Robert Mondavi Dies
Tags: illustration, larry roibal, portrait of the day, Robert Mondavi, sketch of the day, winery
Ball point pen on paper napkin
Robert Mondavi passed away yesterday in his home in Napa Valley. He was 94.
My Grandfather Roibal was an amateur wine maker. He immigrated from Spain in the 1930′s and settled in New Jersey. Visiting his home as a boy was what I imagined it would be like to go to Europe. Even though he lived in the city of Newark, his back yard was covered with trellises filled with ripening grapes. His cellar, where he made his wine, was a cool, damp place to escape the summer heat. The stone walls and cement floors, having absorbed the years of his toil, gave off the unmistakable oder of wine making. His equipment for mashing and grinding the grapes looked like it belonged in a medieval torture chamber, and large oak barrels in a line held the fruits of his labor. He would give us kids a sip from a tin cup that he had hanging on a nail. He’d wipe it out with a rag before partially filling it from the wooden spickets that tapped the oak barrels. Even though he was just an amateur, he took a lot of pride in his wine and I think he would have been pleased that I’ve painted some nationally distributed wine labels.
Some of those memories came flooding back this year when I visited some wineries in Napa Valley, California, among them, Robert Mondavi’s Winery.
