Lately, in thinking long and hard about what grape varieties (and anything else) we might plant at the new estate in San Juan Bautista, I am facing yet another variant of the New World Conundrum.¹ I’ve publically proclaimed myself to be a “terroirist,” i.e. someone committed to “expressing the unique individuality of the site.” All well and good, and while this sounds quite noble when declaimed from the mountaintop, what exactly does it really mean? What precisely have I signed up for? I’m standing at the altar, and suddenly, momentarily, feeling a bit weak at the knees.

          Implicit in the commitment to seek terroir is the notion of honoring the site by growing the grapes most appropriate to the site, those most capable of expressing its unique character. The New World focuses on climatic appropriateness, the Old World on the felicity of the soil/grape variety union. Growing pinot noir in Fresno is an obvious example of what one absolutely mustn’t do; cabernet sauvignon on the extreme Sonoma Coast is also clearly contraindicated.  Merlot is said to love clay (but not too much of it); cabernet, gravel; gamay and syrah, granite; riesling, slate; carignane, schist; pinot noir, a limestone/clay mix. In the Old World, your path is generally bright and clearly delineated. In the New World, you know where you should definitely not go, but it is far less evident how you will be delivered into the light of perfect vitrimonial bliss.

March 2010 Pinot Noir planting at San Juan Bautista

If you have found a wonderful site for grapes, with a longish growing season and bright but temperate days, you can well imagine that there are many varieties you might grow in your vineyard that will do well. But what will do best? What will, as they say, sing? Which grape or admixture of grapes will produce a wine of such distinction, that this nectar – still in largely eidetic imaginary form – will mount the world stage as a “classic” of its genre?²,³ Yes, there is likely to be an immense satisfaction in producing a wine that will universally (or nearly so) be regarded as “great,” and sincere wine lovers admire all great wines. At the same time, it seems that if you are going to the trouble to try to make great wine, simply admiring that wine is not quite enough. You want to be crazy, silly, absolutely besmitten, head-over-empurpled-heels-and-toes in love with it.

           So how do you know if your match is really right, if it is a love that is truly meant 2B, as rhapsodized about in old-time pop ditties? This is the question that star-crossed pairs have been asking themselves since the age of Courtly Love. In the Old World, the love of a particular grape or wine literally comes with mother’s milk;⁴ if you are a Burgundian in the Côte de Nuits, you could not possibly fashion loving another grape more than pinot. If you are Jean-Louis Chave, the thought of growing anything other than syrah would strike you as being a non sequitur. But planting a vineyard in the New World de novo is a bit like being an orphan, a dogie. No mother, no mother’s milk. Like an “ugly duckling,” you are just trying to figure out where you fit in in the Grape Order of Being.⁵

          Returning to the question in a slightly different form: In the New World, how do you know that you will love the wine that you plan to make before you make it? Can you learn to love the wine that is the product of your terroir, presumably if you have a deep love of the place, before it has even shown itself as a great terroir? If the wine that you produce is mostly or entirely a projection of your own aesthetic bent, despite the fact that you haven’t irrigated, you’ve massally selected, yield restricted, eschewed over-ripeness, maybe even laboriously found the recherché knife that allows you to cut surface roots,⁶ in other words, performed all of the outward obeisances that known terroirists are known to perform, are you still not, in the end, producing something more akin to what might be called a vin d’effort?⁷ How do you ultimately find a harmonious, felicitous blend of your own aesthetics with the deep qualities of the inchoate Stranger?

           The question raised is a little bit like the one implicit in Shaw’s Pygmalion. Can you truly be said to love something or someone that is essentially a reflection of yourself? If your wine is so solipsistic as to be simply a refashioning of your own aesthetic, are you truly honoring terroir? It would seem that there is something of a false – or at least incomplete – joy in merely building a wine rather than in discovering a true terroir.⁸ Without a very gradual unfolding of the mystery of the Other, the exercise of producing a “great” wine would appear to be a rather sterile one. And yet, I am as nervous as a bridegroom on the eve of his wedding night, that I will, even after deep contemplation and in deepest consideration and respect for the terroir of our site, have somehow made a great miscalculation, that we will end up with a wine from our San Juan Estate that is technically proficient, impeccable even, but somehow doesn’t touch my soul.⁹ I yearn on a daily basis to find my soul/soil-mate in a wine, a product of something utterly beyond and outside myself, and yet something with which I have been terribly intimate and of which I am inordinately proud. Will pinot always be my fantasy-grape, the girl in the T-Bird, who winked at the stop light and motored off into the night?

           Claude Bourguignon and his wife Lydia, the famous soil scientists and possibly terroir’s greatest advocates and interpreters, are coming in the next few weeks to our new San Juan Bautista property to consult. I need to understand a lot more about how they work – their work is almost all in France, and not much of their published work shows up here. I understand that Claude has famously pronounced that he has yet to observe a vrai terroir in the New World. Perhaps this is because we do not have a co-evolving wine culture – of human and vine – in the New World, nor anything like a cultural esteem for terroir,¹⁰ or simply because we have not yet had enough grape growing history for terroir to truly disclose itself. Claude and Lydia apparently make recommendations to their clients about what kinds of grape varieties and rootstocks they might best plant where on their property, as well as what sort of cultural practices they might deploy to best express their respective terroirs. So I am, of course, tremendously curious to know what they will say, and slightly fearful that they might throw up their hands as to the suitability of the property for terroir’s expression – too much clay or not enough – or perhaps they will recommend a number of grape varieties in which I have no interest whatsoever – some terminally rustic cépagesi.¹¹ What if they suggest, indeed insist upon, pinotage?¹² Carnelian? Cynthiana? Madeleine? Angevine? Or – God forbid – Merlot?¹³

