Winemaker Randall Grahm's been Doon this road before
Randall Grahm personifies his own definition of what a great glass of wine should be: intriguing, dynamic, capable of taking the conversation in a whole new direction at any moment.
Over the past three decades, as president for life of Bonny Doon Vineyard at Santa Cruz, Grahm has been California's most provocative, adventurous and entertaining vintner.
Seated in a booth of his Cellar Door Café, a hybrid restaurant and tasting bar in the converted bottling room of his winery, he's entertaining a Swedish journalist who's jotting notes as he tastes his way through a cluster of Grahm's wines.
The towering staves of an old wine barrel almost completely surround them. Farther up floats a sculpture of a cigar-shaped flying machine, as iconic a symbol of Bonny Doon Vineyard as Grahm's long hair, thinning and graying but still pulled back into a lanky ponytail.
When the Swedish writer leaves, another reporter slips into his place. Fresh glasses are arranged, and the exercise resumes. Grahm approaches it with an enthusiasm and studiousness that suggest that even within this short time the wines have something entirely new to say.
Taking on the big targets
Grahm has been amusingly vociferous since he began to plant grapes and build his winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains at the start of the 1980s. Through parody and satire in his newsletters, silly lyrics of a rock opera and serious lectures for university audiences, he's been the Don Quixote of the American wine scene, using a blunt but lacerating lance on "winemills" that irritate him – industrialized wines conceived with more artifice than soul; the fashionable preoccupation with the size, strength and scores given wines; the massive egos of several of his contemporary vintners.
Now, his writings, a spicy blend of the farcical and the philosophical, have been collected into one substantial tome, "Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology" (University of California Press, $34.95, 314 pages).
He astutely parodies John Kennedy Toole, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, among many others; pulls off with authority an ambitious riff on Dante's "Inferno" ("Abandon all oak, ye who enter here."); rewrites the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen; and dips into haiku.
Among other things, he restores respectability to the pun, but his humor almost invariably has a serious purpose other than the marketing of his wine – to educate readers and to provoke them into considering what wine is and can be.
He's been surprised by the favorable critical and popular response to the book.
"The subtext of the book is this idea of pursuing a more soulful and authentic path, and that resonates with people, maybe now more than ever," Grahm says. "That's the weird thing about the wine business.
"The wine business never, ever admits that they are anything less than perfect. Nobody ever says, 'Oh, boy, I really screwed up that wine.' Everything's always perfect."
In a highly literate way, Grahm shows that isn't necessarily the case.
Grahm's initial dream to make great pinot noir in the Santa Cruz Mountains didn't materialize, yet he's had more success than failure, even though he's eschewed mainstream varietals like cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay for such novelties as albarino, dolcetto, roussanne and muscat.
He's the original "Rhone Ranger," two decades ago leading an initially small group of vintners who saw in the California sun and soil an opportunity to cultivate grape varieties and wine styles traditionally associated with France's Rhone Valley.
In recent years, he slashed his yearly production from 450,000 cases to 35,000, and moved his winery from his beloved Santa Cruz Mountains to an urban complex on the southwest side of Santa Cruz.
In the past year he's complicated his life by opening the restaurant, an attempt to connect with customers on a more intimate level.
He sees the overall simplification of his life as a way to devote more time to his twin passions of his family and his goal of producing a wine that with originality truly expresses "terroir," a sense of place. Yesterday's "Rhone Ranger" is today's "enfant terroirble."
Toward that latter goal, he's bought property at San Juan Bautista, where he intends to plant 80 to 90 acres of vines and where he expects to move his winery eventually. The vineyard will be "very old-fangled," he says – "very low-tech, no wire, no trellis, no end posts, no irrigation. It will be state-of-the-art 1880s."
Speaking of terroir
The focus of many California wines today is "power" and "concentration," laments Grahm.
How would a wine that expresses "terroir" be different?
