Robert Mondavi Winery Explores Changing Our World With Small Steps and Big Ideas at 2008 Taste³ Conference

OAKVILLE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Robert Mondavi Winery’s annual Taste³ conference, held in Napa Valley July 17-19, featured a whirlwind two days of thought-provoking and inspiring presentations on sustainability, personal responsibility and creativity in the areas of food, wine and art. Leading innovators and activists from around the world gathered at Taste³ to share their work and experiences with a rapt audience of more than 350 professionals and enthusiastic food, wine and art lovers. Attendees emerged from the experience inspired and enriched by what they had heard, seen and tasted.

Robert Mondavi Winery created Taste³ as a way to honor and build on founder Robert Mondavi’s legacy of fostering a spirit of community and innovation around wine, food and art. “It was illuminating and unique!” said Margrit Mondavi, the winery’s vice president of cultural affairs. “We had all these creative, energized people bringing their ideas and talents together—my husband would have loved it.”

The annual event has surfaced as a leading forum for food, wine and art. This conference was Robert Mondavi Winery’s third Taste³ event.

As the sessions progressed, clear messages of sustainability and personal responsibility emerged. Widely diverse session topics shared a focus on the importance of making a difference, however insignificant it might seem, through educated and conscious choices about food, the environment and making the political personal.

The impact of personal action shone in several powerful sessions:

• Chris Jordan presented a stark and stunning series of his photographs that translate the abstract statistics of waste and consumer culture into a visual language.
• Speaking on personal commitment to community service of the Sikh community, Thy Tran introduced the Gurdwara, a Sikh temple where anyone can go for food and shelter.
• Culinary Corps founder Christine Carroll coined the term culanthropy—defined as civic service through food and cooking—while working with her team of volunteer chefs to help Hurricane Katrina victims.
• Artist Michael Rakowitz brought the Iraq war down to a human scale with a moving account of “Return,” his project to import prized Iraqi dates and date syrup into the U.S.
• Writer Andrew Smith encouraged listeners to think about choices, noting that a good idea can have unseen implications.
• Novella Carpenter talked about her life as an urban farmer in Oakland, CA and noted that the “locavore” movement grew out of foodie culture and the search for flavor.
• Winemaker Bruce Gutlove spoke passionately about Coco Farm and Winery, which is owned and operated by mentally disabled Japanese adults in Ashikaga, Japan.
• Filmmaker Mathurin Molgat shared the story of New Zealand’s endangered Kauri trees, brought to life by the music of Jessie Coutts and Michael Chapdelaine, who played a guitar made of 50,000-year-old Kauri wood.

Many speakers made a passionate plea that people work together toward a goal of sustainability—whether related to water, climate or bees:

• Chef Dan Barber related his trip to Spain where he met a farmer who raises geese for foie gras that are not force-fed; instead they respond to the natural environment to fatten themselves for winter.
• Greg Jones of Southern Oregon University talked about the importance of climate change on the structure and stability of the wine industry. “Change should be expected, and our adaptive capacity will be key,” he said.
• Honeybee expert Dennis vanEngelsdorp talked about the potential impact of Colony Collapse Disorder (one in three bites on your plate needs pollination) and exhorted attendees to cure “Nature Deficit Disorder” by replacing pesticide-laden lawns with meadows.
• Andrew Kimbrell reminded us that we are not consumers but creators. “Every choice we make creates a different future,” he said, urging the audience to exercise the right to choose socially just, bio-diverse, humane food.

Speakers also inspired the audience with their creativity and thoughtful solutions to some of today’s most perplexing problems, big and small:

• Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier introduced vertical farming, which creates a sustainable urban ecosystem with year-round crop production, lowering the use of pesticides and fossil fuels.
• Roger Boulton of UC Davis talked about the challenges for wineries in the future, such as emissions and clean water. Boulton suggested solutions such as rainwater capture and storage that can help improve a winery’s sustainability and resource limitations.
• Darra Goldstein, editor-in-chief of Gastronomica, traveled to Israel and Palestine and found people of different religions can come together peacefully over food, to transcend their identity without losing it. “If you break bread with someone, you cannot be enemies,” she said.
• Pastry chef Ben Roche shared ingenious, edible popcorn-flavored packaging peanuts—a delicious alternative to Styrofoam.
• Master baker Peter Reinhart described his innovative “Epoxy Method” and explained how bread is a transformational food, making a radical change into something else.
• Patricia Allen talked about how the organic gardening movement started in 1967 with a poison oak-infested field at UC Santa Cruz and dynamic gardener Alan Chadwick.
• David Hoffman asserted that worms have enormous impact on the health of our soil and told of his work with tea farmers in China and the use of worm castings to enrich soil.
• Winemaker Serge Hochar of Château Musar talked about producing wine during the difficult years of the Lebanese Civil War, and the power of wine on the human spirit.
• Vintner Barry Schuler explained that the wine grape genome has been mapped; he made the controversial assertion that this could allow us to scientifically characterize terroir.
• Researcher Tara H. McHugh applied the lessons of scientific innovation to address food borne illnesses (76 million per year) and waste through edible food films.

Several speakers focused on social trends and how they shape our decisions:

• Professor Michael L. Kasavana of Michigan State University discussed self-service technology, specifically vending machines and “V-Commerce” (a term he coined).
• Author and journalist Benjamin Wallace (The Billionaire’s Vinegar) talked about how the perceived value of trendy, luxury products can be related to a pleasure response in the brain.
• René Koster spoke about the multi-purpose laboratory “Restaurant of the Future” in the Netherlands, which serves to research and monitor eating behavior in order to keep up with consumer patterns, trends and preferences.
• Author Jennifer 8. Lee offered an engaging account of Chinese food in America and the evolution of the fortune cookie, which is actually Japanese in origin.

Several conference highlights came from unexpected events, such as chef Roland Henin’s sincere lesson in patience and being a mentor. A surprise visit from his star pupil, Thomas Keller, demonstrated the strong link forged from Henin’s mentorship. And everyone felt the generous spirit of the Taste³ community in action when the raffle winner of a fabulous new Viking grill immediately donated it to Christine Carroll of Culinary Corps, for her future endeavors cooking for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Session hosts contributed humor, insight and big-picture views to the varied session themes: Ted Allen of Bravo TV’s “Queer Eye,” “Top Chef” and “Iron Chef America;” pleasure specialist Georges M. Halpern; Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW’s “Good Food;” Saveur magazine editor-in-chief James Oseland, slam poet Rives, noted wine authority Andrea Robinson; author Michael Ruhlman and food justice activist Bryant Terry. Humorist Tom Rielly and Rives wrapped the conference up with a madcap review of the presentations.

Attendees enjoyed Napa Valley’s wine country with winery dinners at Etude, Gargiulo Vineyards, Hall, Mumm Napa, Paraduxx, Quintessa and Rubicon Estate.

For more highlights, video presentations and images from Taste³ 2008, visit www.taste3.com.

Taste³ will stir things up again on May 31 – June 2, 2009 in Napa Valley. Registration opens shortly at www.taste3.com or call (707) 967-3997.