           There are some wine styles that we have worked on for quite a number of years, and for which I have some deep sentimental attachment – Le Cigare Volant, for one. This wine has worked for me as a vin d’effort, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes when I’ve been too clever by half, a tad less well, but it has been enormously fun and stimulating to produce. However, in the end, making the wine largely turns out to be somewhat of a purely technical challenge, a bit like those chefs on food reality television shows being given a market basket of ingredients and charged with producing a tasty/showy dish that will wow the etiolated, jaded critics. I end up with wines that I greatly enjoy, because that was my intention in how they were produced.¹⁴,¹⁵

            So I am a bit torn. I would like to respect the historical continuity¹⁶ of Cigare, partially out of sentiment, partially out of a recognition of certain commercial realities.¹⁷ On the other hand, this new estate is the opportunity to create potentially a different paradigm and to think about the wines we produce in a very different way. Dare I introduce an Italian uvaggio into the Rhône blend? Does this road not lead to madness? How important is it to color within the lines – to plant a suite of grapes that have some sort of history of relationship with one another?¹⁸,¹⁹

           Here’s the gist of it: It truly doesn’t matter to me (apart from wishing to avoid economically ruinous decisions) what grape varieties we end up growing at San Juan. But like finding an appropriate romantic partner, there are certain minimal criteria that just must obtain. You don’t want to be shacked up with an ax-murderer or someone heavily into Ozzie Osborne – for me, this would be the equivalent of having a site that absolutely demanded its grapes attain 14.5% potential alcohol to be interesting. I know that there are certain flavor characteristics and even certain pH ranges²⁰ that absolutely push my buttons (in a pleasantly driven to distraction kind of way). For whites, it is higher acidity, minerals and citrus.²¹,²² For reds, there is a certain complex of flavors and a particular kind of way in which they are organized, that at least for me, signify absolute organoleptic bliss.²³,²⁴ Then there is the phenomenon of “licorice.” God only knows why this should be the case, but virtually every red wine that really knocks me out has, to some degree or another, a slight (or not so slight) suggestion of licorice.²⁵

           Maybe I’m just worrying too much about doing it right. The relationship I have with this land and the grapes and wines it will produce is certain to be an ever-changing one, a dance, a true give and take. I will try to exert my will, my aesthetic, with the land and the vines at times, taking the lead, treading on more than a few toes.²⁶ Of course it is largely up to me and my colleagues to give this great estate real form and definition, but this will require me to personally dig deep and find attributes in myself that are sometimes elusive – patience and the ability to listen and to observe, to trust. In the end, all of this discussion about whether I will direct the vines or the vines will guide me may likely be moot. The male (in this relationship) imagines that he has some control, but this is merely his fantasy. I fancy that it was I who has chosen the site for my grand polycultural dreams, but it really is the site that has chosen me, and it will have its way with me. I will do my best to hang on for the ride.

