watched the weather metrics, which indicated the storm would be significant, she decided they had better bring the grapes in.
“We ended up picking Saturday, Sunday and Monday, as well as the entire week before,” she said. “I dislike processing fruit on Saturdays and Sundays. I like to give my team a well-rested break from all the hard work that they’ve been doing for that entire week.”
The 100 winery employees include a national sales team. Inside the cellar and the lab about 20 more people include the winemaking team.
Because of the rainstorm, they brought in all the grapes that were at optimal ripeness and “tasting absolutely perfect prior to the rain,” she said. “So at the end of that rainstorm, I really got to take a deep breath, and we only had 60 tons left out in the rain, but I’m not worried. It’s in the tank now. There was no mold, no mildew, so I made the right call.”
But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way, and winemakers have to be diligent, watch the weather and predict the unpredictable.
“That’s one of the best parts about winemaking,” she said. “Every year it’s completely different. What you thought you were going to deal with at the start of harvest ends up being different. And that makes the wine even more beautiful and nuanced.”
This year the winery sold some merlot and a little bit of cabernet sauvignon and sauvignon blanc.
“We actually did OK,” Mondavi said. “There were some last-minute buys that we weren’t anticipating.”
This past year, the family pulled out 15 acres of zinfandel.
“They were over 30 years old and were severely diseased,” she said. “And in a market where you’re seeing the contraction and you’re seeing the bulk wine sales not doing well, really we couldn’t even sell it. So for us, it made a lot of sense to just to rip it out and then work on the rejuvenation (of the soil). When we’re talking about pulling vineyards out, we’re also talking about the next 10 years. It’s not just pull it out and let the land sit and stay fallow. Now we have to work on the regeneration. We need to make sure that the nutrients go back into the soil so that when we do replant, those vines will be healthy for the next 30 years.”
Currently, the market is in a major correction — too much supply and not enough demand, either for wine grapes or wine — and Mondavi said flatly, “I think we’re not done yet.”
How long will the correction last?
“I’m hoping for no more than another year,” she said. “A lot of vineyards got ripped out this year here in the Napa Valley. There’s a lot more that I believe are going to be ripped out this next coming year, as well.”
Today’s Word Puzzle:
Fermentation isn’t the only thing getting shaken up at Charles Krug. Unscramble the varietals and vineyard lingo below. Answers at the bottom of the page.
Younger Generations Not Drinking Wine
On a related issue: Many people in Mondavi’s age group and younger are not drinking wine. Why?
“I know the younger generations are definitely more into exploring and experiencing and experimenting with different ‘vices’ in both drink form and smoke form,” she said. “I think there has been a lack of true authenticity in the wine world, as well. I feel everyone’s been talking and touting about the younger generation being healthy, and while I might agree on that, I also don’t agree because they’re probably the largest consumers of energy drinks, which are not healthy for you.”
She said the younger generations are coming to Charles Krug and looking for authentic stories.
“They’re like, ‘We found you because you’re the oldest winery in Napa Valley,’” she said, “and then we start telling them we’re also still family-run, family-owned for five generations and we’re majority women-owned. We have all these different pinpoints and blocks that we can say are a little bit more valuable and more meaningful than just (someone) pulling a wine off the shelf that has zero meaning.”
She added, “I think the individuals (wineries) that will truly prevail are the ones that are all about transparency, being 100% authentic and talking about it all and being open-minded about it.”
Mondavi makes wines using a minimalistic approach.
“One of the huge things that our family has really been focusing on is creating efficiencies but also creating transparency,” she said. “We’ve been getting a lot more calls asking if our wines are gluten-free, if they’re vegan, what’s our residual sugar? I’m proud to say that almost all of our wines are gluten-free. They’re vegan. They all have less than 1 gram per liter of sugar.”
Mondavi is herself insulin-resistant.
“If I’m going to work my behind off, I want to make sure that I can actually reap the rewards, as well, and sit down and have a glass of wine and know that my insulin isn’t going to increase,” she said.
