Robert Mondavi changed wine. His grandson aims to change agriculture.

Robert Mondavi paved the way for Napa Valley to take its place among the world’s top wine regions and raised the bar for all American growers.

By the strength of his charismatic personality, Mr. Mondavi, a hard driving visionary who established the Robert Mondavi winery after being forced out of the family business, practically wished Napa would strive for greatness.

Now, Carlo Mondavi, Robert’s grandson, is assuming a similar role, driving the California wine industry in a new direction born not of 20th-century aspirations but of 21st-century existential threat: climate change.

Mr. Mondavi, 43, envisions something like an agricultural revolution that would curb the carbon footprint of agriculture, estimated at about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions each year. He requires a combination of regenerative agriculture, increased biodiversity, and what he calls renewable agriculture, which is no longer dependent on the fossil fuel industry, but instead relies on renewable energy sources.

A farmer and winemaker—on the Sonoma Coast, not Napa like his grandfather and father— Mr. Mondavi is far from the only person in the wine world who has tried to encourage the industry to consider farming. as a tool to combat climate change. . Many farmers recognize the importance of maintaining diverse ecosystems and avoiding the use of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.

But Mr. Mondavi, with whom I spent a day in Northern California in early May, has taken a concrete step to help more farmers achieve these goals by spearheading the development of the monarch tractor. This smart electric vehicle can run autonomously while serving as a sort of agricultural research center that will provide growers with the crop health data they need to better understand their operations and make them more efficient.

“I think we can get to a place of climate stability,” he said, speaking with the elder Mondavi’s characteristic optimism and evangelical fervor, his words flowing in torrents of facts and statistics. “We can have a huge reduction in carbon and fossil fuels, but now we are in the worst place in the history of the planet.”

Tractors may seem like quite mundane items on which to build a revolution. But they are essential agricultural tools, selling several million annually worldwide with an expected market to reach nearly $70 billion by 2027.

The problem: Most tractors run on diesel. They are expensive to run and spew pollutants, especially the older diesel models.

“Tractors are much worse than regular cars,” Mondavi said.

Enter the Monarch, a compact tractor designed specifically for small fruit and vegetable farms, including vineyards. It is based on electric vehicle technology, robotics and artificial intelligence that Mr. Mondavi sees as a solution to the obstacles that many conventional farmers say prevent them from transitioning to organic or other more sustainable methods.

“This is technology that helps our planet,” Mr. Mondavi said. “It changes economic dynamics, helping make it cheaper to farm organically or regeneratively than to farm conventionally.”

steve matthiassona farmer, winemaker and vineyard consultant in Napa Valley, he has two Monarchs on order and is an enthusiastic supporter.

“The argument against organic farming, from a climate perspective, was using diesel to do more tractor operations instead of using synthetic chemicals to get the job done,” he said. “This negates that argument. Now we can farm organically without diesel, using renewable energy.”

The tractor has the ability to drive itself, although, as with self-driving cars, the idea can make people nervous. Still, driving a tractor is dangerous work, particularly with vineyards on hillsides. Around the world, farmers are killed each year in tractor accidents. Autonomous driving offers an added bonus.

“It allows us to provide more opportunities for vineyard workers to drive multiple tractors and more complexity, rather than one person, one tractor, which is how we do things today,” said Mr. Matthiasson. “More responsibility, more pay, more opportunities.”

In addition, the tractor comes with a full range of cameras and sensors, controlled by proprietary software, which not only enables autonomous driving, but also the collection of a wide range of data about a vineyard, such as crop health, estimation of the yield, insect life and moisture.

“By being able to get a better idea of ​​what exactly is going on in different parts of the vineyard, we can be more specific with our farm inputs, which saves us considerably, which helps the bottom line but also the environment,” Mr. Matthiasson saying.

