On a rainy June morning in the Piedmont wine region, Carlo Mondavi and his wife, Italian native Giovanna Bagnasco, walk the steep and slippery vineyards that Carlo calls “our little slice of heaven.”
Spanning nine acres, their south-facing Sorì della Sorba vineyard is planted to Nebbiolo and Dolcetto on clay-limestone soils. At the top of the ridge is the couple’s farmhouse and small brick winery. Across a facing ravine is a dense, bird-filled woodland.
“It wasn't our intention per se to go out and find a vineyard and start a winery,” says Carlo, 43.
The couple, who married last summer, discovered the property—just east of the Barolo appellation, in Diano d’Alba—in 2019. At the time, they were living together and shuttling between two continents. In other words, they didn’t need a new project.
Carlo, grandson of Napa icon Robert Mondavi and son of Tim, founder of Continuum, is a partner with his brother, Dante, in the boutique Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir winery Raen. He is also co-founder and chief farming officer of Monarch Tractor, a rapidly-growing electric-tractor startup based in Livermore, Calif. Giovanna, 29, runs the Barolo-producing estate Brandini with her older sister, Serena.
“But we always said to each other, if we had an opportunity that was very special, we would consider it,” Carlo continues. “And once we walked it, it was like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have a piece of grand cru Piedmont.”
“By grand cru, I mean a great site,” Carlo clarifies, simultaneously dismissing the fact that the location is outside the elite Barolo zone.
“This is Nebbiolo heaven,” he adds confidently. “It reminds me of my grandfather thinking outside of borders. This has every bit of merit as a great, great site’’
“The forest is what attracted us …, ” adds Giovanna. “There’s more biodiversity once you get outside Barolo.”
In their fifth vintage at Sorì della Sorba, Carlo and Giovanna exude a rare blend of can-do entrepreneurism with organics-will-save-the-planet idealism. They complete each other’s sentences when they talk about a number of subjects, including their farming—a blend of organic and biodynamic viticulture with permaculture (“the holy grail,” says Carlo).
“We are pushing the envelope to go back to the way my great-grandparents and her great-grandparents were farming,” says Carlo.
Of course, their lifestyle is an upgrade over that of their great-grandparents, an eno-gastronomic fairy tale that features, for example, lunch hours at Brandini’s modern, biodynamic garden–to-table restaurant, Coltivare, run by the expert Piedmont chef Luca Zecchin.
Carlo and Giovanna met in 2017 in California, where she was working as a summer intern in Napa for the Italian label maker Eurostampa.
Neither of them has studied enology or agronomy; rather, they learned their craft by growing up around winemaking.
Giovanna studied languages and literature. In 2005, her father, Piero, the now-retired business partner of Eataly founder Oscar Farinetti, began to develop Brandini as a pioneering, organic, no-till estate in La Morra, later turning it over to his daughters.
Carlo spent much of his youth working in wine cellars from Napa to Burgundy, dabbling at university in France and competing as a professional snowboarder. He and Dante launched Raen in 2013, and in 2016, Carlo began the “Monarch Challenge” movement aimed at convincing farmers to use alternatives to herbicides and other chemicals that were not only killing butterflies and other beneficial insects but damaging the environment in broader ways. One of those alternatives is by managing under-vine weeds with tractors, which has its own environmental drawbacks, so in 2018, he, his partners and a team of like-minded engineers launched Monarch Tractor to create lightweight, rechargeable farming vehicles.
When Carlo and Giovanna bought Sorì della Sorba, the vineyards were largely still under contract to others for that year. Still, they managed a small first harvest in 2019. Then, that winter, the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and the couple hunkered down in their new home.
“It was definitely a COVID project,” Giovanna says. “We needed to sit down and make a plan like, ‘What are we doing? What kind of wine?’ There was a lot of time for brainstorming.”
The winery produces two wines, both of which undergo whole-cluster fermentation with indigenous yeasts and then maturation in large oak barrels. The 2021 vintage is due out this fall, with about 1,700 cases total.
The flagship Sorì della Sorba Langhe Nebbiolo is the deeper and more complex of the two; a fresh, medium-bodied wine full of dark fruit and spice, it has the tannic structure for aging. Their Dolcetto-Nebbiolo blend, called Solo Per Amore (translation: “Only for Love”) Langhe Rosso, is lighter and brighter, driven by acidity and showing red fruit. The prices, like the wines, are ambitious for their categories, retailing for $75 and $65, respectively.
“My two favorite aspirational grapes have been Pinot Noir and Nebbiolo,” Carlo says. “With Nebbiolo, you have these tannins that are like at the top of the mountain, and you have this long journey down where the tannins evolve. It needs that aging time to get to a beautiful place.”
Tall, with a broad smile and the Mondavis’ signature Roman nose, Carlo was granted Italian citizenship, based on his bloodline, around the time of their debut harvest at Sorì della Sorba. (His great-grandparents Cesare and Rosa had emigrated from Italy’s Marche region to the United States.)
His Italian is pretty fluid and he has dived into the local life: gathering wild greens, grilling over a wood fire with family and friends, and haunting a local flea market one Sunday a month.
In turn, he has also had an influence in Piedmont.
In the 2020 harvest, Giovanna recalls Carlo returning from California, where he had lost most of the Raen crop because of wildfires and smoke. Meanwhile, at her family estate, she and her team were worried that the hot, dry season with temperatures in the mid-90s would bake their wine harvest.
“Then Carlo came and smiled and said, ‘What are you worried about? It’s not hot here. It’s not even burning!’” she says, laughing. “The energy and positivity that he brings … everyone is, like, shocked … everyone loves it.”
“I think,” she says, “we learn a lot from each other.”