"A terroir wine should be this kind of kaleidoscope, it just unfolds, it continues to reveal layers of depth as it develops in the glass," Grahm says. "How many bottles have you had where the last sip was far and away the most interesting?
"This happens all the time with real wines. Finally, it's coming out of its shell, finally I'm beginning to understand, and then it's gone. It's a metaphor for life. By the time you understand it, it's gone."
Grahm talks of spending more time in the vineyard to heal and care for his spirit.
"The winemaking I can do in my sleep, but being present in the vineyard, walking, looking, observing, being in tune with its real subtleties. That's something I don't have yet, and may never have," says Grahm.
"I love pruning, it's my favorite thing in the whole world, apart from crossword puzzles. They are one and two, and I couldn't even say which is one and which is two," he adds. "When I planted the first vineyard in Bonny Doon and put up the fences, pounded the fence posts, strung the barbed wire, hoed the whole thing with a hoe, that was amazing.
"That was the best experience in my life, and I lost it. I don't have the physical endurance I had 25 years ago to do all those things, but for me that was connecting, that was a great presence for me. I may not be able to duplicate it, but I want to try."
He no longer may be the Merry Prankster of the California wine scene – staging a hilarious New York funeral for the cork when he switched his lineup to screw caps; taking over a theater on San Francisco's Embarcadero for a one-night run of his rock opera "Born to Rhone"; dressing in clerical robes to introduce his wine "Cardinal Zin" at a zinfandel festival in San Francisco – but Grahm likely will continue to rattle the trade for years to come, though his talk of retreating to a vineyard begs the question of whether he's entering a monastic phase: "Not if it involves a vow of celibacy."
GRAHM'S SIGNATURE WINES
As a measure of Randall Grahm's reach and commitment, the wine list of his restaurant Cellar Door Café lists nearly two dozen wines under the label of Bonny Doon Vineyard, and not one of them is a cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay or merlot.
From that spectrum, which includes sangiovese, albarino, dolcetto, pinot noir, syrah and several blends, here are the three that he says come closest to representing his goals:
• Bonny Doon Vineyard 2005 California Le Cigare Volant ($40), the winery's flagship red, a meaty and complex blend of grenache, mourvedre, syrah, carignane and cinsault. "I'm not a drug person," says Grahm, "but there is a sort of magical mystery tour in this wine. It has a kaleidoscope quality. One of the great lovely lessons of wine is that it can evolve so quickly, it is capable of transforming itself, it develops in the glass. That's one of the exciting things about this wine."
• Bonny Doon Vineyard 2004 California Le Cigare Blanc ($18, but difficult to find), a voluminous yet agile blend of roussanne and grenache blanc, is Grahm's most articulate case for aging white wines as well as red. "We sell them too early, they're reviewed too early, they get misunderstood, but white wines have an incredible capacity to age, improve and change. This wine is at its peak right now."
• Bonny Doon Vineyard 2007 Arroyo Seco Beeswax Vineyard Les Vol des Anges ($30 per 375-milliliter bottle), a botrytised roussanne that Grahm considers "one of the greatest dessert wines we have ever produced." "This is grapefruit marmalade, or maybe orange or quince marmalade. It's a super cool wine. It isn't politically correct to eat foie gras, but this wine with foie gras and a Seville- orange reduction is off the charts," says Grahm.
– Mike Dunne
RANDALL GRAHM IN DAVIS
When Randall Grahm returned to UC Davis last spring to lecture students, he titled his talk "How I Overcame My UC Davis Education."
The university apparently doesn't hold a grudge, and Grahm has been invited back for a public lecture. After the talk, he will sign copies of his book, "Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology," in the lobby.
When: Friday. Reception 6-7 p.m.; lecture 7-8 p.m.; book signing and continued reception 8-9 p.m.
Where: Sensory Theater of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science
Cost: Lecture is free. Nearby parking is $6.
Registration required: (530) 754-6349 or tmheath@ucdavis.edu