What They Kept

In 1966, Robert Mondavi built a winery in Oakville to prove a point: that Napa could stand beside the great estates of Europe. He gave the job to architect Cliff May, who drew an arch and a low bell tower against the Mayacamas, and for sixty years that silhouette has stood for the valley's ambition. Ten years after it went up, the Judgment of Paris settled the argument Mondavi had been making all along.

This spring, after a three-year rebuild, the estate reopened, and the new work is genuinely beautiful. A new hospitality wing and an inverted gable canopy open the tasting rooms out toward the vineyard. Indoor and outdoor spaces flow into terraces facing To Kalon. A modern cellar brings optical sorting and gravity flow to the winemaking, on estate vineyards now certified organic. It is a serious, forward-looking piece of design.

What gives it depth is how much care went the other direction, into what was kept. They restored Cliff May's 1966 arch and tower rather than replacing them. They preserved Margrit Mondavi's hand-painted tiles and worked them back into the new rooms. They repurposed materials from the old structures into the ones that succeeded them. The bell tower, long the spiritual center of the property, is now the Tower Library, its racking and ceiling built from reclaimed wood off the original winery, with a room of older vintages alongside it. The new and the old were built to hold each other.

There is a conviction in that, and it is worth reading in a year when the valley marks fifty years since Paris. The estate that helped win Napa its name did not use its reinvention to leave its origins behind. It carried them forward, betting that what it started with in 1966 is exactly what makes the next sixty years worth having.

The estate is open now, along Highway 29. Worth the visit, as much for what is new as for what has endured.