Not everyone sees Monarch as offering revolutionary potential. Mimi Castel, a farmer and grape grower in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and advocate for local regenerative agriculture, recognizes the impact a vehicle like the Monarch can have. But he said a green tractor does little to address underlying problems in our food system, such as global supply chains and farms that are vast industrialized monocultures rather than diverse ecosystems.

“I love that he’s focusing on making change, and I think what he’s doing can certainly be part of a future that’s more regional and sustainable,” she said. “But when I think of General Mills investing millions of dollars in regenerative monocultures to continue making Cheerios, we are avoiding the root causes.

“Even with clean energy, it will still be prohibitively extractive: solar panels, batteries, all of these things require vast amounts of energy to build, and the materials have to come from somewhere. In my opinion, the effort involved in bringing people closer to regional food systems would be progress.”

If wine wasn’t exactly his destiny, Mr. Mondavi was sure from a young age that it was what he would do.

“I always knew, from the age of 7, that I wanted to do what my grandfather did,” he recalled. “It was his passion and my father’s.”

When Robert Mondavi Winery was sold to Constellation Brands in 2004, after years Overwhelming ambition and family conflict, Carlo’s father, Tim Mondavi, the youngest son of Robert Mondavi who had long played a prominent role there, founded his own winery in Napa Valley, continuous. It was small and focused specifically on one wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon-based blend.

Carlo attended university in Aix-en-Provence, France, wanting to learn the language and culture, but left before graduating to become a professional snowboarder for a while. He later worked in wineries in France and Italy. In the process, he fell in love with pinot noir.

“Joining my family business was not automatic,” Mr. Mondavi said. “Continuum was a startup and too small. I had to work outside the family. It was the opposite of being told, ‘You’re going to do this.’”

He teamed up with his younger brother, Dante, to make pinot noir, but it took them 10 years, he said, to get their father’s blessing. Finally, in 2013, they established RAENResearch in Agriculture and Enology Naturally, which produces small batches of pinot noir on the Sonoma coast.

“Dad didn’t want us to overdo it,” he said. “I had to be convinced. Now he is super supportive.”

RAEN wines, from various coastal sites, are luscious, delicate in texture, subtle in aroma and flavor, and wonderful with food, attributes that the Mondavi family has long promoted.

Mr. Mondavi had long been alarmed by the changing weather, but it was the Monarch butterfly decline which he said propelled him into activism. Important cogs in the food chain and crucial pollinators, butterfly populations have declined dramatically over the past 50 years due to habitat loss and widespread use of herbicides like glyphosate. They are now classified as endangered.

He saw this happen with other pollinators, such as bees, and became an ardent supporter of the Xerces Society, which is dedicated to the conservation of invertebrates. He also started the Monarch Challengea movement that encourages organic farming in Northern California by raising awareness of the dangers of chemical farming.

“I have friends who farm conventionally,” he said. “No one wants to harm Mother Earth.”

But he discovered that education was not enough. The main objections, he said, were that organic farming cost more and required much more use of tractors, which caused a different set of environmental problems.

While the challenge failed, he said, it was the genesis of a new idea.

He wondered if an electric tractor could overcome the objections. He started talking to people in the tech industry and partnered with three like-minded veterans from the electric car and artificial intelligence industries to found Monarch in 2019.

Mr. Mondavi’s role in development was to provide the farmer’s point of view, evaluating each design idea for its practical appeal. Based in Livermore, California, and a manufacturing deal with Foxconn in Lordstown, Ohio, the first tractor was delivered in late 2022 to Constellation Brands, the corporation now owned by Robert Mondavi. This year Monarch expects to build 1,000 tractors and scale up to 25,000 by 2026.

With the design phase complete, Mr. Mondavi now acts as something of a roving ambassador for Monarch, trumpeting his virtues to all who will listen, while continuing with his brother at RAEN and spending time in Italy in sori della sorbaa project with his wife, Giovanna Bagnasco, whose family produces Brandini Barolo.

“This is the hardest job I’ve ever done, seven days a week, day and night,” he said.

He described frequent air travel as “one of my greatest pleasures and my greatest faults.”