Author Event: Cabernet Sauvignon by Richard Mendelson

Join us for a special event with Richard Mendelson, author of Cabernet Sauvignon, The Love Affair that Built the Napa Valley. This event is free, but we appreciate your RSVP below so we can plan for your attendance.

Here, the award-winning author Richard Mendelson brings us a jewel: the story of how one prized grape variety, Cabernet Sauvignon, transformed a little-known California farming community into America’s most celebrated wine-growing region. And what a love story it is!

From the first plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon in the 19th Century to the surprise triumphs of Napa Valley wines at the fabled Judgment of Paris, Mendelson shows us, up close, the wisdom and passion of the daring pioneers, artists, and craftsmen who brought us a wealth of magnificent

wines and in the process turned the Napa Valley into a world-renowned showcase for the very best in American wine, culture, and cuisine. 

For the past three decades, Mendelson has lived this story from the inside, as a winemaker, an author, and a leading attorney and adviser in the valley, helping shape and protect its vineyards and its future. In these pages, he brings us enlightening personal portraits and reflections from many of the giants of American wine: André Tchelistcheff, Maynard Amerine, Robert Mondavi, Warren Winiarski, and Bill Harlan. 

As Mendelson emphasizes, wine is art, wine is culture, and wine is history. Accordingly, he shares with us a rich array of historical portraits, maps, lithographs, and a wealth of contemporary photography. The result is both a definitive chronicle of the rise of the Napa Valley and a deeply human portrait of the vintners, growers, and visionaries who built it and who now work so hard to protect its future.

Richard Mendelson’s lifelong engagement with wine began as a graduate student at Oxford, where an academic curiosity quickly became a personal passion. He moved to France to deepen his education and worked at Bouchard Aîné & Fils, a respected Burgundy winery, before returning to the United States in 1979 to attend Stanford Law School. Soon after he settled in Napa Valley, where he joined the firm of Dickenson, Peatman & Fogarty and began a career devoted to wine law.

Over the decades, Mendelson has participated in nearly every dimension of the wine world, from growing grapes and making wine to advising growers and wineries on legal, land use, and appellation issues. His work has often centered on the preservation and promotion of Napa Valley as one of the world’s great wine regions. He founded and directed the Wine Law and Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founded the International Wine Law Association, serving as its president.

He is the author of several books, including From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America, Wine in America: Law and Policy, and Appellation Napa Valley: Building and Protecting an American Treasure. His creative pursuits extend beyond wine to sculpture and metalwork, reflected in his book Spirit in Metal. Mendelson and his wife Marilyn live in Napa Valley, where they remain closely connected to the land, the community, and their growing family of children and grandchildren.