A few years back, a friend asked me to donate a unique item to a fund-raiser for a local non-profit, the Marin Art & Garden Center.  I would lead the winning auction bidders on a bike tour of Napa Valley, showing them favorite spots I’d discovered in my research for The House of Mondavi, my first book which began as a front page story for the Wall Street Journal.

Last weekend, as the grapes still hung on Napa’s vines during this unusually cool growing season,  I met up with the winning bidders for our day of pedaling and wine-tasting together. For me, it was an opportunity to check in with friends in the Valley about what had changed since The House of Mondavi came out three years ago. My book had detailed the rise and fall of the pioneering Mondavi family’s wine business, a story full of visionary brilliance as well as painful family discord.

Peter Mondavi Sr., I learned, still goes to work every day at the original family business, the Charles Krug Winery. Last weekend, it drew seven hundred visitors for its annual Tastings on the Lawn gathering, which first began in 1951 with wine tasting and music on the Carriage House Lawn. Although he sadly lost his wife Blanche earlier this year, he’s still enjoying life — including a glass of his winery’s Family Reserve Generations each evening at about six. 

Robert Mondavi, who helped build  Napa’s  reputation as a world-class wine region, had passed away in 2008, but according to our guide at the Charles Krug winery, his remains didn’t end up joining those of his parents and sisters at the Mondavi family crypt at St. Helena’s Holy Cross Cemetery. Instead, our guide said he had discovered a plain stone marker for Robert at the non-denominational St. Helena Cemetery. Did that mean the rift between Robert, his second wife, Margrit, and the Peter Mondavi side of the family had never fully healed? I hope not.

Margrit Mondavi, the only family member still affiliated with Robert Mondavi Winery.

Robert’s eldest son, Michael, is now owner of Folio Fine Wine Partners, producing wine and marketing other small brands. Michael’s brother Timothy and sister Marcia are partners in another venture, the Continuum Estate. Margrit Mondavi, Robert’s widow, is the only member of the family still working for the Robert Mondavi Winery, as vice president for cultural affairs.

While Mrs. Mondavi can still call the winery home, the house she and Robert built off the Silverado Trail, which they called Wappo Hill, is for sale. Michael Mondavi and his siblings are trustees of the estate, which is on the market for $25 million.

Wappo Hill’s 11,500-square-foot home was built in 1984 in a design by Cliff May, who is probably best known for designing Sunset magazine’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. The house has an open floor plan, with just two bedrooms and an indoor swimming pool adjoining the living area – perhaps a testament to Robert Mondavi’s preference for open spaces. In a 1989 piece about the house in Architectural Digest, he told the reporter, “I hate the feeling of being confined.”

The view from Wappo Hill

You can take a peek at photos of Wappo Hill here. Whoever buys the house will be neighbors with Robert’s sons, who built their own homes nearby. Let’s hope whoever buys it will honor the spirit of the home’s original owners and raise many a glass there among friends (as well as by plunging into the 50′  pool during exuberant parties!).

Early on in my search to understand the last queen of Hawai‘i, I met with Corinne Chun Fujimoto, curator of Washington Place, the gracious, white-columned home in downtown Honolulu where Queen Lili‘uokalanis had spent the last years of her life.

Corinne suggested that the best place to look for the queen was not through the places she lived, nor even through the words she wrote  in official documents, diaries or correspondence, but in Lili‘uokalani’s music. So I began with The Queen’s Songbook, a monumental, decades-long effort to collect and publish the queen’s compositions. The task began in 1969 and took more than twenty-five years to come to fruition.

The Songbook was based on a  collection that the queen herself had hoped to publish in the late 1890s but never did: “He Buke Mele Hawaii: Hawaiian Songs with Words and Music.” For a century or so, the manuscript had been tucked away in the state archives.

