REVIEW : Wine and Food Center Is Call to Celebration

The new Robert Mondavi Wine and Food Center here is more than just a cultural phenomenon blazing across the horizon. It is a permanent celebration.

Robert Mondavi, paterfamilias of one of the Napa Valley’s best-known wine-making families, has made an inspired vote of confidence for Orange County in choosing to open the center here. The sprawling, magnificently landscaped complex will host demonstration dinners, cooking classes, seminars and cultural events, while affording locals the opportunity to participate in some of those events (at hefty, but justifiable prices). Anyone serious about food or wine had better stand up and take notice.

Monday evening I visited the center for the first time and found it a serenely handsome place. It’s a clean-lined structure done in ‘80s earth tones, with an 840-square-foot demonstration kitchen and several reception and function rooms. The art of Benjamin Bufano, the late San Francisco sculptor, is currently on display and a delight to the eye.

At dinner, Mondavi and his wife, an ebullient Swiss woman named Margrit Biever (who talks about food and wine with the enthusiasm of 10 food writers), were both on hand to drink in the artistry of Jean-Pierre Vigato, chef-owner of the two-star Paris restaurant Apicius, part of a Great Chefs program sponsored by the center. I haven’t had a more elegant dinner this year.

Vigato’s food is touched by the gods, all lightness, contrast and whimsy. No one I can think of combines flavors and colors in more sensible harmonies. Cooking for 50, he prepared a three-course dinner stunning in its simplicity.

The first course was a terrine of leek topped with a tomato concasse in a basil-and-tomato-infused olive oil, plated with prawns lightly turned in the saute pan, very Italian somehow, like Vigato’s forebears. That was followed by one of the most spectacular dishes I have ever eaten, a round of roast lamb loin with a veal galantine wrapper, mustard crumb coating and browned wild mushroom astride. Not one person at my table left a single bite.

I thought dessert would be an anticlimax, but that thinking proved rash. Vigato’s dessert, misnamed warm crisp apple “sandwich,” left any apple confection I have ever tasted (or sandwich for that matter) in the dust. The chef makes a paste from six or seven types of apples, then envelopes it in butter-soaked bread and bakes it in a caramel sauce. Pure magic.

Each course was accompanied by excellent Mondavi vintages: a Fume Blanc ’87 Reserve, a ’79 Cabernet, a rare ’83 Johannisberg Riesling Botrytis.

During a dinner oft-interrupted for speeches, pronouncements, plaudits, etc., one guest rose to call Mondavi “a man of vision.” Mondavi does indeed have a vision, as he puts it, “to promote the good life”--arts, music, food, and wine in California. That is exactly what he is doing, and we are all the richer for it.

The center is at 1570 Scenic Ave. in the Harbor Gateway Center, Costa Mesa. It is not open to the public per se but can be reserved for classes or groups. For more information, call Deborah Fabricant at (714) 979-4510.