“What do women want?”
~ S. Freud

“Sometime a Cigare is just a Cigare.”
~ R. Grahm (with apologies to S. Freud)

“I mean, to put it crudely,” he was saying, “the thing you could say (Flaubert) lacks is testicularity. Know what I mean?”
“…Lacks what?” Franny said….
…He hesitated. “Masculinity,” he said.
“I heard you the first time.”
~ J.D. Salinger, “Franny and Zooey”

“I woke up this mornin’, my baby mighty mad.
Cause the lead in my pencil, it’s done gone bad
Lead in my pencil, baby its done gone bad
And that’s the worst old feelin’ that I’ve ever had.”
~ Johnny “Geechie” Temple, “Lead Pencil Blues”

“There’s a man in the house.”
~ Harlan Miller

My friend Amy recently told me, “Randall, you’re really missing the boat.” “Of course I am,” I told her. “The nautical conveyance and I haven’t been, shall we say, intimate for quite some time.” “No, you’re missing a great business opportunity.” “And, what pray tell, Amy, might that be?” “You make chick wine,” she said. “You should be marketing your wine to women.”

The technical difficulty of figuring out precisely how one might market one’s wine to women and the discipline in doing so notwithstanding, I was intrigued by what she was saying. It felt that she was perhaps on to something and I wanted to better understand what she meant. “Amy, assuming that what you say is correct, why do you imagine my wine is appealing to women?” I asked.

“For one thing, it’s soft, doesn’t have a lot of harsh, aggressive tannin, and the alcohol isn’t over-the-top. The highly concentrated, punch-you-in-the-face “statement” wines are very difficult for a lot of women. We just can’t deal with that much alcohol, that much structure. And your wines have a story – they’re about something. The labels are funny, non-threatening and beautiful, with a lot of attention paid to detail. Women like details.”

It seemed that certainly what she was saying about “chick wines” was true on a number of levels. The first thing I thought about was the whole notion of “trophy wines” – wines that are considered desirable in virtue of their great rarity, and whether they might somehow be akin to “trophy wives.” Both species tended to be very expensive, flashy, and with a number of obvious if somewhat superficial charms. (Non-trophy winemakers and non-trophy wives might well want to scratch out the eyes/pull out blonde hair by the dark roots of their opposing numbers.) One thing seemed certain. I didn’t imagine that women would likely buy a particular wine to impress other women; they might buy it because they liked the label or more likely because they were intrigued by the label and having tried the bottle once, rather liked the wine. There was certainly a lot more of a question of status, establishment of pecking order and demonstration of competence involved in a man’s decision to purchase one particular wine over another. It seemed to me that wine – whether it be its tannic structure or its usefulness as a fungible asset and investment vehicle, was for men, something that needed to be managed and mastered.

I have sometimes jocularly remarked about Le Cigare Volant, our flagship wine, that it differs considerably from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the southern French wine on which it is modeled, in that, being produced in Santa Cruz, where men are more in touch with their feelings, with their feminine side, it is decidedly kinder and gentler than its somewhat rustic, more broad-shouldered Gallic counterpart. You don’t have to go out and slay a large beast, drag it back to your lair and roast it on an open hearth to make an appropriate pairing with the wine.¹ And while Cigare differs from Châteauneuf, it is also, broadly speaking, quite a bit different from many if not most of its New World confrères. Our wines tend to be higher in acidity, lower in alcohol and tannin than those of many “serious” New World wineries.² While the proposition of more elegant, presumably food-friendlier wines is intellectually quite interesting, I think that it is also a bit confusing to a lot of wine writers and tasters. One way to think of our wines is that they are a bridge between New World and Old World. I suppose the question might be: Is the bridge leading anywhere or is it just a bridge out over the abyss?

I believe that the style of our wines tells only part of the story as to why they are (if they are) putatively attractive to women. Without getting too New Agey about it, I find that our wines are somehow more “sensitive” to their surroundings,³ more mutable, subject to greater changeability, based on the climate, both meteorological and emotional.⁴ They are wines not immediately accessible to the imbiber at first sip – they are typically quite closed up at first approach, and demand some patience and understanding. But once they begin to emerge from their shell, they are ready to engage in a long and meandering conversation with the food. In short, they are chick wines.⁵

Now, here is where I think it gets interesting, at least to me. If my wines are particularly interesting to women, might the converse be true, i.e. might they on some level be not so interesting to men? Lately I have been getting a fair amount of press, partially from the new book and partially due to my rather vocal and public plans to produce a vin de terroir, a wine intended to express a sense of place, from a new vineyard site, as yet to be planted. I am, of course, very pleased to have garnered so much public attention,⁶ but what has me a bit vexed is that while some very astute writers are quite willing to vigorously cheer me on in the pursuit of this new vineyard in its audacious aspiration, with but a few exceptions, they seem to be rather less convinced about the brilliance and uniqueness of our current line-up (especially the reds).⁷ They just can’t quite “get” the wines, are not quite ready to thoroughly embrace what I am proffering as an aesthetic; I suspect that they are troubled by the fact that the wines are to them, somehow neither fish nor fowl.⁸⁹ Maybe there is too great a disparity between my protestations of esteem for “somewhereness” and the nowhereness (or geographical indeterminacy) of the current line-up that just bugs them.¹⁰ Maybe it’s the hubristic grandiosity of my project – the creation of a vin de terroir – and instinctively, not wishing to become disappointed themselves, they are being a bit harsh on the wines in the hopes that I will try just that much harder to attain this worthiest ideal.¹¹

Perhaps a less convoluted explanation is indicated. Maybe in some of my wines the standard signifiers of “quality,” if not missing, are at least perhaps a bit occluded.¹² What actually is “quality” in a New World wine? I think that one would be hard pressed to insist that it is authenticity or trueness to its Platonic essence, because likely there is no such Platonic essence, especially if the wine does not come from a singular vineyard, and that vineyard is not farmed in such a way to optimally express its unique character. I believe that all of us hold some sort of template in our brains as far as what constitutes “quality” and what provokes our interest in a particular wine; likely we respond to wine in ways analogous to other sensual stimuli. Perhaps wine affects us a bit like music does, though its balance and logic does not have the same kind of temporal sequencing. With wine the elements are initially apprehended all at once in a sort of trumpet blast and then slowly, almost imperceptibly they shape-shift and unfold with time. Most people, at least us Westerners, are attuned to tonal music, with a recognizable structure and a predictable, inevitable logic; there is satisfaction and resolution when the melody returns to the tonic, a harmonic resonance of a few key elements. In wine maybe these elements are wood, fruit, tannin and minerals (though nobody really knows what this last category really means). Withal, I would suggest that these flavor elements cannot simply be present but they need to be organized in such a way that suggests that they represent something. Put another way, in a vin de terroir, the unique qualities of the site are driving the bus, in a vin d’effort, a winemaker with a strong stylistic vision is driving the bus. But somebody’s driving. And that there are some strong scenic elements on the way to observe: “Look, there’s that Russian River cherry fruit!” the helpful wine-guide/critic points out.

Critics – wine critics, movie or art critics – are always looking for some sort of explanatory hook, revelatory lens, if you will, to explain to themselves and readership what is most interesting and worthy of approbation. It can be the relatively obvious tic – the eucalyptus note found in older Heitz’ Martha’s Vineyard Cabs, the soft structure and caramel/vanilla of the early Silver Oaks, the iodine of La Mission Haut-Brion, the pencil lead of Latour, but there is something that tells us that this wine is different, and maybe, by extension, that there is A Plan of some sort. I’m not sure whether it has been my lack of imagination or maybe lack of will to make a wine that makes a strong statement. It is hard to think of “Balance!” “Elegance!” “Harmony!” as incendiary, revolutionary slogans that one shouts, or more accurately, murmurs at the ramparts.¹³ It seems that all too often, absent a strong organizing thema of a wine, (pre-understood by the taster/critic), it is tactile imminence/presence on the palate that is the default measure of quality. Meandering, elegant wines that change and evolve, and whose qualities take time to emerge, maybe are not so convincing.