One of the many, many people who contributed to The Queen’s Songbook was Nola A. Nāhulu, who now directs the choir at Kawaiaha‘o Church. “Auntie Nola,” as some of the younger choristers call her, holds a storied position: Lili‘uokalani herself directed the same choir a century earlier and loved playing the church’s great pipe organ.

Nola A. Nāhulu, director of the Kawaiaha'o Church choir and the Hawaii Youth Opera Chorus, leads choristers in an outdoor performance at 'Iolani Palace.

So it was with delight and some trepidation that I accepted an invitation to sing with the choir at a Sunday service, directed by “Auntie Nola.” I sang with the soprano choristers, who wore formal mu’mu’u dresses  in a pattern of green, black and white brightened with sprays of delicate orchid blossoms. Green silk lei hung around their necks.

We sat together in the first floor choir stall, at the back of the church looking over the congregation. Singing directly in front of me was Malia Ka‘ai-Barrett, who works alongside Nola as general manager of the Hawai i Youth Opera Chorus. Although I can sight-read and I sing with my own church chorus at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ross, California, I was relieved to follow Malia through the hymns we sang in Hawaiian.

Behind us was the massive pipe organ, played by Richard “Buddy” Naluai. As one of the first Christian churches in the islands, made of thousand-pound blocks of coral stone cut and then dragged from the sea, the building is on the Registry of National Historic Places.

Kawaiaha‘o was the church for Hawai‘i’s ali‘i – its chiefs – and I sat almost at eye level with the powerful portraits of the kingdom’s rulers that hung on the walls. The sermon by Kahu (Reverend) Curt Kekuna started off with the question: “Why are you here?” and went on to preach, “We’re not here to create another Christian country club … we’re here to go out and transform the world!”

Claire Hiwahiwa Steele, left, and me in front of 'Iolani Palace.

Why was I here? I’d been invited to join the choir Claire Hiwahiwa Steele, whom I’d met in a Hawaiian studies class at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa earlier in the week. Claire is not only a member of the choir but also the church’s newest trustee. A graduate of Kamehameha Schools, she is a recipient of a church scholarship that’s allowed her to pursue a master’s degree at UHM.

I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to sing the queen’s songs in her own church with people who’d grown up with her music . And the experience profoundly moving — joining together with these beautiful voices to perform the queen’s own songs. It touched me in a way that no amount of reading or writing ever could.

Yet , I was also there as an author and journalist: I couldn’t resist pulling out my reporter’s notebook during the service. Or, for that might, smiling with recognition when I spotted choristers tapping away on iPhones and Blackberries while I was scribbling in my pad. Good thing Auntie Nola didn’t catch us!

September 2nd is the day that the last ruling monarch of Hawai‘i was born and I was invited by the trustees of the Queen Lili‘uokalani Trust to join them at a ceremony honoring her birthday at Mauna ʻAla, the Royal Mausoleum where members of both the Kamehameha and Kalākaua dynasties are buried.

The last queen was the successor to her brother, David Kalākaua, and the last ruler of the islands.  Born in a grass hut in 1838, Lili‘uokalani was a fervent patriot who struggled for the restoration of her land and the rights of her people for most of her life. She died in 1917, nearly two decades after America had annexed her independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i.

At the offices of the Lili'uokalani Trust, a poster depicting the late queen is draped with a lei tribute.

Yesterday morning, we headed up towards the mountains, along Nuʻuanu Avenue to pay our respects to her. It was sprinkling when we arrived, but the clouds soon parted and the air grew steamy. The white-clad members of the Royal Hawaiian Band, one of the oldest continually performing municipal bands in the U.S., began to play.

The birthday commemoration for Queen Lili'uokalani was held at Mauna 'Ala, the Royal Mausoleum, in the hills above downtown Honolulu.