1. Not to be confused with the off-dry blended white wine produced in Napa Valley. I have already faced that particular Conundrum, and managed to emerge bruised, but not broken. [↩]
2. This seemingly innocuous question is itself rather fraught. Isn’t the notion of a genre somewhat riddled with a raft of assumptions and presumptions? (I always think of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, with its distinction between “karass” and “granfalloon” – an association of members of a particular order or class of things that are either deeply linked to one another (albeit in an esoteric fashion) or those that on the surface appear to have something in common, but in fact do not. The emergence of a wine sui generis is perhaps the most difficult thing to fashion. Like any new emerging art form, it would likely take at least a generation for a radically different concept of “wine” to be fully comprehended, if not grudgingly accepted. The highly conservative world of wine is as accepting of new vinous styles as Prince Charles is of modern architecture. [↩]
3. I’m not even mentioning the need for a vine to acquire a number of years of age before it “settles down” and produces a balanced product – grapevines, like teenagers, are notoriously unhinged in their adolescence – nor the time involved in making the wine and allowing it to mature for an appropriate period of time before release. [↩]
4. For Nicolas Joly in the Loire, it was the cool lait de Serrant. [↩]
5. Or a hard-scrabble kid, a street urchin, looking for role models by watching old movies. [↩]
6. I’ve been looking, unsuccessfully, for years for this knife, throughout Europe, and it appears that they are no longer being manufactured. (The closest thing I was able to find was in Spain and it was a tool for cutting white asparagus.) You will need to find some sort of antiquarian metalsmith in a small traditional village to fabricate this antique tool. Bonne chance! [↩]
7. Bent is certainly the operative word. If the vines or wines are bent too much, they break from their own true originality, and become lesser for that. In the example of human relationships, if one partner’s personality is so dominant or controlling, even if brilliant, the other will likely fail to find herself (or himself) truly expressing her (or his) fullest potential. [↩]
8. It has always been a bit of poser to me that a vigneron whose family has lived in an area for countless centuries, talks about “discovering his terroir,” a process that seems to need to be renewed in every generation. Would the family have not already found it, passed it down with the china, cutlery and furniture? [↩]
9. I recently had the opportunity to taste a few wines made by an old colleague of mine, who left the Central Coast to make pinot noir in the exciting new area of _______.  My colleague is among the most serious terroirists I have ever met. He is very methodical, farms Biodynamically, intensively, and doesn’t irrigate; by all reckoning he is doing virtually everything right, or at least everything I could conceive to do under comparable circumstances. The soil on his site is clay and limestone, and it’s climatically cool – way cool.  And yet, the wines seem to be a bit messed up. The pH of the finished wine is totally whacked – my friend doesn’t want to add tartaric acid, as he feels that would deform the terroir; there’s little color (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but these wines just seem, well, slightly muddy, lacking in focus and precision – I’m sure that the pH is what is wreaking havoc. I do not know what lessons to draw, or even if there are any lessons. He is pursuing his passion, pinot noir, and has worked as diligently as he possibly could to find an appropriate site for it. I have looked for what I imagined was a great site and am now trying to figure out what to grow there. And yet, we might both, despite best intentions and a certain amount of skill, be just slightly off in our trajectories, with a slightly heart-breaking outcome. [↩]
10. In the New World we don’t have a wine culture, we have the wine business. [↩]
11. It’s kind of like being party to an arranged marriage, where you end up saddled with a clock-stoppingly ugly partner, said to sew well, be a good housekeeper, or to have a sunny personality. [↩]
12. I realize that lately I’ve gotten into the habit of using pinotage as a bit of a straw man (though not vin de paille), indicating what can possibly go terribly wrong in the hybridization of a new grape variety. With the possible exceptions of scheurebe and incrocio manzoni, commercial “modern” grape crosses have generally proved to be somewhat lame, at least as far as the ultra-violaceous end of the spectrum that vibrates with my resonant frequencies. Maybe in the 20th century we have just attained a certain threshold level of hubris that precludes the accurate perception of real value in many things, grapes being a somewhat trivial example. (Grape breeders have mostly been focused on the solution to practical problems like disease resistance, early ripening, more productive yields, and have not particularly zeroed in on originality of flavor/phenolic profile or other aspects of vitaceous genius.) As a footnote to a footnote, scheurebe, long believed to be a silvaner/riesling cross, has recently, through DNA testing, been shown to be an unknown x riesling cross. But what is most bizarre is that it was not the Grape of Unknown Parentage that was the pollinator, but rather it was the riesling that was the dad. This meant that Dr. Scheu’s lab techs were not paying particularly close attention in spreading the magic fairy dust, nor when they came back to harvest the fruit from this dangerous liaison. The lesson here is that Nature will surprise us in ways that we cannot conceive, and She is infinitely cleverer than we are. [↩]
13. Yikes. [↩]
14. Maybe I’m belaboring the point here, but to continue the cooking metaphor, you can use all sorts of really snazzy ingredients – caviar, truffle oil, or any umami-intensive condiment and you can make the humblest raw foodstuffs pretty tasty. But it is a rather different proposition to make a dish of maybe just one or two ingredients with the simplest of preparations and have it create the most exquisite aesthetic bliss. [↩]
15. Note that I have eschewed the more vulgar tricks – designer yeasts, enzymes, spinning cones and the like for more subtle ones – lees infusion, tricky sorts of élevage in demijohns. [↩]
16. “Historical?!” any self-respecting European would snort. “You’ve been mixing grapes from all over California for thirty years and you call that ‘historical?’” [↩]
17. I have worked more than twenty-five years in establishing the brand, and despite the modern world’s fascination with the latest and shiniest, new brands are not exactly created overnight. [↩]
18. Love, at least in its earliest stages, is a well-known form of madness. [↩]
19. Maybe what is really needed at this juncture is a cold shower. [↩]
20. You know that you’re talking to a real geek here, with this admission. [↩]
21. Please disregard everything that I have written up till now. I secretly want to just replicate Clos St. Hune in the New World. Or on the moon, if need be. And the pH (for whites), for those who just absolutely have to know is somewhere in the 3.25–3.3 range [↩]
22. This is like a tragic, irreconcilable predilection for redheads. [↩]
23. Flavors that are capable of unfolding, that seem to be arrayed around a mineral core, such as one finds in great (old-vine) Burgundies, Baroli, and certain northern Rhônes – especially Cornas – I find particularly compelling. [↩]
24. I am also a sucker for a certain amount of umami or savoriness in the wine, all the time knowing that this may represent a still slightly unevolved palate. For reds – not that this is really anyone’s business – I am particularly turned on in the pH range of 3.55-3.65. [↩]
25. Michel Bettane has himself postulated (personal communication) that this flavor seems to emerge at certain inflexion points of perfect ripeness, independent of the grape variety. [↩]
26. I am certainly trying to have my way these days with the ubiquitous poison oak. [↩]

A Conversation with Professor Andy Walker (in Long Form)¹

          Andy, as you recall, the last time we spoke, I was very keen on the idea of growing grape vines from seedlings at our new property in San Juan Bautista.  I’d like to catch you up on my current thinking and ask a few questions, as this project is potentially fraught with a non-trivial amount of danger.²,³,⁴  It would seem that there are some clever things that one might do, and some not so clever ones as well.

          I thought I’d review some of my assumptions and hypotheses and also share with you what I am really hoping to achieve with the initiative.  The fundamental hypothesis/assumption is that a profoundly mixed (or mixed up) population of genetically distinctive individual plants (if the crosses are made thoughtfully) will yield a wine of far greater depth and complexity than a comparable one made from a relatively discreet number of clones or genotypes.⁵  Is this utterly far-fetched? I imagine that with this program, the particular varietal qualities of the grape will recede in prominence and potentially, the unique characteristics of the site, that is to say, its terroir, might begin to emerge.⁶  Now, this hypothesis is a bit tentative, for as we know, scrambling and re-expressing the genetic information of the source plant will generally result in a very different expression of characteristics – usually, though presumably not inevitably, less desirable than those found in the previous generation.  Put another way, might you gain more than you potentially lose in re-expressing all of this information, and might the gentle guidance of human intelligence vis-à-vis the inclusion or exclusion of particular individual seedlings in the mix tilt the balance of benefit to the right side of the equation?