Peter Mondavi Sr. as a Purist
Mondavi grew up in one of the three houses on the grounds of the Charles Krug Winery with her parents and sisters. She followed in her father’s footsteps and worked with her grandfather, Peter, whose parents, Cesare and Rosa Mondavi, paid $75,000 for the winery in 1943. Their sons, Robert and Peter Sr., ran the winery until Robert left in 1966 to begin his own operation. After the death of his mother, Rosa, in 1976, Peter acquired full ownership of the Krug winery.
Peter and his wife, Blanche, had two sons, Marc and Peter Jr. Angelina and her sisters are four of their six grandchildren. Angelina is the daughter of Marc and Janice. She and her three sisters, Alycia, Riana and Giovanna, own the Mondavi Sisters’ Collection, which includes such wines as Aloft, AntiMatter, Dark Matter and Humble Beginnings. Angelina is the winemaker for the collection.
Peter passed away in 2016, at age 101, when she was 33.
“I knew my grandfather very, very well,” she said. “When I lived in Australia, I was pretty much calling him once, twice a week, asking questions having to do with the science behind winemaking. I didn’t know my grandfather was really one of the huge proponents and one of the founders of cold fermentation. I didn’t find that out until I was in graduate school because he didn’t talk about it.”
Mondavi earned her master’s degree in winemaking from the University of Adelaide in South Australia. Her undergraduate degree in chemistry with a minor in business is from Villanova University in Pennsylvania. She said much of what she knows comes from working with her grandfather.
“I learned a lot,” she said. “When you work for a family business and when you’re learning under a family business, you’re told a lot of things. This is how it goes, but you’re not necessarily told why. It’s just, ‘This is how it is. Don’t second-guess me, just do it.’”
Audio Note: Above is the full, unedited audio of Dave Stoneberg’s conversation with Angelina Mondavi. We kept the room tone and natural pauses so you can hear cadence and context. Use headphones if you can.
Audio Chapters: 00:00 — Intro and context; 01:14 — Stacy Clark’s retirement and Angelina’s current roles; 04:52 — Lessons from family and cold fermentation; 06:37 — “Generations,” single-vineyard focus; 12:39 — Process notes and 2025 whites; 15:13 — 2025 harvest calls and cellar team; 18:42 — Scale and limited releases; 19:31 — Estate fruit sales this year; 20:17 — Family legacy and goals; 27:23 — Transparency on additions, vegan and gluten-free; 29:35 — Vineyard changes, soil work, wildfire risk; 34:01 — Succession and 2025 style; 37:12 — Younger drinkers, efficiency, water, UV; 44:17 — Close.
Mondavi said studying for her graduate degree brought into focus what she had already learned.
“It was really where I started understanding what Grandpa and what my dad, Marc, talked about when it came to winemaking. It was putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.”
Before, she knew what the outcome was, but she never knew why. Today she understands. She said she is a “huge amalgamation between my grandfather being a purist at heart and my dad. He very much loved to explore and try new things, whether it was with fermenting or whether it was trying different barrel cooperages out of the norm. So I’m really kind of a mix between the two.”
Mondavi said her grandfather was strict while her father was more adventuresome.
“My grandfather said you put cabernet sauvignon in a cabernet sauvignon tank, and you keep it that way and then you blend afterward,” she said. “My dad was different. He was just going to mix everything (different varieties of grapes) together and create a beautiful co-ferment, or field blend. That’s how our Generations wine came about.”
But she said she has her grandfather’s spirit: She doesn’t create a field blend “hoping for the best” for the family reserve “Generations.”
“I really focus on keeping the tanks as pure as possible,” Mondavi said.
She said beyond that, keeping the grape varietals separate “helps me identify the strongest parts of those blocks. But the other cool part about it is then I can actually blend the ‘Generations’ down the line and get a little touch of everything, as well as for the vintage selection, which usually comes from our best vineyards.”
She said she doesn’t think she is rebelling against her grandfather’s wishes.
“I think the only area where I kind of rebelled with Grandpa was he was a stickler on lower-alcohol wines, to the point we would hear it ad nauseam. Everything has to be low-alcohol.”