The Daughters and Sons of Hawaiian Warriors, along with  descendants  of the Hawaiian royal family, were there. So were some of the Hawaiian children who were beneficiaries of the trust that Lili‘uokalani set up in 1909. (For more information on the history of the trust, take a look at a fascinating article in the Hawaii Bar Journal from May of 2009 entitled “The Queen’s Estate” by Samuel P. King, Walter M. Heen, and Randall W. Roth.)

The Queen Lili‘uokalani Children’s Center, the operating unit of the trust, organized the program at Mauna ʻAla. According to Trustee Claire Assam, last year the trust spent $14.7 million to help care for 1,441 orphan children and 9,531 destitute children. All of its revenues come from its real estate holdings, which include 6,330 acres of land, mostly on Hawai‘i Island (also called the Big Island).

High school students who chanted for the late queen. Beneficiaries of the Lili'uokalani Trust also attended the ceremony.

I brought a lei of crown flowers – the delicate, lavender-colored blooms that were the queen’s favorite – to place in her crypt, after all the dignitaries had made their way down into the tomb and back with their offerings. I walked down the steps, took off my sandals, and entered the cool, dark space, which is normally gated off to the public. It was the closest I had gotten to her — at least physically — in the three years I’ve been working on The Lost Kingdom.

Then I said a prayer, reflecting on what I’d learned from the past few years of trying to understand her through her letters and diaries, and through the numerous historical documents and books written about 19th-century Hawai’i. The reverence she was accorded on this day was its own eloquent testament to her life and  legacy.

Dignitaries descend into Lili'uokalani's crypt during the ceremony marking her birthday.

I wasn’t the only one who found it moving. Honolulu’s acting mayor, Kirk W. Caldwell, also attended the service. He remarked,   “It’s a reflection on what the ali‘i [the Hawaiian royals] have given this community – the trusts, the Queen’s Hospital, which is the best hospital in the state, the Kap‘iolani Women and Children’s Hospital where almost everyone was born…” “adding  “it was a little bit chicken skin for me as I went down into the vault.”

I knew I’d found a soul sister who also loved research when I clicked onto Amy Stillman’s blog and found her posting, “Adventures in Archives.”

For the past three years, I’ve been making trips to the treasure trove of Hawaiian historical archives located in Honolulu. Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, a Harvard-educated associate professor of music and American culture at the University of Michigan, likewise had just arrived on the islands and couldn’t resist making a trek to the Hawaii State Archives, with a long list of things just to “spot check.”

Amy Stillman (photo: Honolulu Magazine)

She signed into the archive, put her purse into a locker, and fired up her Mac. With the help of archivist Luella Kurkjian, who safeguards the most precious manuscripts locked away in the safe as chief of the archives’ historical records branch. Amy found a lot more than she’d bargained for, opening up a “whole new can” of scholarly worms, she told me. Ah, happiness!

Luella Kurkjian of the state archives staff

Amy, who is a Hawaiian, will serve as the Dai Ho Chun Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. A meticulous scholar and powerful writer, I first came across her work in an article she published in 1989 in The Hawaiian Journal of History.

Titled “History Reinterpreted in Song: The Case of the Hawaiian Counterrevolution,” Amy wrote the article when she was still a doctoral candidate in musicology at Harvard, where she’d gone after studying at the University of Hawai‘i. I read an article in the current issue of Honolulu Magazine that Amy had just returned to her home state for a year, so I decided to email her, asking if we could meet.

Not only did she say “yes,” but she offered to pick me up, drive me to a marvelous Hawaiian-Vietnamese restaurant called Hale Vietnam, and then return me to the hole-in-the wall where I stay when I’m digging through the archives. All I can say is mahalo, Amy, for the chance to spend an evening with you and to share that heavenly lychee sherbert – real ono!

But what really hooked me were Amy’s descriptions of her recent discoveries in the archives concerning Queen Liliʻuokalaniʻs 1897 manuscript “He Buke Mele Hawaii.” The excitement and sheer staying power that drives her as a researcher is inspiring and it comes through in her series of postings about what she found. Take a look at her postings, especially her praise of the Hawai‘i State Archives staff.