I am left to conclude that in the New World we are still frontiersmen, that we must hew our way, leave an indelible trace, if we are to be taken at all seriously. Perhaps at the end of the day, in virtually every arena, including wine criticism, there is something like an implicit contest of wills, at least between men. Male wine critics and perhaps testosterone-infused female ones, are always gauging the power, the will of the winemaker, trying to divine the measure of his (or her) intention, and how well that intention has been met in the final product. I have spoken my piece in rather measured and modulated tones; perhaps it will be necessary to come down an octave or two.

1. Though just for the record, the umami-intensive character of our red wines (owing in no small part to our diligence in encouraging yeast autolysis of the wine’s lees) make them very well suited to pairing with roasted meats. [↩]
2. Part of the problem here lies with the whole notion of “seriousness.” In the Old World, one’s real estate – that stunning terraced vineyard, originally planted 2000 years ago by the Romans does quite a bit to establish the legitimacy of one’s credentials. In the New World, credibility is a bit more difficult to vouch for, and for reasons too numerous to enumerate, concentration or density of a wine has become the proxy for “seriousness” or “quality.” [↩]
3. There may be any number of reasons for this, from the somewhat straightforward and slightly banal – a less filtered wine, with more colloidal mass (fine particulates) will possibly be more variable under differing barometric pressures – to the more esoteric, i.e. considerations of the wine’s “life-force,” or ability to tolerate oxidative challenge, which in chemical terms may be a function of the particular minerals present in the wine, as well as the complex interactivity of its entire set of oxygen sensitive elements. Presumably the more complex the chemistry, the more unpredictably the wine will behave, the more “sensitive” it might be to its surroundings. [↩]
4. There is no question at all that the experience of a wine, whether pleasurable or not, is partially based on the qualities inherent in the wine itself, but equally is a function of the physiological, emotional and psychological state of the taster himself. The character of some wines (like some people) is more or less immediately evident, but in most instances, really requires a lot of unpacking. Critics don’t write about the enormous amount of subjectivity (and variability) that is brought to the tasting experience because this would undermine their basic stock in trade, which is dependability and replicability. [↩]
5. It occurs to me that another word that would well describe the style of our red wines is “Burgundian” or even “Pinot Noir-like.” The difference of course is that no one expects Burgundy to be a massive wine that will make its point in a stentorian fashion and there is (generally) a rather different set of expectations when one tastes the wine. This actually brings up the interesting dichotomy between Bordeaux and Burgundy. Bordeaux could well be considered “Apollonian” and Burgundy “Dionysian,” that is to say that Bordeaux appeals to the head, and Burgundy to the entire sensorium. Burgundy is truly the most feminine wine, one that seduces with its wiles, draws one in, until all resistance is futile. [↩]
6. My primary character disorder is an insatiable need for infinite public approbation. [↩]
7. Maybe I am overthinking this a bit, but I have the idea that one can never quite experience a wine (or anything else for that matter) without a set of assumptions and preconceptions about that wine, without implicit (and often unconscious) standards of quality, signifiers of merit or defect. Certainly wine writers have quite a bit to learn from phenomenologists as far as learning how to look into the enormous set of factor already brought bring to the tasting experience before a wine touches lips. Matt Kramer and Eric Asimov have both recently written about their experience of “orange wines”; their work in looking at their own set of prejudices and prejudgments in considering these wines might make them more open-minded in considering wines from a more normative range. [↩]
8. There is nothing but anxiety of influence when it comes to winemaking and by extension to wine criticism. A producer of Syrah in the New World has the unenviable choice of either rebelling against the elegance (critics might say wimpiness) of Old World Syrah and thus producing the bold monstrosity of SAE 40-weight motor oil Shiraz, or alternatively, producing a derivative “French-style” Syrah, which will likely be excoriated by the influential wine press and shunned by real wine mavens, who would likely prefer the Chave “Offerus,” which sells at about the same price. [↩]
9. A New World producer who produces a “lighter” Syrah, at least has the Platonic template of Côte-Rôtie, which helps to create a range of defined normative expectations for Syrah. A New World southern Rhône blend, which is loosely modeled on the powerful wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape does not immediately create the same universe of expected possibilities, a sort of imaginative pre-tasting, if you will. [↩]
10. I recently had the experience at a winemaker dinner of sitting next to a woman, whom I presumed (and of course, I am merely presuming) was a transsexual. (She was well over 6 feet, stocky, with a rather booming baritone voice.) Apart from my desire to not say something inappropriate, I just found myself uncomfortable with her “ambiguity,” which of course was a function of my own need to have the world neatly sorted out. [↩]
11. Having just written this, I realize that it is patently false, and maybe just an indication of narcissism in the extreme – no one out there really does (or should) care that much. [↩]
12. The issue is made even murkier (somewhat literally) by our use of screwcaps, which creates a slightly different redox milieu for the wine – the same old cast of vinous characters – fruity esters, tannins, organic acids and the like – but ever so slightly altered as to be not quite recognizable, a bit like the voice-altering technology employed in witness protection programs. When the wine becomes completely saturated with oxygen, a more normative or expected tasting palette re-emerges. [↩]
13. I’m not precisely sure what ramparts are – just certain that, like lees, they are only found plurally. [↩]

Years ago, when I had decided that Pinot Noir and that other Burgundian variety were just not going to work so well at our Estate Vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, I began to focus instead on Rhône varieties. We produced then an extraordinary haunting wine from our Estate called “Le Sophiste,” a putative blend of “Roussanne”¹ and Marsanne². No need to dwell on the painful past and all of its fateful turns, but Le Sophiste really focused my attention (as much I could muster) on white Rhône grapes.

In the ‘80s many winemakers imagined that Viognier would be the Vinous Great White Hope,³ but there are a lot of reasons why the grape has never fulfilled its promise. To really do its best work Viognier generally needs to be darn ripe, and as a result turns out a wine heady in alcohol,⁴ lovely as an apéritif, but problematic to drink with an entire meal. It is clear to me that at least in the realm of the Rhodanien whites, for a real gastronomy wine, one that will pair with a wide range of dishes, one really needs to consider Roussanne and its vinous conferères.⁵ Voilà, Le Cigare Blanc, a blend of Roussanne and Grenache Blanc in varying proportions, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the vintage. LCB is the conceptual analogue of Le Cigare Volant and is a blend of the primary white grapes of Chateauneuf-du-Pape⁶ and is made entirely from fruit from the Beeswax Vineyard, located at the mouth of the Arroyo Seco in Monterey County. The soils of the Arroyo Seco are significant for the extraordinary profusion of river rock; the soil at Beeswax is deep but well drained and the vines root exceptionally well in it⁷.

I realize that this piece is beginning to sound a bit like an infomercial for the wine, and that is not my intention at all. So, here’s the real story about Le Cigare Blanc: It is a wine that I have really struggled with – struggled to find a style⁸ that is truly distinctive and of course, struggled to educate customers to the great beauty of the category in general, and this wine specifically.⁹ It is really a swan/ugly duckling story.

