Winemaker Donates $35 Million to UC Davis
Robert Mondavi, credited with bringing California’s Napa Valley wine region to world prominence, says that “90% of what I know about wine I got from UC Davis.”
In a sweeping gesture of thanks, Mondavi, 88, and his wife, Margrit, on Wednesday announced a gift of $35 million to the university, the largest single donation in the campus’ history.
The gift includes $25 million for a Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science and $10 million for the campus’ new performing arts center.
“Davis did a lot for me, and I realize that their facilities were antiquated and needed to be brought up to a new standard,” Mondavi said in an interview. “I knew we could learn a lot more in the years to come.”
Mondavi did not attend UC Davis, but his son, Timothy, vice chairman and winegrower of the Robert Mondavi Winery near Oakville, is a 1974 graduate of the campus’ viticulture and enology program.
The Mondavi company, founded in 1966, has maintained a close relationship with the university for decades. Davis has an experimental station on the Mondavis’ To Kalonvineyard in Oakville.
A chairman emeritus of the winery, Mondavi said he learned how to make wine by reading a book by Maynard Amerine, a longtime Davis professor. Amerine, who died in 1998, pioneered the mapping of California’s microclimates, determining which grape varieties grew best in different regions.
The institute the Mondavis are helping fund will be the new home for the department of viticulture and enology and the department of food science and technology, now housed in buildings that are nearly 50 years old.
Groundbreaking is expected in 2004 for 75,000 square feet of classrooms and lab space, a 13,000-square-foot food-processing plant, and a 36,000-square-foot teaching and research winery.
Campus funds and other private donations will make up the difference for the overall project, projected to cost $72 million.
Plans call for putting the institute next to what will now be called the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. That $61-million project, already underway, is slated for completion in about a year.
The art-loving Mondavis are also founders and major funders behind Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, a center scheduled to open around Thanksgiving in Napa. And they are spearheading the restoration of Napa’s 1870 opera house.
Although the largest in UC Davis’ history, the Mondavis’ gift falls well short of past donations to other California universities.
Earlier this year, Stanford University received $400 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. In 1999, the W.M. Keck Foundation donated $110 million to USC’s School of Medicine.
The largest gift to UC Davis had been $17.4 million in 1999 for the College of Engineering.