Ancient Hula Hawaiian Style, Volume 1: Hula Kuahu

Did I mention she’s not just a scholar, stuck in dusty archives, but also the director of the Great Lakes Hula Academy in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and producer of a Grammy-winning album ‘ikena, by singer Tia Carrere and singer/songwriter and co-producer Daniel Ho?  Amy’s latest project as a producer is an album of some of the greatest hits of ancient hula, called Ancient Hula Hawaiian Style, Volume 1: Hula Kuahu, through Michael Cord’s Hana Ola Records.

‘ikena

On the drive back to my place, I asked Amy what music she’d recommend for me. Aside from her post on “Top Ten Hawaiian Albums for Newbies,” she also suggested a group from Michigan called The Rose Ensemble, based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Nā Mele Hawai‘i

A reviewer of their album Nā Mele Hawai‘i wrote, “You will never hear Aloha Oe quite the same way again after hearing Ke Aloha a ka Haku (The Queen’s Prayer, track 27), written by Lili’uokalani from her prison cell in 1895, and the earlier and later works all have stories to tell as well. Very highly recommended to anyone with the slightest interest in Hawaii, regional American music, or issues of colonialism in general.”

Amy, not surprisingly, helped produce that CD, too.

I first came across the word kaukau in a note that the Hawaiian Princess Ka‘iulani wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson more than a century ago.

The Scottish novelist and his family had arrived in Honolulu in the afternoon of January 24, 1889, and the beautiful princess dropped them a short note, inviting them to her family’s estate and adding that “Papa promises “good Scotch kaukau….”

To try to track down the word’s meaning, I went to the Hawaiian Electronic Library Web site, which searches several Hawaiian dictionaries simultaneously. But because Hawaiian words can have multiple meanings depending on their diacritical marks (which weren’t used in the 19th century) the modern Web site offered an array of possible spellings and definitions.

The relationship between R.L. Stevenson and Ka'iulani was depicted on a commemorative postage stamp in 2000.

Could it mean “to slow down, linger or procrastinate?” Hmm. Stevenson and Ka‘iulani did famously sit together under the spreading banyan tree at ‘Āinahau, her family’s estate at Waikīkī. But probably not, given the context of the sentence.

Or did kaukau mean, in another definition, “a hemorrhoid or exterior obstruction to bowel evacuation”? Almost certainly not. A well-educated Victorian lady, no matter how earthy her humor might have been, would never had written such a thing to the eminent author of of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped!.

Or could it be Pidgin, the uniquely Hawaiian language that developed from the islands’ mix of immigrant influences? Checking a Pidgin-specific dictionary at e-Hawaii.com, the definition was “food; meal; to eat.” This clue led me to the right entry on the original dictionary site.

Bingo!

Arnold Hiura signs a copy of his book. (photo courtesy Arnold Hiura)

This week in Honolulu, I came across the word kaukau again, in a small notice for a talk on Sunday afternoon by Arnold Hiura at Native Books in the Ward Warehouse. In his first book, titled Kau Kau: Cuisine & Culture in the Hawaiian Islands, Hiura relates that growing up,  “when someone bellowed,  ‘Kau kau time,’” it was the equivalent of saying “Chow time!” or “Come and get it!”

Originally he’d thought the word was from the native Hawaiian language. But over the three years he took to write his marvelous food history of the islands, he learned the original derivation of the word, stemming from “chow chow,” which is Chinese for “food.”

The mystery deepens, though. Chinese contract workers were first brought to the islands in 1852 to labor on sugar plantations. Would the princess, who was born in 1875 and died at age 23 in 1899, have known the slang that these workers used to describe their food?