The received wisdom is that Roussanne is a “noble cépage,” one with a reputation for great elegance and finesse, more than say, Marsanne and Grenache Blanc, possessed of more structure and complexity than Clairette or heaven forfend, Picpoule. And yet, in my own experience, Roussanne has tended to produce wines often incredibly awkward and gawky in their youth. I assumed that I just wasn’t quite getting Roussanne, certainly not as a stand-alone. I loved its musky, quince/Asian pear skin nose, but there was often a real austere edge to the wine, at least very much evident in its youth. Whether this was the much vaunted “minerality” of the variety or the phenolic nature of its skins (most likely a bit of both), the wine was generally not so forthcoming until food was brought to the table – ideally something a little bit rich or fatty.¹⁰ The wine sealed with a screwcap closure tended to reinforce its austere mineral aspect,¹¹ (probably low concentrations of sulfur-containing compounds, i.e. thiols) and you (either producer or purchaser) could either allow yourself to become slightly depressed by this fact or alternatively, become utterly elated that you had the wit to produce or purchase a bottle that would evolve brilliantly if you just had the patience to wait a little while – two to four short years – and let the wine do its thing.¹²

Roussanne, when it is not being a dream grape is also a bit of a nightmare. The word itself derives from the same root that gives us “russet” – for Roussanne to be truly ripe, it has to take on an autumnal coloration,¹³ which it does when exposed to sufficient light and heat. These conditions obtain on the south and west side of the vine, meaning, of course that they don’t, at least not quite as promptly on the vine’s opposite side. So, typically, one half of the cluster will become ripe and flavorful while the other half remains lime-green and relatively tasteless. Ideally, you have had the wit to set up the trellising and manage the canopy in such a way as to even up the light conditions on both sides of the vine, but, take it from me, this is a bit easier to do conceptually than in practice. So, you wait for the north/east side of the clusters to catch up before the south/west sides are done to a faretheewell. Picking decisions, like every decision undertaken in life, tend to be a compromise between a set of ideal conditions and the exigencies of harsh reality. You wait and wait for the flavor to develop in the Roussanne, and by that point, the acid has dropped away and the pH is beginning to go to hell.¹⁴

Enter Grenache Blanc. G.B. seems to be brilliantly suited to our growing conditions, lightly shrugging off the heat and bright sunlight of the Central Coast with the nonchalance of Surfer Girl. It doesn’t sunburn easily and retains its crisp acidity like a champ, making it a natural and necessary ally to Roussanne. The wine, on its own is not so terribly phenolic; mildly melon-like, almost pineappley or minty. If one anthropomorphically thought of it as a person, you might even call it “friendly,” like a true Californian. So Grenache blended with Roussanne brings a level of approachability and balance to the conversation – like a well-matched couple, each balancing one another’s deficits.

We have gotten in the habit of combining Grenache Blanc and Roussanne in something like a 50/50 proportion as juice and co-fermenting, whilst retaining a portion of each unblended for the final assemblage.¹⁵ We ferment approximately half of the wine in neutral puncheon and half in stainless steel tank, a relatively Solomonic strategy – blending redox profiles of the different fermentation and élevage regimes as an acupuncturist might do to balance yin and yang. I am keen to experiment this year with a certain amount of Cigare Blanc ageing in bonbonnes (carboys), to optimize yeast autolysis.¹⁶

To all of those reading out there in Grapeland: Give Cigare Blanc a try, with an open mind and open palate. Invest in some nice, not necessarily crazy expensive wine glasses, and serve the wine not too cold, giving it time in the glass to expand and spread its wings. We would all do well to do the same.

Watch new video! “Sub-terroir Rhônesick Blues music video with footnotes“ blog post and on YouTube.

Purchase Le Cigare Blanc in the Bonny Doon Vineyard store.

1. It turns out that the “Roussanne” in my vineyard wasn’t in fact Roussanne, but rather, amazingly, Viognier. That sad story has already been told many times before and does not bear repeating. [↩]
2. I recently tasted an older vintage en magnum (1993 if memory serves) and the wine, at least in magnum, was still absolutely magnificent. Sophiste had a great vaguely Deco-ish collage label and was capped with a top hat, which we had specially produced for the wine. Most everyone, apart from Larry Stone, buyer at the time at Charlie Trotter’s, greatly appreciated the top hat.  So anxious were we to ingratiate ourselves chez Trotter, we replaced the top hats with black sealing wax. [↩]
3. In the early 1980s I visited M. Multier of Chateau Du Rozay, a small Condrieu estate imported by Kermit Lynch. M. Multier, himself a very diminutive hunchback, navigated the exceptionally vertiginous slopes of his vineyard with the agility of a mountain goat. I was so taken with his wine and the other Condrieus I had tasted, and being somewhat in a state of denial of the technical issues the grape presented, I imagined that there was an infinitely vast opportunity for Viognier in California. M. Multier was clever enough to detect the cupidity written on my face. “Young man, let me give you some advice,” he said. “First, make your money and then plant Viognier, not the other way around.” [↩]
4. Yield must also be quite restricted and the utterly unique growing conditions of Condrieu and Chateau Grillet are rather difficult to emulate. [↩]
5. Wines made from Marsanne, viz. Hermitage Blanc, are often wines for gourmandizing as well; they are so rich and unctuous, their application for food pairing is somewhat limited. I once opportunistically dropped in on Gérard Chave at lunchtime (to the great disapproval of Mme. Chave), but was fortunate enough to have been served his ’67 Hermitage Blanc with fresh foie gras he had prepared himself. Mind-altering. [↩]
6. In a perfect world we would also be able to include Picpoule and Clairette and that may well happen someday. While Picpoule and Clairette lack the structure of Roussanne, they furnish (as does Grenache Blanc) a much needed refreshing acidity. [↩]
7. We’ve adopted the practice of irrigating in the vine middles on a diamond pattern, with the intention of encouraging the vines to seek water in all four directions, thus enhancing the rooting mass (with a lot of positive benefit, not the least of which is at least a theoretical enhancement of mineral content, though we have not demonstrated that with anything approaching scientific rigor. [↩]
8. Certainly one real issue is that of ripeness. Roussanne and Grenache Blanc in the Beeswax Vineyard seem to develop flavor at a relatively high Brix (24++) and this will give us, even with the use of indigenous yeast, a wine fairly rich in alcohol. In earlier vintages, we have resorted to technological means to remove alcohol from the wine, but this is no longer a practice that I can support. We are thinning the crop to achieve more even ripening, and living/coping with alcohols in the low 14s, an ethanol level that seems to work reasonably well for this style of wine. [↩]
9. It is small consolation that white Rhônes as a category, even for top-notch Rhône producers are a very difficult sell, certainly on the retail shelf. Sommeliers have largely worked out how wonderful they pair with food, but are still mostly viable in the “by-the-glass” format. To purchase an entire bottle of wine in a restaurant is now (more than ever) a Major Commitment, and that usually means playing it safe. [↩]
10. Lobster will do very nicely, but pork belly or even a fowl that has been appropriately larded will be brilliant. [↩]
11. Screwcaps provide a more reductive environment for wine (generally a good thing), but tend to quite literally close up a wine. [↩]
12. I’ve been consuming a fair bit of ’04 Cigare Blanc lately, a wine that was incredibly backward in its youth, but is now showing remarkably well, that pome thing coupled with toasted hazelnuts, a pretty unbeatable combination. [↩]
13. It is not inconceivable to me that there are possibly some of the identical flavor compounds in Roussanne skins that one finds in (russeted) pear skins. Nature never likes to waste any of Her great biochemical ideas. [↩]
14. There are likely a set of environmental conditions that might be more optimal for the retention of acidity in Roussanne, and with several centuries of iteration and observation in California, they will likely ultimately be determined. [↩]
15. Thoroughly in step with the Santa Cruz practice of Keeping One’s Options Open. [↩]
16. We attempted this year a small (one barrel’s worth) lot of Roussanne, fermented on the skins to dryness and the results were pretty dreadful. Most significantly, the skins are quite rich in potassium, which elevates even further the already elevated pH. Probably would have been a better idea to have attempted this with Grenache Blanc, but oh well. [↩]

The reader may know or be able to infer that I live a somewhat convoluted, self-referential life; that is to say, many of my personal points of reference seem to exist in the realm of vinous and the arcane (generally both). Eliot footnoted The Wasteland; why not to footnote a Bob Dylan song parody about some of the more obscure aspects of winemaking chez Doon?

There is not one particular reason why I have undertaken to produce the Rhônesick Blues video,¹ apart from the fact that it a) seemed to be a fun thing to do, and 2) it might bring a little more attention to the wine and the brand itself; something, I’m afraid, that it is a bit of a necessity these days. I am quite sensitive, perhaps to the point of the slightly pathological, to being branded a “marketer,” or worse yet, a “marketeer,”² but the truth is that unless you enjoy the rare luxury of having a legion of others stentoriously trumpeting the virtues of your wines, you must in some way essay to reveal those wines to their world and speak to their overarching significance. Like it or not, you are then squarely in the realm of marketing. Yes, I’ll say it one last time and then lay this painful business to rest: Admittedly, we have in the past been far too focused on marketing and not enough on the quality of the wines themselves. But that has changed. Dramatically. Please don’t take me at my word; try the wines and come to your own conclusions.