          As to the issue of what I’m really trying to achieve here:  Firstly, the project needs to be fun, great fun,⁷ and the side-splitting amusement factor may of course have to do with whether we end up producing some eerily dramatic, soulful wines that taste unlike anything else in the world.  It would also be just wonderful if the human contribution to the experiment – the thoughtful establishing of criteria (even if they are a moving target) for inclusion or exclusion of vines with certain characteristics – was found to actually be helpful to the process, i.e. bringing greater brightness and definition to the wine.  Truly, the overall objective of the exercise is to produce a wine of great distinctiveness, an original wine, bringing something into the world that was not there before.  It is of secondary importance to me – it may in fact be utterly impractical – to identify the “best” new grape varieties, but rather, more important to create an experience for the consumer of a wine of breath-taking resonance and harmony.  It is my belief that the creation of an “original” wine benefits the world in many ways – enriches our experience as well as our imagination.  But there is still another consideration:  As amusing as this exercise might be for me, how might I make a real contribution to the world of wine? Might the creation of these new varieties actually yield a particular genotype of real utility for the future?  Are there any lessons learned in this exercise that might have application elsewhere?

      So here are some more really hard questions:

1. My initial thought was to conceptualize some sort of idealized blend, based on assumptions about which varieties might do particularly well on the site, and then set about hybridizing these different grape varieties in some vaguely proportionate manner.  One obvious question: What do you need to know to decide which grape varieties might cross well with another?  My biggest fear is that I might begin with two noble grape varieties, and in hybridizing them, end up with something that is (in aggregate) absolutely wretched.⁸  So, for purposes of discussion, I’m beginning with the idea that grapes that have been planted in the same neighborhood, let’s say, the southern Rhône, might in fact have a reasonably good compatibility with one another.  Is this a fair assumption?  Is there any other way that I might look at criteria for hybridizing one variety with another?⁹

 

2. So, say we’re going for something like a Rhône-ish blend, of perhaps 66% grenache, 15% mourvèdre, 10% syrah, 6% cinsault and various others from the hood.  Does it make sense to hybridize between varieties (grenache x mourvèdre) or hybridize within the variety (grenache x grenache)?  Are there any major incompatibilities among these grapes? Amongst the Rhône grapes are there some that make better pollinators, others better pollinated?  Are there more dominant characteristics expressed in the male or the female parent, or is this utterly random? Intuitively, for purposes of this project’s stated aims, it would seem to make more sense to hybridize between varieties, but maybe the world at large would be better served by hybridizing within the variety.  (Identification of a brilliant grenache or cinsault selection would seem to have some tangible benefit for vineyardists of the future.) Does that make any sense? Also, this is rather a biggie: How much do the seedlings of particular varieties resemble their parents?  Which varieties of grape vine offspring tend to remain truer to their patrimony?

 

3. Which brings me to a very interesting project undertaken by an extremely bright young man, Sashi Moorman, down in Lompoc.  Sashi has collected a large number of pinot noir seeds (maybe 8000?), and has germinated them, and planted them out in a high density vineyard.  Obviously a number of them will not bear fruit¹⁰ and he will presumably have to discard them.  Sashi is imagining that somehow in this vast number of seedlings, he might be able to identify a particularly brilliant individual.  By brilliant, he is meaning a variety that may be slightly better adapted to his site – ripens at lower Brix, with better acidity, with more expressive pinot character, etc.  But might any of these offspring actually be truly pinot?  Perhaps these very gross parameters might be noted (or notable), but I am myself slightly dubious about the practical ability of making these determinations.  So, I think that Sashi imagines that he is doing one experiment – trying to identify a great pinot for his site (and maybe happily find a vine that might also have some other great endearing characteristic, like phylloxera resistance) but I think that in fact he may end up with a different experiment altogether.  I am anxiously waiting to find out what the wine made from the totality of his grapes might taste like, and hoping that even if few of them individually look or taste much like pinot noir, they might in aggregate somehow capture the Platonic nature of pinot-ness.  Any thoughts about that?

 

4. So, I want to make a wine that captures a sense of this unique property in San Juan, and one element that I want to address is that of drought tolerance.  Since I’m hybridizing grapes here, might it make sense to consider adding other elements to the mix that might do that?  Is it totally crazy to consider adding some genetic material from vitis californica to this assemblage?¹¹

 

5. You had mentioned once that the best way to hybridize vines of a particular grape variety would be to cross a number of different clones of the same variety with one another rather than simply collect the seeds.  As we both know, going through the tedious process of castrating the male flowers of plants and going to the effort of pollinating them oneself is incredibly tedious. Can you tell me again why not simply collect the seeds from a grape, syrah, for example, and plant those out?  (Assuming that they being grown in a fairly sequestered area and you don’t have a lot of chenin blanc pollen floating around.)

 

6. Which brings me to a rather geeky question:  If we are planting a mother block from which to collect pollen and also to pollinate, how far apart need the different grape varieties be from one another?  It would not be very rigorous (at all), but given the essential idea of the program, why not simply plant a small mixed block of grapes in randomized fashion (with a range of different clones of a variety, as discussed) in the proportions that one wishes and then simply collect the seeds from these grapes? – a lot less tedious than going through the whole hybridizing process. 