The fact is that by 1889, when Ka‘iulani wrote her note, Chinese cultural influence on the islands was ubiquitous enough to have influenced everyday language at all levels of society. By the 1884 census, according to Thrum’s Hawaiian Annual, there were nearly 18,000 Chinese in Hawai‘i, making them the largest immigrant group by far – dwarfing the American presence and rapidly catching up to the native Hawaiian population, which had dwindled to just over 40,000. Honolulu’s Chinatown had long been a bustling waterfront commercial hub, and in 1889 the district was rapidly recovering from a fire three years earlier that destroyed 7,000 Chinese homes and caused $1.5 million in damage (more than $30 million today).

Hiura himself grew up on a sugar plantation on the Island of Hawai‘i, working there periodically until his early twenties. He remembered how he and the other workers would stop work when the whistle blew mid-day and take out their metal lunch cans – the bottom half filled with rice and the top with vegetables or pickles. They’d all squat down to eat, reaching over and picking from their co-workers’ cans for tastes of different toppings.

The night before his book talk, he and his wife Eloise had attended a “plantation potluck” in Hilo in which everyone brought their favorite dishes from the old days, when the islands still had sugar plantations (there is only one left now: the Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. on Maui). As they described the way in which sharing their food created feelings of closeness, another Pidgin term popped up: real ono – an allusion to the prized ono tuna fish, slang among young Hawaiians for something truly fabulous.

The last queen of Hawai‘i’s best known composition is Aloha Oe, which is heard in the soundtrack of everything from Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” to the Disney movie “Lilo and Stitch.” But the one that brought tears to my eyes this morning was “The Queen’s Prayer,” a hymn she wrote when she was imprisoned for eight months following a failed insurrection against the 1893 overthrow of the independent kingdom of Hawai‘i.

A tribute to Queen Lili‘uokalani at the Kawaiaha‘o Church

Every Sunday, congregants at Honolulu’s Westminster Cathedral, the Kawaiaha‘o Church, sing this hymn, known as Ke Aloha O Ka Haku, in alternating verses of Hawaiian and English. It is a reminder of the last Hawaiian monarch’s faith and her ability to forgive her enemies. During the year, the church holds a few “Ali‘i” services to remember the Kingdom of Hawaii’s high chiefs, usually on the Sundays before their birthdays.

Today was the “Ali‘i Sunday” dedicated to Queen Lili‘uokalani, who was born on September 2. She was born in 1838, the same year that the Cherokees were forcibly relocated from their homelands to Indian Territory along the Trail of Tears, and she died in 1917, long after Hawaii had been annexed to the United States. But she remains deeply alive to Hawaiians. So I decided to learn more about how some Hawaiians feel about their last queen at today’s service. (more…)

Crowds of book group aficionados flocked to San Jose for the third annual Book Group Expo, above; below, author Frances Dinkelspiel debuted her book, Towers of Gold, at the convention.

There are conventions for everyone: dog lovers, tattoo artists, people who trade sports memorabilia, barristas, and hairdressers. They all have their annual gatherings to swap tales, make friends, and do business.
So why shouldn’t book groups have theirs? For the third year, an estimated 1,700 people gathered over a weekend in October for Book Group Expo at the San Jose Convention Center in California’s Silicon Valley to meet authors, eat chocolate, and engage in high (and low) book talk.
Some 75 authors also made the trip, including Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days), Gail Tsukiyama (Women of the Silk, The Street of A Thousand Blossoms), Julia Glass (Three Junes, I See you Everywhere) and Will Durst (The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing).
Since some book groups have started reading The House of Mondavi alongside King Lear, I was invited to participate in a panel called “Where There’s A Will….Shakespeare In The 21st Century.” And let me tell you: I felt pretty sheepish when I misstated the century in which Shakespeare wrote his plays. Okay, so I was off by a hundred years!

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The elegant Mondavi arts center, above, is a dramatic addition to the rural landscape of Davis — and it will soon be joined by the Robert Mondavi Institute, depicted in an artists’ rendering below.