The Sub-terroir³ Rhônesick Blues parody really tries to get at the existential angst of one sincerely seeking to improve the quality of his wines. I am always hearing a cacophony of opinionated voices, second thoughts (should I have added 30 instead of 40 ppm of SO2?), mixed with the subtle intuitions and inspirations I am hoping to find. One tries to reconcile the absurdity of the current state of the wine business with the anguished cries of one’s aesthetic conscience. I recommend consuming the ‘05 Le Cigare Volant whilst contemplating these footnotes and/or thinking about the wonder of it all.

Sub-terroir Rhônesick Blues

J. Locke’s⁴ in the cold cave
Drinking down the old Chave⁵
I’m on the crushpad
Thinking about the Advocate⁶
The man in the lab coat
Reporting on a horsy note⁷
Final review’s just now set
Says we’ve got some bad brett,
Sees filtration as a safety net.⁸
Look out grahm
You’re gonna get slammed
God knows why
But Cigare’s never gonna fly.⁹
Make wine a better way
Looking for a new trend¹⁰
Winegeek blogging up a blue streak,
Still likes wines for real men¹¹
Wants a score of one ten
You only got an eighty-point blend.¹²

Girl from the raw bar
Said she wants some terroir
200% good wood w/ extra char¹³
Spaceship wines won’t fly far.

I’ve been told that many say
Wine is closed on a “leaf day”¹⁴
Gotta rack it anyway
Watch out for mounting V.A.
Look out grahm
Don’t matter point scores a sham.
Don’t take gulps or big sips
No untoasted oak chips¹⁵
Watch those immature grape pips¹⁶
And riding illicit spaceships.
Better stay away from those
That carry ‘round kinked wine hose
Watch that residual xylose¹⁷
Make sure the bottle’s got a clean nose
You don’t need a Spectator
To know for sure your wine blows.¹⁸

Wine’s sick, wine’s well,¹⁹
Darkly colored as an inkwell
Wholesale business gone to hell, hard to tell
If anything will ever sell²⁰
Try hard, get ****ed
Hang around the wine bars, carouse
Drink Big House, get soused²¹
Find informed water if you dowse.²²
Look out, grahm
Your wine aint got ‘nuff raspberry jam²³
But “Speculative” thinkers, wine boors
Hard-core trophy drinkers
Hang around the cellar door²⁴
Girl by the Jacuzzi flow-form²⁵
Just looking how to stay warm
No need for saigner bleeders²⁶
Watch your pH meters²⁷

Ah, get scored, get bored
Bad hair, County Fair, fruit bomb-scare
Alcohol too high, sugar pill aint Beaune-dry²⁸
Try to be an Ex-Spectorator “Best Buy”
Please Jim, please Bob,²⁹ Samsonite clonal grapevine³⁰
Don’t you cross-filter, don’t fine³¹
Six years of Davis
And they put you on the bottling line.
Look out grahm
Are you a lion or a lamb?³²
Better punchdown a warm cap
Go to Berserkeley, get a case of Clape,³³
Learn to love the screwcap
Avoid whole clusters w/ the green sap³⁴
No use for designer yeast
Wine must pair well w/ roast beast
The must pump don’t work
Cause: Too much grape-crap in the air-trap.³⁵

Watch video of the Rhônesick Blues recording session. Professional footage of the recording session and finished music video coming soon.

1. Freud pointed out that all of our actions are “over-determined,” i.e. a conflux of mixed motives; this was known by Shakespeare (“Two natures beat within my breast.”) and the ancient Greeks as well. [↩]
2. Contemplate the irony of “marketing” one’s gravitas as well as publically proclaiming one’s indifference to public attention or approbation. [↩]
3. This – the manifest non-expression of terroir in our wines – is the greatest source of anguish in my winemaking life. [↩]
4. John Locke was a long-time collaborator at Bonny Doon, my Doppelgänger, and still dear friend. [↩]
5. This might have in fact happened at one point or another. I was fortunate enough to have purchased a number of bottles of Chave from Kermit back when prices were not quite so stratospheric. [↩]
6. This would of course be The Wine Advocate (Parker’s Journal), not The Advocate, but I like the ambiguity. [↩]
7. A horsy note in a wine is generally prima facie evidence of a Brettanomyces infection. [↩]
8. If you sterile filter a wine, you can pretty much stop the Brett situation from getting worse, but there is some cost to the wine itself. [↩]
9. OK, this is a bit of self-deprecation and may well be misconstrued. In fact, we (that is all of us) must insure that Cigare flies high. Recent vintages of Cigare have been just great, each one seemingly better than the last. [↩]
10. A little irony here: I’m not at all looking for a new trend. I’m really just trying to figure out how to make the best possible wine which can be made and that will somehow express some real distinction. [↩]
11. The wine blogosphere, at least the most influential sectors of it, is still largely dominated by wine drinkers, who esteem power and concentration above all. Manly wines for manly winedrinkers. (Joel Peterson captured this perfectly in his apothegm, “No Wimpy Wines!” [↩]
12. The shame of not quite measuring up. [↩]
13. One of the indications of a wine-world of decadent wretched excess was the brief fascination a few years back with the utilization of “200%” new wood, i.e. the passage of a wine in new oak barrels, followed by racking into yet another set of virgin barrels. This practice would certainly, perhaps divinely, signify that a winery owner had too much money for his/her own good. [↩]
14. In the biodynamic practice, specifically in the utilization of the biodynamic calendar, it is believed that plants (and other organisms) on earth change with a sort of periodicity in response to the celestial bodies. On a given day, one part of the plant (the leaves vs. the roots for example) may be more energetically active and one can gear one’s farming practice to take advantage of this fact – irrigating (if one must) on a “root day” will give you better water uptake than on a “flower day,” for example. The wine itself seems also to change based on this astronomical calendar (though also of course sensitive to many other factors, such as lunar cycle and changes in barometric pressure.) It has been my own experience that wines do not present as well on “leaf days,” compared to say, “fruit days.” Just one more bit of evidence of the world as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” in the words of William James. [↩]
15. We have experimented in the use of untoasted oak chips in our wines with generally benign results. They seem to help stabilize the color in the wine without adding much discernible oak character. I have been rethinking the use of chips in our premium wines, largely out of aesthetic considerations, and we’ve largely eliminated the practice with the ‘09 vintage. [↩]
16. The quality of a wine’s tannins comes largely from the grape seeds and a determination of the seed’s ripeness is absolutely crucial in producing a wine with a reasonably silky tannic structure. [↩]
17. Xylose is a wood sugar, primarily derived from new oak barrels, unfermentable by Saccharomyces, but a potential nutritional source to spoilage yeast. For this reason, somewhat counterintuitively, Brett is often a bigger problem with new barrels than with old. [↩]
18. This was a bit gratuitous on my part and sorry for the rude language. But, yes, you really don’t need the Spectator (or anyone else) to tell you whether or not you should be happy with your wine. While it is of economic necessity to ultimately sell your wine at something like a reasonable profit, your job as a winemaker really is to please yourself. [↩]
19. I have gone on at great length elsewhere on wine’s enormous seeming mutability. Wine (and its consumers) are always in a state of Heraclitean flux. [↩]
20. Don’t get me started on this. Selling wine in the wholesale market these days really is murder. [↩]
21. I don’t drink much Big House these days for obvious reasons, but love the rhyme with “get soused.” [↩]
22. There is the belief among some that water, owing to its unique electro-magnetic properties is potentially the carrier of all sorts of information on an energetic level, retaining a kind of “memory” of a solute that had once touched it but is no longer physically present. Water that is carrying specific energetic information is called “informed water.” There have been a number of experiments proposed to validate this phenomenon, none of which have been scientifically conclusive. [↩]
23. Duh. Of course it doesn’t. We eschew crazy ripeness levels and selected yeast strains that accentuate the jammy character in wine. [↩]
24. This is patently false. We don’t seem to get too many trophy wine drinkers hanging around our “Cellar Door.” [↩]
25. If you come to visit us at our “Cellar Door,” you will observe a rather beautiful flow-form water feature – a sculptural form that emulates the eddying motion of natural watercourses – which, while not even remotely Jacuzzi-like, does produce rather hypnotically beautiful figure-eight forms. [↩]
26. In previous years, we were somewhat reliant on the technique of saigner, or the bleeding off of juice from our red tanks prior to fermentation to attain sufficient concentration in our red wines. With better management of our vineyards, we are far less reliant on this practice. [↩]
27. I like the spoof on Dylan’s “parking meters.” We do watch the pHs in our wines, but try not to be slavishly devoted to formulaic parameters. [↩]
28. At the end of fermentation, we do want to make sure that our wines go to complete dryness, making them a lot more stable microbiologically. [↩]
29. This would be Mr. Laube and Mr. Parker respectively, but I no longer wish to slavishly essay to please them. [↩]
30. It is conceivable that a vine or two has entered this country via luggage. The point is that winemakers will risk confiscatory fines in the attempt to arrive at superior planting material, and by extension, superior wines. [↩]
31. In a perfect world, there would be no need to filter or fine one’s wine. We don’t fine our wines but in some instances if there are major microbiological issues, we will filter, reluctantly. We’re working hard to get in front of microbiological issues before they become problematic. [↩]
32. Darn good question. [↩]
33. The brilliant wines of Auguste Clape are available at Kermit Lynch Wine Merchants in Berkeley. [↩]
34. The lunar rhythms will have a bearing on the degree of sap that exists in the stems of grapes, an important consideration if one is using a significant fraction of undestemmed fruit in the fermenter. [↩]
35. I’m quite pleased that we were not compelled to use our must pump at all this vintage and have been able to handle our grapes in a much gentler fashion. [↩]

