Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Mondavi

In Mondavi's mouth, that "God Almighty" line lands as a half-joke with a hard business edge. He’s not praising critics; he’s diagnosing a market distortion. Wine is famously hard to evaluate before you buy it, and even harder to articulate after you taste it. That uncertainty creates a vacuum, and into that vacuum steps the critic as priest, translator, and judge. Mondavi is pointing to the moment when authority stops being helpful guidance and turns into a quasi-religious shortcut for anxious consumers.

The subtext is about power and delegation. Consumers outsource their palate the way investors outsource risk analysis: not because they are foolish, but because the cost of being wrong feels high. A bad bottle at a dinner party isn’t a catastrophe, yet the social stakes can feel like one. Critics monetize that insecurity, and brands either learn to court them or get punished by their silence. Mondavi, a builder of American wine’s modern reputation, understood that a single influential score could swing distribution, restaurant placements, even land values. Calling critics "God" exposes how absurd that deference is, while admitting it’s real enough to move product.

Context matters: Mondavi came up as California wine was fighting for legitimacy against Old World prestige. In that era, critical gatekeepers didn’t just review wine; they validated an entire region. The line reads as both warning and strategy memo: if consumers worship critics, producers ignore them at their peril, even as the whole arrangement flatters the illusion that taste can be ordained.