But Mondavi told her grandfather that the flavors don’t always develop until the wines get to optimal sugar ripeness, optimal phenolic ripeness.
When she was working on the Dark Matter zinfandel, she got her grandfather to taste the wine that was 16.1% alcohol, which he said was too high.
“I said, ‘But you said you liked it.’ And he said, ‘I did, didn’t I?’”
She asked him whether he cared more about alcohol or balance , telling him that “From my learning, I care more about balance as an end result than I do necessarily about the alcohol. Now I care about alcohol because I would like to have more than one glass of wine, so my end results are always keeping everything below 14.4% alcohol, regardless.”
She said that even today her grandfather is “chirping in the back of my head, saying that alcohol is very important. You need not to disregard that. And I’ve never disregarded it.”
Grandfather’s Legacy
Mondavi wasn’t aware of the importance of the family name until she left for graduate school outside the United States.
“We didn’t talk about it much,” she said. “We didn’t talk about the family rift. We didn’t talk about any of that stuff. It just wasn’t spoken about.”
What is the legacy?
“I have really big shoes to fill,” she said. “There are very few people in the world that I can have a conversation with as a multigeneration family, but also as a wine family that had responsibilities of really making Napa Valley what it was in different aspects.”
As a winemaker, Peter was the pioneer of cold fermentation, cold sterilization, one of the first to bring in barrels and one of the first to plant in Carneros. A lot of firsts.
“As a fourth generation, my generation, I won’t ever fill those shoes,” his granddaughter said. “But what I always look for is how can I be a solution to a problem that may be arising farther down the line.”
The issues she mentions might be water conservation and using technology that is developing around that issue, such as using UV light, rather than water, to sanitize tanks. Others are regeneration of the soil and regenerative farming, making more efficiencies and being more resourceful.
She said rather than work toward five or 10 generations, “Our dream is always to model ourselves after the Antinori family (in Tuscany), which is now 26 generations. Those are the sorts of things that I think are really, really important for us and for our family.”
She added that already the family business is starting to evolve to the next generation.
“My dad and my uncle are starting to slowly give up the reins,” she said. “We are slowly transitioning to the next phase, which is into the fourth generation of ownership. My dad will be retiring next year, and Pete will retire in a few years. And when that’s all they’ve done for their entire lives, it can be a challenge. It can also be rewarding in the sense that the baton is being passed, and I think it’s really exciting. We’re still one of the few families here in Napa Valley that is multigenerational. For us to still be here and still be fighting for our ground and our rights and to be able to continue representing Charles Krug, it has been an honor. But it does come with its challenges.”
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Dave Stoneberg is a long-time journalist and editor for Napa and Lake counties.
Wine Discovery:
2019 Generations Red Blend ($85, ~500 cases) — A 100% estate-grown Bordeaux-style blend from Charles Krug in Napa Valley, this vintage combines 87% cabernet sauvignon, 7% merlot and 6% petit verdot. Night-harvested and aged in new French oak, it opens with ripe cherry and pomegranate layered with notes of duck confit, garrigue, malt and dark chocolate. Full-bodied with a firm, rich texture, it shows mixed berries, vanilla and dark-roast coffee on the palate. Alcohol sits at about 14% with medium-plus acidity and a grippy frame suited for cellaring. Pair with grilled ribeye and herb butter, braised lamb shanks with rosemary or aged Gouda with fig jam — Tim Carl
Today’s Polls:
This Week's Word Challenge Reveal:
Answer + Explanation
Petite syrah – A tricky grape that needs to be carefully managed to avoid mold.
Aloft – One of the wines in the Mondavi Sisters’ Collection.
Regenerative vineyard – What happens after they pull out 30-year-old diseased vines.
Cold sterile – Short for cold ferment sterilization, a technique championed by Peter Mondavi Sr.
Carneros – One of the AVAs where the Mondavis farm grapes.
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I'd like to read a follow up story on the restoration of that Zin vineyard they pulled. I once read Angelina say they will be doing "Regenerative" practices, which is very specific. If they are using those practices, I'd really like to see that featured, as well as any/all other vineyards using true, Regenerative Ag.