I am sure that I will have a million more questions for you as we get closer to really implementing this project.  You may well regret the encouragement that you have already expressed.  With very best wishes, Randall

1. Andy is a Professor of Plant Science (Viticulture) at UC Davis, specializing in grape vine breeding, the logical person on this side of the planet with whom to have this discussion. [↩]
2. And of course, great possibilities of “success” (whatever that is), éclat, and the contribution of something of real value to the wine industry. [↩]
3. We are not even thinking about the utter riskiness of planting vines without the protection of a resistant rootstock.  A seedling is perforce a non-grafted vine, and hence vulnerable to phylloxera, though possibly far more resistant to other sorts of vine diseases. [↩]
4. My intuition tells me that something truly great might come of it, but likewise, it could easily turn into a very expensive obsession, a ruinous folly. [↩]
5. You had also mentioned to me that seedlings, if transplanted soon enough, exhibit a much higher degree of geotropism, as compared to rootings.  This factor alone may well be significant in creating a more eloquent expression of terroir, owing to a deeper rooting profile, and perhaps also conferring a greater degree of drought tolerance, which would be a very favorable outcome, indeed. [↩]
6. It would of course be extremely useful to have some other points of triangulation in helping to identify this terroir.  An adjacent vineyard planted more traditionally, i.e. from vegetative cuttings, to the self-same varieties would provide a good point of reference in illuminating the contribution of the difference in rooting habit, as well as the added dimension of extreme genetic diversity. [↩]
7. You had mentioned the great likelihood of plants grown from seedlings having the tendency to throw “suckers” (which need to be laboriously dug out with a shovel) essentially for the entire life of the vineyard.  This particularly tiresome phenomenon may well negate all of the countervailing fun features of the product, viz. the creation of a dizzying profusion of new grape varieties. [↩]
8. The obvious example of pinotage (pinot noir x cinsault) comes to mind. I do not consider myself a “varietalist,” that is to say, someone irrationally prejudiced against a particular grape variety, but in the instance of pinotage, I am quite hard pressed to find any real value in the grape. [↩]
9. This is in some sense a bit of a restatement of how does one begin to conceive of a blended wine.  In the New World it is particularly problematic if one is planting one’s vineyard from scratch.  You can opt for grapes with known affinities for one another – a Bordeaux blend or a Rhône blend (North or South), a Tuscan blend, but what if you really want to utterly break the mold and dare combine varieties from very disparate regions?  How do you insure that you are not creating utter chaos? The other significant part of the equation is that you must produce wines that you absolutely love to drink.  This problem is largely solved in the Old World, where young people grow up tasting the wines of their region and by the time they become winemakers, they already love those grapes.  Deeply. There were no vineyards in Beverly Hills when I was a lad, so I was not imprinted at an early age with a deep vitaceous cultural identity.  I just know that there are certain flavor components found in certain wines that just make me insane with – the flavor and aroma of citrus in whites, that of licorice and beetroot in reds.  I would be so utterly thrilled if the wines of my dreams would have these characteristics, and certainly I will contrive somehow to make that happen – but obviously, not by “trying.” [↩]
10. Just by the by, do you know of any relatively quick and dirty biochemical assay that would show whether a particular plant might be fruitful or not?  This would be incredibly useful in avoiding some the cost of planting non-productive plants. [↩]
11. If the aim of the project is to truly convey a sense of terroir, maybe adding an element of “indigenousness” is not totally crazy.  How one would have any sense at all as to how much to add to the mix is beyond me. [↩]

          I recently sold my vineyard in Soledad in the Salinas Valley. I didn’t really want to do it – it was arguably producing the most interesting grapes with which we were privileged to work. The Albariño and Loureiro seemed to consistently produce wines that were elegant, true expressions of the grape¹ and the Moscato Giallo was lovely – elegant, balanced and haunting.² Most unexpectedly, we were growing some breathtakingly original selections of Grenache that were just unlike anything I had ever tasted.³,⁴  And the Nebbiolo!⁵ - I had almost forgotten about that. I’m certain that no one in my lifetime will ever figure out how to sell New World Nebbiolo at a price that will ever begin to cover the cost of producing such a difficult wine, but the fact that we were able to produce such a creditable effort in what is not exactly an obvious site for the grape, is nothing short of miraculous.⁶

          Soledad, neither the vineyard site nor the town itself is really the most prepossessing of locales. If you look at the Santa Lucia range to the West and the Gabilan range to East, you do feel enclosed, protected; there is a real stark beauty to the place. But, the wind, the wind. If you are working out in the vineyard for any length of time, or living in the area, the wind may just drive you mad. I’m not quite sure why this should be the case; on a psychological basis, it does rather feel that the world (or at least its air) is just rushing by you; there is seemingly no place for repose. The other thing that just drove me crazy was the proximity of the vineyard to the prison. You could hear the public address announcements from the prison – it was not much more than a quarter of a mile away. And of course you were always hearing the sound of gunfire – target practice, one assumed.⁷ Hindsight is always twenty/twenty, but it seems that I might have had a little better intuition about the subtle (or not so subtle) Feng Shui aspects of the place before rushing in years ago to buy it. Maybe this was hubris, or just a certain kind of dissociation.

          So, I sold it because I needed to – no need to air the dirty laundry of tawdry financial matters – and the deed is doon. Maybe I’m currently going through a period of rationalization, telling myself why this just had to happen.⁸ I think back to my motivations for planting the vineyard in the first place. At the time the Estate vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the eponymous Bonny Doon, had recently begun to show symptoms of what we would soon learn was Pierce’s Disease.⁹ I tend to confound chronology in my mind, and imagine that I acquired the Soledad vineyard after the demise of the Bonny Doon Estate, but the two were actually occurring concurrently. I bought the property in Soledad because it was rather inexpensive (or so it seemed at the time) and I imagined that I could plant it to cool Piemontese grapes for Big House Red.¹⁰ The only minor problems were: a) It turned out to be almost orders of magnitude more expensive to farm the vineyard, especially organically, as was originally conceived, than I could ever imagine; b) Yields had to be greatly restricted (2 tons/acre vs. 4-5) to even begin to get the grapes to approach maturity, which exacerbated issue of point a); c) All of these varieties yielded grapes with shriekingly high levels of acidity, most especially the Barbera. Unless one added a non-trivial amount of potassium carbonate to the wine to de-acidulate the wine, the resulting blend was just too tart for human consumption. Now, if I had only just thought of making it as a red sparkling wine…¹¹

          One big issue with the Soledad vineyard, indeed with almost any vineyard in the Salinas Valley was the infernal wind, which would typically begin in the late morning and not conclude until late afternoon, offering a photosynthetic window that could be measured in picoseconds. We attempted all sorts of strategies to overcome this issue – from the planting of casurina trees as windbreaks,¹² to maintaining tall cover-crops between the rows, to re-heading the vines closer to ground level. Ultimately, we decided to just take our lumps – after removing the casurinas – between the untilled cover crop and the vines headed lower, it seemed that we were making some headway on the headwind.