Anyone driving east from San Francisco on Highway 80, the 10-lane transcontinental highway to Nevada and points east, can’t miss the name Mondavi. In California’s Central Valley, where the Mondavi family first made its name in the grape wholesaling business in the 1920s and then became America’s foremost wine dynasty, Robert and Margrit Mondavi have passed into legend – so much so that their names are heralded for all to see from the freeway.
This past week, I gave talks on my book, The House of Mondavi, in Sacramento and the nearby town of Davis, where the University of California’s renowned viticulture program is based. Davis is home to both the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science. You can see the sign for the Mondavi Center on one side of the I-80 and the construction site for the new RMI on the other.
When I told a good friend from Alabama about these author events, she teased, “Oh, Julie, it’s just Mo’ Bob Mon …” — meaning that talking about the late Bob Mondavi had become a long-standing routine. In fact, it’s been Mo’ Bob Mon for more than 15 months now, and that’s why I was was not much looking forward to what had threatened to be a long and taxing day in the Central Valley.
But to my surprise, the two events were some of the liveliest and most though-provoking I’ve yet attended. The first took place at a breakfast for about 50 members and guests of the Capital Region Family Business Center, a non-profit group made up of second-, third-, and even a few fourth- and fifth-generation members of local family businesses.

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Sparse crowds at Copia have contributed to its financial challenges.

(Photo from Sacbee.com – Owen Brewer / Sacramento Bee file, 2002)

Despite my intention to take a summer sabbatical, an investigative story that appeared on the front page of last Sunday’s Sacramento Bee brought me back to my keyboard. The story raises some new questions about Robert Mondavi’s philanthropic legacy, a subject I explored in The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.
An enterprising reporter for The Bee named Andrew McIntosh broke the news that Copia, the nonprofit brainchild of Robert Mondavi devoted to wine, food and the arts in downtown Napa, was bailed out by a state-owned bank that might now be liable if the center fails to recoup its losses. In the mid-1990s, Robert Mondavi had donated $20 million to found Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts. Ever since the 80,000-square-foot building opened in 2001, the center has struggled with low attendance, financial troubles, and a confused mission.

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A summer day in Berkeley includes seeing buildings rise and fall at the Lawrence Hall of Science (above) and smelling the “Corpse Flower” (below), whose name and odor both recall Audrey II, the killer plant from another planet (bottom).

This spring, I mailed off applications for our boys to attend an academically challenging summer school run by the University of California at Berkeley. When the letters arrived in the mail telling us whether they’d been admitted, I opened them with mixed emotions – perhaps even a certain amount of dread.
Both boys were admitted, which made me proud. But that also meant we’d be setting our alarm clocks for 6:30 every morning to make it to their classes in Berkeley, which would begin at 8:30 a.m. sharp.
Since hiring a chauffeur wasn’t in our budget and reliable public transport system between our home and Berkeley doesn’t exist, their acceptance to the program meant that I’d be spending at about three hours a day in the car ferrying them to their respective campuses.
Even though I am now a best-selling author, with the The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty under my belt, and a newly-signed contract for a non-fiction narrative with Grove/Atlantic, I’m still stuck with the school run.
And like many working mothers across the country, my life becomes infinitely more challenging in the summer, at least in terms of finding the time to squeeze in work. (I’ve found the time to write this, for instance, while I’m waiting for one son outside a summer school classroom: I’ve got exactly 18 minutes left before the dismissal bell rings and my writing day ends.)
Even so, I realize how lucky I am to have the chance to spend this time with our boys, unlike so many other working mothers who punch in and out at work every day. Despite my grumbling, I’m grateful for this privilege.
To explain why I don’t mind driving our young scholars every day, let me tell you about how my younger son and I recently spent the morning in Berkeley – he gets one day off from class each week – while my other son was in school.
We started off at the Lawrence Hall of Science, arriving nearly an hour before it opened. We passed the time playing a fascinating game in the atrium (which opens before the rest of the museum) called “Hex.”

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