I’ve been to visit Carl von Schubert, the owner of the beauteous von Schubert-Grünhaus Estate just once in situ. He was rather preoccupied that day with various and sundry crises1 (despite the bucolic veneer, this is what the wine business is generally about), so his wife showed me around.  The Ruwer tributary is not the most prepossessing place in the world, but the Grünhaus Estate is absolutely magnificent, encompassing thirty four contiguous hectares of grapes (that’s enormous), as well as a number of hectares of fruit trees, meadow, woods and a grand manor house.  But more to the point, the Estate produces arguably the most consistently sublime Riesling year in and year out (since the 10^th Century, possibly earlier).  The Abtsberg vineyard is my favorite of their holdings, the most mineral intensive, sometimes the most reticent when young, but the longest-lived.  A Maximin Grünhauser Abtsberg Spätlese with a fair bit of age on it (12-15 years) is my desert island wine – one that I would happily drink for decades until the rescue boat arrived (or didn’t).2

I don’t really know what the deal is with their “Superior” bottling – this is supposedly a selection of “the best of the best.”  My guess is that it is some sort of marketing initiative to re-establish the company’s credentials as a “top dog” estate after the somewhat unfair maligning of a few vintages of the late ‘90s, early ‘00s by some howling jackals of the wine press.  (The Estate never lost a step, at least in my book.)

Here is what is interesting: I didn’t get this first-hand from Carl, and probably it is very indiscreet and irresponsible of me to be bruiting about hearsay testimony, but hey, this is a wine list and not a court of law.  I have it on reasonably good authority that when he was in San Francisco not too long ago, Carl was absolutely overjoyed that he was able to finally able to make a personnel change with the winemaker/vineyard manager, who had worked at the company for more than fifty years.  Carl inherited the property from his father (and has been in charge since 1981), but apparently owing to some seemingly passive-aggressive provision of his father’s will, Carl, despite being the owner of the property, could not make this crucial personnel adjustment, a state of affairs that caused him no end of grief.  My point is this:  Things are never what they appear to be on the exterior.  To the casual observer, Carl von Schubert is a member of the vinous pantheon, an Olympian demi-god, the owner of what I believe to be the greatest wine estate in Germany, and incredibly lucky to work with the noblest white grape on the planet.  In my fevered imagination, I reckon him to be the Thor, Zeus or Odin of grapes, but a divinity afflicted with a titanic case of, say, hemorrhoids.3 I am so happy that Carl now feels so much freer; no question that the wines will become ever more exciting in coming years.

So, about this wine:  It is, of course, utterly magnificent, a real pity to drink so young, but certainly capable of providing great vinous joy and satisfaction tonight. The “Superior” is slightly higher in alcohol than a typical Spätlese or Auslese, as well as somewhat dryer; in some sense, it really is a new style for German Mosel wines – a middle ground between classic “Spätlese/Auslese and the Trocken style.  What is typically most enchanting about the Grünhauser wines is their immense fruitiness, balanced by a steely acidity and mineral component.  The ’06 seems to be relatively softer and more approachable in acidity, but the fruit – it is riotous.  One aromatic element that is quite typical for G’haus is apricot and peach – flavors that one typically associates with botrytis.  The other quality I often find is a haunting citrus note – mostly lemon (and sometimes lime); what you get in Grünhaus is not just lemon but lemon chiffon – that ethereal quality that makes you just wonder how it is that you are personally worthy enough to be consuming this juice.

I really wanted to get the description of the wine right, so I thought to bring in another palate to help me with some of the heavier organoleptic lifting.  My daughter, Melie, who is six, has heretofore humored me in my obsession with things gustatory.  I have occasionally handed her a glass of wine, asking her,  “So, Melie, what do you smell?”  “It smells like wine, Dad,” she usually responds, rather amused at her own wit.  But this time, something very unusual happened.  Instead of responding in a dismissive, off-handed manner, Melie gave me very detailed tasting notes.

“So, what do you get?”

“Smells like peach ice cream, Dad. And apricots, maybe some nectarine.”4 It’s also very lemon-limey.

“What else?”

“Mango, definitely mango… And what’s that tree outside our yard, Dad?  Kumquats.  No, not kumquats… Loquats.”

Here’s where it started to get a bit freaky.  “Dad, you know, to really smell it, you need to twist the glass.  (She meant, “swirl.”)  She started swirling the glass, very, very creditably.5 (We’ve practiced this before.)  “Now, the smell is really starting to come out and change,” she said.  (I swear I am not making this up.)

“What do you smell?”

“I smell honey.”

“What kind, sweetheart?”

“Lavender honey.  Definitely lavender honey.” (She’s been brought up well.)  “And there’s also pea-flower.6 And cantaloupe.”

“You’re scaring me, sweetheart.”

“And some herb.  What do you call that herb, Dad?  Lemon… Lemon … What do you call it?  Lemon balm (!!!!)”

“Uh, anything else, Melie?”

“It just smells like earth, Dad.”

This last comment – and I solemnly swear that my account is 100% accurate – persuaded me that my ancestral line of DNA had absolutely, positively replicated itself successfully, that the fruit of my loins, was at least instrumentally, up to any and all gustatory challenges that would present themselves.  Thank you, Carl, for your magic elixir.

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1 I’ve met Carl a number of other times on market visits to the U.S., where he has generally been a lot more relaxed.

2 I don’t know quite why we wine guys are always being asked the somewhat inane question about getting shipwrecked and what would then constitute our fantasy desert island wines.

3 I am also incredibly amazed by the fact that Carl imagines that a significant percentage of his wines (more than half) has to be made in a dry or dry-ish style, a function of the thoroughly misguided enopsychosis, that has swept through Germany in recent years.  Max Grünhäuser generally has far too much acid to be particularly palatable as a dry wine.  But, as a Spätlese, it is perfect or perhaps even better than perfect.

4 We had actually made peach ice cream earlier that day, so the comparison was fresh in our minds.

5 Last year Melie attended an unusual private school that teaches “circus arts” and has become a proficient stilt walker and unicyclist; she is still learning how to spin plates.

6 Nailing of this descriptor was particularly astute.

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J. Locke’s in the cold cave
Drinking down the old Chave
I’m on the crushpad
Thinking about the Advocate
The man in the lab coat
Reporting on a horsy note
Final review’s just now set
Says we’ve got some bad brett,
Sees filtration as a safety net.
Look out grahm
You’re gonna get slammed
God knows why
But Cigare’s never gonna fly.
Make wine a better way
Looking for a new trend
Winegeek blogging up a blue streak,
Still likes wines for real men
Wants a score of one ten
You only got an eighty-point blend.