          The other intractable issues with the vineyard were two; they are linked and they were major. It just doesn’t rain much in the Salinas Valley. On a very wet year you might see ten to twelve inches of rain, on a dry year it might just be three or four. It is just really too dry to farm without supplemental irrigation. Virtually the entirely civilized wine world knows (or should know) my views on drip irrigation – it mortally cripples the potential expression of terroir by virtue of limiting the root-zone of the plant. There were solid-set sprinklers at the vineyard in Soledad, indeed they were there when I bought the place, but we found that we couldn’t really use them after the vines had leafed out, because they tended to cause a slight case of salt-burn, as the water evaporated from the leaves (damn wind again).

          You see, there is a reason why the valley is called Salinas. The water that comes from the underground Salinas River is slightly saline. When you irrigate with saline water you are generally gradually diminishing the fertility and arability of your soil. The more salt that accumulates in the soil, the more difficult it becomes for plants to extract water; there is a further tendency toward soil compaction, greatly restricting root development.¹³

          So, it is unfortunate that I had to sell when I did, but like it or not, the universe seems to be giving me instruction in how my actions might be more congruent with my stated beliefs/values. I originally bought the vineyard with the (mistaken) notion that I could grow good, inexpensive grapes there. With enough iteration and investment, we found that certain varieties did in fact reasonably well, indeed were rather brilliant. And yet, the whole proposition of growing grapes in the Salinas Valley is, I would maintain, not really sustainable. You cannot continue to irrigate a vineyard with slightly salty water and expect it to magically regenerate its fertility, as if in a fairy tale.¹⁴

          It is a bitter – maybe more accurately, salty pill to swallow,¹⁵ but my viticultural life has become slightly more simplified. Our winemaking range will gradually shrink in the next year or two, but rather than going wide, we’re going deep.¹⁶

1. Definitely a caveat or two in that assertion: I am more or less persuaded that if you grow virtually any white grape in a cool enough climate at an absurdly low yield level, you will consequently end up with a wine that is seemingly true to its “classic” form. (Expressing a quality of minerality – one of the earmarks of a wine’s “greatness” is another question.) But this doesn’t really address the fact that we had to take truly heroic measures to bring the Loureiro grape to anything approaching “ripeness,” as it is classically conceived. In the ’08 vintage for example, the vineyard was thinned twice. The second pass was done fairly late in the game – 2nd week in October, when it was obvious that the fruit had just too far to go. I instructed my colleague, Philippe, to drop half of the extant fruit on the ground. The fruit that remained on the vine managed to just barely limp to 21° Brix by the first week of November. But something truly extraordinary occurred. After picking the Loureiro, Philippe and I were walking through the vineyard and saw the fruit that was just sitting on the ground. We don’t disc the vineyard, mind you, so there was a fairly nice thatch of straw between the vine rows. Amazingly, the grapes – apart from the ones that had been inadvertently stepped on – were in remarkably good shape, slightly russeted, not particularly sunburned, with not a bit of rot or other damage. Very tentatively, I picked up a cluster and tasted a grape. Quite sweet – we measured them at maybe 26-27° Brix – but still shockingly tart. Looking very carefully, apart from the squished grapes, not a drop of rot. We decided to pick up these accidental vin de paille grapes, fermented them separately to dryness and ultimately decided to include them in the main lot of Albariño. With the ’09 vintage, we just went ahead and thinned the hell out of the Loureiro to begin with. There are still bottles remaining of the ’09 “Vinho Grinho,” made for the DEWN club, which is made from mostly Loureiro with a little Albariño added to soften the shrieking acidity. The wine is just stone brilliant, if you don’t mind me saying, but definitely a creature of a day, so you may (broad hint here), wish to act on this rather sooner than later. [↩]
2. To produce a haunting (which is to say a truly original) wine is perhaps the only real justification one can possibly offer for doing what one does in this business. [↩]
3. Grenache – neither the wine nor the grape – probably doesn’t take one’s breath away in quite the same way that, say, a great Pinot Noir might. And yet, this Grenache came in with extraordinary, unheard of levels of acidity, even at what is sometimes called “physiological ripeness” – though owing to a minor cognitive deficit, I generally hear the term as “rifeness,” given the ubiquity of its usage, especially among practitioners of winemakers making wines (facetiously) par coeur. [↩]
4. Grenache Village – that mythical place from whence derives most all Grenache is generally considered to be rather warm with a chance of occasional jamminess. [↩]
5. The irony here is that as obsessed as I and virtually everyone else is with Pinot Noir, producing a great Nebbiolo seems to me to be an infinitely more difficult proposition. [↩]
6. It is not immediately obvious why Nebbiolo is such a difficult grape to produce, but it certainly seems to be a lot like Pinot Noir in its need for something like a homeostatic soil – one that that buffers the vine from extremes in water availability/water stress. The real issue with Nebbiolo seems to be finding a growing regime that greatly favors regularity of ripening, and maybe there is just no other way to achieve this apart from a tremendous amount of intervention in the vineyard to insure something like quasi-uniformity of ripening. Underripe Nebbiolo can be a horror – green and vegetal; overripe Neb is likewise unattractive – think stewed prunes and raisinettes, though in some instances (with enough acidity) this latter presentation may work reasonably well. [↩]
7. I was not present when this happened, but at least on one occasion, live rounds were fired into the vineyard, inducing Philippe and the other workers to run for cover, scaring the heck out of them. [↩]
8. From a financial standpoint, it seemed that it absolutely did have to happen, and maybe acceptance of external necessity is (God forbid) one of the hallmarks of maturity. [↩]
9. I had feared for a short while, that what it had was “Grahm’s Disease,” and as yet unobserved vineyard pathology. “It was believed that until the onset of Grahm’s Disease in the late 20th century, there was a vibrant grape growing industry in California. [↩]
10. On the face of it, this was not necessarily a dreadful idea. Big House was originally conceived as a pan-Piemontese blend – Nebbiolo, Dolcetto, Barbera and Freisa. The only problem, apart from the appalling cost of growing the grapes, was the palate-destroying acidity of the grapes as an ensemble. [↩]
11. I found that I could buy grapes for Big House, viz. old vine Carignane, that were far cheaper and better than the grapes that I was growing. This underscores the essential existential paradox of planting vineyards. Be very certain of what you are doing (but how can you?) lest you end up with the Curse of the Home Ranch Fruit. [↩]
12. All of these strategies worked to a certain extent, but all had unintended consequences that were in some instances quite unfavorable. The casurinas in particular were quite disastrous. Partially through nutrient and water competition, partially through aleopathy, they seemed to kill off the four or five rows of vines proximal to them. [↩]
13. This is really bad news on so many fronts – not the least of which is that vines with limited root systems (especially those subject to periodic water stress) are much more prone to sun-burn, as well as to what I call the “accordion-effect” – rapid expansion and contraction of the berries, leading to a fair bit of tearing of the cell walls and incursion of all manner of bacterial/fungal creepie-crawlies. But most worrisome is the lack of roots equates to a certain deficit in minerals; somehow (maybe it was the Biodynamic® practice?) we seemed to still express a fair degree of minerality in the wines, but I am certain that with less compacted soils, we might have done much better. Had we retained the vineyard, the next step would have been to have gone back and ripped the soil well with a rather neat Australian implement called the Vibro-plow. [↩]
14. I sometimes imagine that agricultural enterprises are ineluctably linked to magical thinking, rather like Jack and the Beanstalk. [↩]
15. In a certain sense, the idea of planting the vineyard in the first place was a bit of an act of hubris. On whatever fantasy level, I had perhaps (unconsciously) imagined a vast Bonny Doon empire, with its centerpiece being Big House, an ultra-cool blend of Piemontese grapes. While making the world safe for Freisa, Dolcetto, etc. may be incredibly laudable, my slight dissociation from the actual feasibility of the proposition ended up with slightly tragic consequences. [↩]
16. The new vineyard in San Juan Bautista will be planted in such a way to very explicitly encourage deep rooting and wide-ranging vines, and if the gods smile, will be dry-farmed. [↩]