Girl from the raw bar
Said she’s wants some terroir
200% good wood w/ extra char
Spaceship wines won’t fly far.

I’ve been told that many say
Wine is closed on a “leaf day”
Gotta rack it anyway
Watch out for mounting V.A.
Look out grahm
Don’t matter point scores a sham.
Don’t take gulps or big sips
No untoasted oak chips
Watch those immature grape pips
And riding illicit spaceships.
Better stay away from those
That carry ‘round kinked wine hose
Watch that residual xylose
Make sure the bottle’s got a clean nose
You don’t need a Spectator
To know for sure your wine blows.

Wine’s sick, wine’s well,
Darkly colored as an inkwell
Wholesale business gone to hell, hard to tell
If anything will ever sell
Try hard, get ****ed (starred)
Hang around the wine bars, carouse
Drink Big House, get soused
Find informed water if you dowse.
Look out, grahm
Your wine aint got ‘nuff raspberry jam
But “Speculative” thinkers, wine boors
Hard-core trophy drinkers
Hang around the cellar door
Girl by the Jacuzzi flow-form
Just looking how to stay warm
No need for saigner bleeders
Watch your pH meters

Ah, get scored, get bored
Bad hair, County Fair, fruit bomb-scare
Alcohol too high, sugar pill aint Beaune-dry
Try to be an Ex-Spectorator  “Best Buy”
Please Jim, please Bob, Samsonite clonal grapevine
Don’t you cross-filter, don’t fine
Six years of Davis
And they put you on the bottling line.
Look out grahm
Are you a lion or a lamb?
Better punchdown a warm cap
Go to Berserkeley, get a case of Clape,
Learn to love the screwcap
Avoid whole clusters w/ the green sap
No use for designer yeast
Wine must pair well w/ roast beast
The must pump don’t work
Cause: Too much grape-crap in the air-trap.

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(Part 2 of a 2-part series; read Part 1 here.)

Imagine wine as possessing two disparate aspects or poles – the lower and the upper, that which goes down to the ground and that which ascends to the sky.  The “bottom” of the wine is its skeletal structure, its power, its centeredness,1 its ability to tolerate oxidative challenge, which in some sense can be thought of as its “life-force,” and is certainly linked with its ageworthiness.  I think that this aspect of the wine is a function in part of its tannins (derived from the seeds and stems of the grapes and wood tannin from the barrels), anthocyanins (derived from skins) as well as the mineral content of the grapes (a function of carefully restricted yields, and most importantly, of vines with a wide-ranging root system, grown in soils with healthy microbial flora).  You can think of this as the “will” of the wine, its vector or intention, the lead in the pencil, as it were.

And then there is this other aspect to the wine – its more aetherial, dreamy or aspirational nature.  This is the heady aspect of the wine, certainly linked to the alcohol and the fruity esters.  Certainly Cigares d’antan possessed this element in spades; the wines were often so very “gracious,” pleasing, maybe a bit too eager to please.2 But there is another, slightly element in wine, allied to its “light” side and that would be the contribution of the lees, or yeast cells, as they autolyze and become digested into the wine.  The lees can contribute a very lovely silky texture to the wine, as well as a certain savoriness, umami, the mysterious “fifth flavor.”3 Here’s where I think things can get very interesting:  I think of the lees as the anima of a wine, its personal daemon, maybe its conscience, à la Jiminy Cricket, a remembrance of everywhere it has been.  It (they)4 can represent the very best and the very worst of the wine  – its brilliance and its extreme awkwardness.  Integrating lees into a wine can be a bit like integrating the slightly messier aspects of one’s own psyche, those that one would rather keep under wraps.  Certainly if the lees become a too dominant element, they end up more or less consuming the wine and there is very little left.  But if they are successfully mastered and seamlessly folded in, they can make a marvelous contribution, knitting the disparate parts of the wine together.  Ultimately I think of lees as sort of angel that must be wrestled and mastered, lest it consume the wine, rather than the other way round.

Now with the ’05 Cigare, after laboring lo, these many years, I believe we have finally achieved a greatly successful and dramatic integration of the lees and have come up with one of the great Cigares.   We have restored Grenache to its rightful position as alpha grape in the cuvée (50% in the ’05), with an enormously successful result.

The wine, which is terribly closed for business when first opened (and benefits greatly from decanting), emerges cautiously out of its shell, like a wary turtle.  First nose is earthy, slightly mushroomy and vaguely bouillon-esque, all of the tell-tale characteristics of Umami Central.  With more air,5 the fruit begins to emerge from beneath the earthy stratum and one begins to detect notes of black fruit – Griotte cherries, blackberries, mulberries, and a floral aspect that recalls candied violets.  With still more air emerges one of the loveliest noses that one finds in wine – licorice – but oddly and improbably, it seems as if you are synesthetically savoring its particular texture as you inhale.  It’s not just black licorice, but the more disciplined and non-punishing red whips, as well, and one can’t imagine licorice whips without thinking of Michel Foucault, now can one?

The texture of the wine is slightly oily and velveteen and there is a finish that just doesn’t quit – it seems as if you’re getting 16 channels or tracks of information here, perhaps some being beamed in remotely from the Mother Ship, hovering overhead – undoubtedly, encoded secret messages.  There is a “gathered” sense to the wine, and one apprehends that there is a certain core or nucleus to the wine – whether these are minerals or what, I couldn’t say.  The wine is the embodiment of savoriness and I love it for the same reason I love Burgundy so much – infinitely mysterious and always beckoning one ever forward.

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‘Apologia’: Please note that this fairly obscure word does not in fact mean “apology,” but rather a written formal defense of something that one believes in strongly.

1 “Centeredness” or perhaps “balance” is probably the most difficult phenomenon to really characterize well.  Certainly, a wine that has a certain exaggerated element, whether it be green tannin or an acidic imbalance or even a lack of primary “fruit”, will likely move in the direction of greater evidence of that imbalance over time.  One thing I have definitely noted is that any sort of gross manipulation of the wine (saigner, use of reverse osmosis, “watering back,” or even acidulation beyond a certain point) will tend to enhance the risk of the wine moving in the direction of a vinous “gutter ball.”

2 Certainly this quality may have been linked with my unique psychodynamics and a strong desire to please.  When this quality dominates either a wine or a personality, it definitely creates some untoward consequences.

3 Yeast cells are exceptionally rich in glutamate, so it is not unreasonable to think of their contribution almost as a sort of vinous MSG.

4 The usage of the word “lees” is normally in the plural form, but usage in the singular is also acceptable, as in this instance from Shakespeare: “The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to brag of.”   Lees are indeed very mysterious on many levels as this ambiguity suggests.

5 I cannot recommend decanting strongly enough.

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We’ve been making Le Cigare Volant since 1984, back when I thought it would be an interesting and fun thing1 to make a blend of the principal grape varieties of Châteauneuf-du-Pape,2 grown under California conditions.  I didn’t quite realize at the time that Cigare would become so synonymous with Bonny Doon and vice-versa, nor that I would ultimately come to identify so strongly with the wine itself.  It has become the truest lens of my current winemaking ideas, aspirations and obsessions, a reflection, of where I am going as a winemaker and where the company itself is headed.

So, just to set things straight:  The Cigare is not a vin de terroir, not by a long stretch.  Most significantly, it derives from multiple, geographically disparate vineyards, so in a real sense, it is a vin d’effort, a composed wine.  But the last several years, I feel that we have made some great breakthroughs with the wine, and while Cigare is not yet expressive of a particular place, it evinces incredible refinement and complexity, and something like a strongly defined distinctive style and aesthetic.3

When I first started producing Cigare, I imagined that it should taste a lot like Châteauneuf-du-Pape to be more or less successful.4 Over the years, to my great chagrin, I have frankly come to really not care so very much for most Châteauneufs; the wines often, though not always, are just too big, too tannic, and generally too alcoholic for my taste.  One glass will usually be as much as I can take.  When I began years ago, I didn’t know much about Rhône wines, or indeed about much of anything at all.  What I had read about Châteauneuf was that it should absolutely positively be Grenache-centric and never see much new oak or small cooperage.5 So, this injunction was pretty strictly adhered to, at least at first, and the first vintages of Cigare were quite successful, indeed, have held up well with the passage of time.

Over the years, I have found myself being pulled in various directions.  Rather wrongheadedly, I decided early on that I needed to increase the production of Cigare – primarily because I imagined that I could – but, alas, there was (and still is) a very finite amount of really superb Grenache in California’s cooler climes.6 As a result, the percentage of Grenache in Cigare began to decline beginning in the late ‘80s, through the ‘90s, rather like the percentage of almonds in a Hershey bar.  Worse, we experimented with barriques (disaster), found that puncheons (double barrels) worked much better, but we may have for a while become too reliant on smaller cooperage,7 but now seem to have found a good balance between smallish cooperage (puncheons) and large wooden upright tanks for the élevage of Cigare.8

When we began to use screwcaps on all of our wines in 2001 everything changed once again.  It has been a bit of a learning curve to understand how to properly utilize this powerful technology.  The chemistry is a bit challenging to understand (indeed, to explain).  Under certain conditions, the use of the screwcap will temporarily render the wine quite backward a short time after it is bottled.9 People who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon of “backwardness” of wines sometimes don’t grasp that in fact this is an extremely auspicious sign of ageworthiness and the presence of a strong life-force in the wine.10 We have made the mistake of releasing at least one Cigare (the brilliant ’03) far too early, when it was in a particularly backward stage.  It was misunderstood at the time, alas, but it is now drinking so magnificently, it is hard to imagine how anyone could have at any time not loved this wine to death.

Which brings me to the subject of Ugly Ducklings and being thoroughly misunderstood.  (If one is misunderstood, it can only be thoroughly.) Certainly this is a thematic that has dominated my own life since childhood, most dramatically through young adulthood – junior high school being the most painful memory.  I do wonder how much of this drama I have brought to the winemaking process, but certainly Le Cigare Volant is a wine that has been largely misunderstood, if only because some people, notably some highly influential wine critics, have been thinking Chateauneuf, and in fact in so many respects, my Platonic model for wine greatness is not Chateauneuf, but rather, in fact Burgundy, of the red persuasion.  My own personal psychodynamics aside, this brings up the larger issue of what one is truly attempting to achieve with a winemaking style, and this brings us to the question of the interplay of darkness and light, power and grace.

(Part 2 of 2 continued in next week’s post.)

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‘Apologia’: Please note that this fairly obscure word does not in fact mean “apology,” but rather a written formal defense of something that one believes in strongly.

1 In the earlier, more lighthearted days of my wine career and of the wine business in general, one did not believe that one was saving the world through the creation of any particular wine.  You just did it non-self-consciously because it was something you wanted to do.

2 Subsequently I learned that virtually every Mediterranean grape-growing area carries a strong tradition of producing blended wines, rather than mono-varietal wines, for several reasons: 1) Growing a range of different grapes allows one to spread the risk of failure of a single one, owing to frost, poor pollination, etc. 2) In a warmish climate, it is often difficult to achieve sufficient complexity from a single varietal wine.  Different grapes contribute differing complexing elements – acidity, color, tannin, fragrance, etc., resulting in a blend that is far more interesting than a monocépage offering.

3 With the caveat of course, that the aesthetic of a vin d’effort will never be as ultimately compelling as that of a great vin de terroir.

4 Well-intentioned people, when they are trying to be nice to me, tell me how much (even still) Cigare tastes like Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

5 The principle reason for the admonition against new oak is that Grenache is typically very high in alcohol, and alcohol is an excellent solvent for wood tannin; a Grenache-based wine in new wood will taste very woody, very quickly.  Small cooperage is problematic because Grenache is said to be an “oxidative” grape – i.e. it doesn’t have a great capacity to absorb tremendous amounts of oxygen.  Best to put it in a large vessel, where there is minimum oxygen exchange.

6 This is an occult fact that few people properly appreciate: In California, one can ripen Grenache in areas generally far cooler than almost anywhere else in the world, owing to our preternaturally long growing season.  This enables us to produce Grenache that is exceptionally well balanced, as far as natural acidity, enormously fragrant and possessing a beautiful complement of anthocyanins.

7 Barrels or puncheons can help a wine in many ways.  Youngish barrels impart tannin, which helps to add structure to the wine, stabilize the color.  They absorb a fair amount of oxygen from the ambient environment, probably more than optimal for Grenache (though certainly appropriate for a variety such as Cabernet Sauvignon).  Where they are brilliant, however, is in their geometry.  They offer quite a bit of surface area to volume aspect – surface area on which yeast lees can deposit and ultimately become more easily digested into the wine.  Too much “structure” from newish barrels makes wines taste modern and “international,” something I’m not too crazy about.  The balance between roughly ½ puncheons and ½ wood tanks seems just about right.

8 Into the wooden tanks we’ve placed perforated stainless steel shelves on which the lees can deposit, which I call “lees hotels.”  Lees check in but they don’t check out!

9 This phenomenon is likely mostly due to the transformation of one of the main redox couples in a wine solution, disulfide (not so particularly detectable) and thiol, (aka mercaptan, quite detectable at concentrations 1/50^th to 1/100^th of disulfide), as the redox potential of the wine changes post-bottling, owing to the suddenly more oxygen exclusionary environment created by the screwcap.  With time, as the wine re-equilibrates, the thiol turns back into disulfide and the “problem” spontaneously resolves itself.  One can either think of this phenomenon as a “problem” (often promptly rectified with the deployment of a decanter, or with the simple passage of time), or rather as a sign that the wine is filled with life-force and is therefore capable of long ageability.

10 Perhaps somewhat analogous to the phenomenon of colic in babies.

This is a speech that Randall Grahm delivered in Washington, D.C., at the Inc. Magazine Conference, September 2009 (part 3 of a 3-part series).

While I have been hoping to elevate the level of discussion about our wines, what seems to be happening is that many of our most loyal customers just miss our old wild and crazy labels and are somewhat disappointed with the relative placidity and mysteriousness of the new ones.  The problem of course is that it is not so easy to redefine yourself once there is a reasonably well-embedded image people have of you.  In my case, it is perhaps that of the ADD-afflicted joker, someone who just can’t get serious, flitting from one wine style and grape variety to the next, and of course there is certainly an element of truth in this characterization.  It’s been difficult to shed the negative association with Big House the perhaps a few slightly iffy vintages of Cigare.  It brings to mind the old joke about having carnal relations with “just one goat” and what do people call you?

On the face of it, it would seem that we are doing so many things right these days, and yet it is still a real struggle.  Maybe I should have tried to be a lot kinder to major influencers when I had the opportunity.  We are in fact at this moment a winery in transition – one that for many years did frankly rely upon marketing to create a buzz around what we were doing.  There is a correlative in the winemaking end of things – what the French call “vinsd’effort” or “wines of effort,” that bear the strong stylistic imprint of the winemaker rather than an articulation of the personality of the site.  They are a reflection of man’s limited intelligence rather than the vast complexity of nature’s intelligence.  I am sincerely attempting to move our wines from “wines of effort” to “wines of terroir,” wines of real distinction, soulfulness and a sense of place.  I think this ultimately represents true value, a precious stone (quite literally), not a bauble, which I believe is what will be needed as we as a society reset our values and priorities.

So, I don’t have the great Estate just now up and running – too bad for me, but like Monty Python’s knight, I’m still in there fighting.  I was hoping that I would not have to resort to my old marketing tricks and could simply sell wine without the gross signifiers of pedigree, i.e. an Estate Vineyard, simply based on its inherent quality.  And yet, marketing qua marketing, even though it seems essential, is now oddly ineffective.  It bugs me to have to wear our groovy, biodynamic credentials on our sleeve, to publicly trumpet our virtue.  Being publicly virtuous is hardly enough these days.  We took the initiative of voluntarily indicating all of the ingredients that touched our wine on the back label partially out of self-interest and partially because it actually is a really useful and virtuous thing to do.  This called attention to the brand for about five pico-seconds and then we receded again to the rear of the collective mind-bus.