I’ve been asked by my colleagues to write about the recent James Beard award for Been Doon So Long, presumably to not so discreetly draw attention to this highly creditable third party endorsement.¹,² I presume they are hoping to get from me something like a sincere lump-in-the-throat profession of pride; maybe a gracious conveyance of thanks to the legions of supporters of the book would also go over well.³,⁴,⁵ Don’t they know with whom they’re dealing?

Initially, there had been some confusion, at least in my mind, about when the event was actually taking place. I had already committed to attend a wholesaler trade tasting in Chicago on what I believed was the day of the award, but hearing word of the book’s nomination compelled a navigational redirect Manhattanward. As it turned out, sometime in the last decade or so, it seems the James Beard Foundation has stretched the award ceremony to become a two-day affair, and my gig was not on Monday, the traditional day of the awards, but rather on the Sunday before.⁶ The Sunday event was focused on the journalistic and literary aspect of food and wine writing – monthly columns, articles, blogs, and of course books.⁷,⁸

I am not privy to all of the issues that the Foundation has had to deal with in the last few years, but the organization itself has had its share – an enormous scandal a few years back, when its President was found to be misappropriating funds, and was ultimately sentenced to do some real serious jail time.⁹ So, despite some historical issues of transparency and accountability, the Foundation seems to have pulled itself together, closed ranks, soldiered on, and by all evidence – the very high production values of the event itself,¹⁰ the expansion from a one-night event to two, and the sheer volume of publicity/mild hysteria surrounding the event – the Foundation has seemingly prospered, the earlier stigma now a mildly embarrassing historical relic.

I didn’t go the Big Event on Monday for a number of reasons,¹¹ but the event on Sunday was probably enough to satiate any need I might have had to bask in public glory, at least for a while. The event did run a fair bit longer than I had imagined it would, and perhaps was more than a little theatrical; one slightly odd touch was the use of an unseen recorded announcer, supplanting the live presenter, the disembodied voice declaiming the roster of names in a plummy English accent.¹² These kind of events always make me think about the subtle, tacit rules of how we are to behave in public. The recipients of the awards (and the viewers of the spectacle as well) all seemed to suffer the anxiety of influence of the Academy Awards – trying to remember to thank all of the important people, to be sincerely gracious, to be mercifully brief in their remarks. On these occasions, the quasi-public figure reveals for just a moment his quasi-private face and we are moved to ask ourselves if our confidence in these worthies is truly well placed. Withal, it was indeed moving to see some of the awardees genuinely touched by the honor bestowed upon them.