We are, in fact, doing some very cool things in the cellar, particularly with the “Snow White protocol” – where we’re “putting wine to sleep” for a number of years by putting it in 5 gallon demijohns, with no oxygen permeation, to repose in darkness.  I think that I will have some pretty amazing wine to sell in four or five years, a uniquely differentiated product, but the temporal horizon of this project is not so brilliant in considering such pesky issues as cash-flow.

All I can really offer as advice to anyone – and this is really mostly to myself:  Move in the direction of the real, the authentic.  Get down to the most basic level, which I think in business is connecting with people.  Myself, I have been too comfortable in the past being an aloof figure, allowing my shyness and social awkwardness to take the upper hand.  I’m now out on the streets, peddling wine, talking to people, rebuilding a customer base very laboriously, one relationship at a time.  We opened a little café at the winery against everyone’s advice.  “This is not our core competency, Randall.” “We can never make any money at this, Randall.”  Perhaps it was a foolish thing to do, but it seems to be connecting me and the business itself to our customers in a much more intimate way.  The fact that the food is absolutely amazing is very helpful.  I’m not saying that there is salvation through gourmandizing, but engagement at this sort of primal level seems to bring a positive energy to the business that permeates other aspects.

I am sitting down and eating with our customers.  Our wine club membership, the Distinctive Esoteric Wine Network is holding steady and actually growing modestly.  I am really trying to be open to my own intuitions about the path forward – not in the grandiose way of before, but always seeking authenticity and connectivity.  I am twittering up a storm (maybe while Rome burns) – and it is seeming to help me get connected.  Most importantly, I’m thinking about redefining success.  It is not now about acclamation, nor less about positive EBITDA (I’d love for our bankers to share this same outlook).  Rather, it is the ability to continue to do creative work on whatever scale might be possible.  If I end up with just one or two acres of fabulous grapes, I will try to produce a few barrels of extraordinary, original wine.

For me, it is about learning how to come down to earth and to forge connective links wherever I might.  I am hopeful that if I am absolutely congruent to myself, this will generate the sympathetic vibration people are seeking to discern within the cacophony that surrounds us.

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This is a speech that Randall Grahm delivered in Washington, D.C., at the Inc. Magazine Conference, September 2009 (part 2 of a 3-part series).

Some back story.  I started the company in 1981 with the naïve aspiration of producing the Great American Pinot Noir in the little hamlet of Bonny Doon.  My efforts were systematically thwarted, but I discovered Rhône grape varieties and my efforts were intermittently positively reinforced, so I’ve continued to do what I do.  Bonny Doon grew and grew organically, which is to say in a random, unplanned fashion and ultimately became quite complex and convoluted, beautiful in its way, but mostly untenable, kind of like a Citroën automobile.

I had always been a lover of European wines and the one thing about them that I found irresistible about the best ones was their ability to communicate a sense of place – what the French call terroir.  I was giving speeches and writing articles about the beauty and uniqueness of terroir, but there was nothing in what I was doing that was particularly congruent with what I was saying.  Further, I had discovered biodynamic farming – this is a fairly esoteric practice based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, involving coordination of one’s agricultural activities with the celestial rhythms and using what are called the “biodynamic preparations,” which essentially are a form of agricultural homeopathy.  Biodynamics does not in and of itself lead you to produce great wines – you still need to be a good farmer and grow grapes in a brilliant and appropriate location – but it does seem to give you healthier soils with more life in them and that does seem to give the wine more of a mineral structure, “life-force,” or the ability to tolerate oxidative challenge.

But what is relevant to the story is that at the time – just three years ago – I had many growers, most of them unreconstructed and unreconstructable.  I was trapped in a life and a business that was just not congruent with my core values.  I had recently turned fifty, fathered a child, and survived a serious medical issue; it was definitely time to change my ways.  If I were to die any time soon, they would say, “What a great marketer he was,” and that would be utterly unacceptable to me, even being dead.  My initial thought was that I would need to sell Bonny Doon outright.

The problem of course was that nobody actually wanted to buy Bonny Doon, at least not for a reasonable price –  it was far too complicated and white elephantine – so in September of 2006 we shrank our production dramatically.  I had hoped to be able to redefine the company – as producers of wines of substance, of this aforementioned life-force.  How have we done in rebranding the company?  Well, frankly, not as well as I would have hoped, but not for want of effort.  I commissioned a beautiful piece of which we ran in the Wine Spectator, detailing the changes we had undergone.

Our new labels were not nearly as wacky as the old ones, but were still visually interesting and tried to capture a sense of the differentiated aspects of our brand.  Here is a picture of our Ca’ del Solo Albariño label, which features a “sensitive crystallization” of the wine itself – this is an obscure methodology involving crystallizing the wine in a petri dish, and while it may be a bit New Agey, it speaks eloquently as to what we’re trying to achieve.

Part 3 of 3 continued Monday, October 5.

This is a speech that Randall Grahm delivered in Washington, D.C., at the Inc. Magazine Conference, September 2009 (part 1 of a 3-part series).

I wish I could offer you some real guidance, but I’m as confused as anybody.  We have undergone and are likely to continue to undergo a series of right-sizings since our significant reconfiguration three years ago, when I sold off our two largest brands, Big House and Cardinal Zin, and spun off Pacific Rim as a separate company, reducing our size from approximately 450,000 cases to about 35,000.

Shortly after this significant reduction came the economic meltdown and with all of the doon-sizings our company has experienced, I find myself at times feeling a bit like Monty Python’s knight, more or less limited to the head-butt as an offensive tactic.

The wine business is particularly difficult to right-size quickly for a number of reasons.  The elements of the supply chain – the establishment of vineyards in particular, are enormously long-term propositions with a lot of inertial mass – it’s something that you are generally obliged to commit to for the long haul and unless you can manage to unlock yourself from long-term contracts, they are infernal machines that keep churning out product.

Wine businesses are enormously capital intensive, so there is that other pesky element of debt, making a highly leveraged winery particularly vulnerable.  Coupled with the fact that essentially the entire world from rock stars to film directors and athletes have decided at precisely the same time that it would be very cool to be the wine business, you have in short the perfect storm.  The biggest challenge right now is to imagine how one might sell one’s wine profitably through the established commercial channels, the so-called 3-tier system, something that just does not seem particularly feasible in the near-term horizon.  This is problematic, because that which solves the short-term issue of cash, i.e. heavy discounting, creates another problem with respect to our overall profitability, always something to bear in mind.

I will talk about my own business, the only business that I know or thought I knew.  Unfortunately for all of you, I am a complete business dunce, and have survived the last 30 years in the business essentially due to extraordinary luck and perhaps slightly above-average karma.  I think that some of my personality traits may have propelled my so-called “success” – contrarianism, compulsive risk-taking, my Luftmensch persona, leading me to more or less a case of clinical denial ofthe so-called hard “realities” (Everybody knows or knew that you couldn’t sell dessert wines made from artificially frozen grapes, or raspberry wines or California Rhône-varietal wines, or dry Rieslings, or bottles with screwcaps, with goofy labels, etc.) but I’m not sure if these traits serve me so well anymore.

I didn’t listen to anyone in the day, did just what I wanted to do.  But this sort of absolute confidence or arrogance or willful naivete – if the world wasn’t quite ready for what I was preparing to send its way, I would somehow through sheer will just make it ready – this sort of attitude just doesn’t seem to work anymore.  The last thing one needs now is denial; I think you really need to look at things as they are with a steely gaze and not flinch – but of course not totally lose heart either.  My success, my mojo, as it were, over the years has somehow been linked with my ability to delight people – whether it was a funny label or a wine that overdelivered in value.  But the mood seems rather grim these days, customer’s bandwidth for new information has greatly shrunk, and delight does not seem to be so high on the elective experiential scale.

Part 2 of 3 continued Thursday, October 1.