I am myself trying to do my best to become more tolerant of human frailty and foibles (my own included), and have tried to think about even the slight schtickiness of the event as something deriving from a deep human need.¹³ We are all of us but lonely nomads on an existential journey and a brief, fleeting acknowledgment of our efforts, a momentary sense of acceptance and approval from other members of our tribe – as unworthy as we may feel – does in fact seem to quicken our step, to allow a little light to seep in – maybe not yet reaching a level of prismatic luminescence in Robert Lawrence Balzer’s famous formulation, but neither consigning us to a heart of darkness.¹⁴

The Beard event is now on its way to becoming a memory; I’m still getting a number of ‘Atta boys from people, dropping me a note, or from those whom I’ve run into since the gig; these nice wishes are like the wonderful cumulonimbus pastel afterglow of a sunset. But cirrusly, the truth is really that as absolutely delicious as the attention and acclaim has been, (accompanied by a nice little uptick in sales), the pleasure derived from these epiphenomena is indeed of a different order from the absolute joy I was privileged to experience in the writing of the book itself. The pleasure of the writing was far quieter, but deeper (and of course sometimes admixed with terror and anguish);¹⁵ most importantly, it was a gift that was only for me to give to myself. The fact that there has been some kind of epilogue or coda to this extraordinary experience has really just been the Maraschino sur le gâteau. The fact that on some level I wasn’t quite sure I had it in me, has made the experience all the more poignant and satisfying. I will allow perhaps a few weeks to pass discreetly, enjoying a break in the action, but soon, very soon, it will be time to jump back into the game.

1. I don’t know offhand how many copies of the book we still have in our inventory, but there is likely also the thought that a few sales would also not hurt the always slightly challenged cash-flow situation. [↩]
2. I am no stranger to the James Beard Foundation. A number of years ago I was awarded the coveted Wine and Spirits Professional of the Year award, which is in fact kind of a prestigious deal. And yet – I can actually say this – I really was unworthy of the award at the time. I hadn’t been making wine all that many years, but had recently been on the cover of the Wine Spectator magazine, and I was doing something very flashy and most importantly new – working with Rhône grapes in the New World in a slightly flashy way. So, I had novelty on my side, as well as the fact that the wines were well known in New York (and Beard certainly then and perhaps now is pretty Manhattan-centric). Further, it was the second time I had been nominated, so maybe people felt, “Oh, let’s just give it to him this time.” Receiving the relatively more prestigious award at such a precocious age perhaps made me slightly jaded. And yet, the book actually represents the accomplishment of a real thing – a work I have indeed labored over for years and years, rather than an award for being somewhat of an icon, that is to say, a Rorschach projection of the psyche of the greater Manhattan restaurant community. [↩]
3. Indeed, there are several aspects of l’affaire de Beendoon that are still a bit puzzling to me, beginning with its (I’m told) not to be sneered at commercial quasi-success, for which I am sincerely grateful. (The book is going into a second printing this week.) While I am proud of the quality of the writing and that the book presents a rather original take on modern wine culture, I am still greatly amazed that the book has, er, doon so well. It is a pastiche, part schtick, part earnest cri de coeur; this sort of genre-benders is generally believed to be quite challenging to the book-buying (and selling) public. [↩]
4. What in fact has blown me away was the absolute riot of good wishes extended by a legion of Twitterers – “tweeps” as they are known in the parlance – after the announcement. Even if these communiqués were but modest gestures of approbation, they do have meaning; someone has taken the time to put some words into the ether, to say something kind. I still find it difficult to accept the fact that I may have actually doon good, and have tended to deploy a variety of psychic mechanisms – chiefly of the analyzing it to death variety – to minimize the accomplishment. [↩]
5. The coolest thing that happened around the Beard awards was the response elicited in my seven-year old daughter, Melie, who happened to be back in Santa Cruz at home, taking a bath when the awards were announced. She was so totally excited about me winning that she jumped immediately out of the bathtub, whooping and hollering. [↩]
6. Many if not most restaurants are closed on Monday, thus making it the logical choice for restaurateurs and chefs. [↩]
7. The actual “Cookbook of the Year” award was announced on Monday, because this is in fact a pretty big deal for the awardee, with very significant positive repercussions in sales for the lucky author. [↩]
8. While wine and food journalists do take themselves quite seriously, perhaps even to a fault, one couldn’t help but come away with the slight sneaking suspicion that our event, the Sunday event, was in fact a significantly lesser deal than the Monday gig, where the real superstar chefs were awarded. Hence, a bit (at least for me) of an overall “kids’ table”-like vibe to the evening. [↩]
9. The idea of being in jail, of being deprived of one’s freedom, is so unsettling to me, that I couldn’t help wonder throughout the event, if the former Beard President, Len Pickell, was still in the slammer as the event was taking place. I visualized Len, clad in drab prison garb, juxtaposed with the many attendees garbed in formal black-tie attire. This sort of obsessive ideation does not do anyone any good. [↩]
10. Impressive use of an array of audio-visual pyrotechnics, lots of nice photo-montages/dissolves, but perhaps the whole thing was just a tad overdone – far too many categories of awards for one thing. (Best use of a semi-colon in a subordinate clause in the category of investigative reportage of glycemic foodstuffs in a non-recurring blog (mid-Atlantic division). [↩]
11. The most significant one being that I was unable to cadge a free ticket. I am also grossly lacking the Sitzfleisch to endure two very long dinners back-to-back. [↩]
12. Just seemed a bit supererogatory, as if the accent somehow enhanced the credibility of the result. It reminded me of the joke my father would often tell me about the real (or imagined) key to success: “Think Yiddish, talk British.” [↩]
13. While kitsch and sentimentality may well be aesthetically indefensible, their impulse arises from a place that is deeply human and therefore is not foreign to us. I do recommend reading all of Stanley Elkin’s work, most especially The Franchiser, The Dick Gibson Show and The Magic Kingdom for an exploration of this theme. [↩]
14. Heart was a Tannat-based wine that we imported for some years from Madiran. [↩]
15. The satisfaction of laboring over a sentence or two for a good long while, polishing and sanding it until it reads just right is perhaps a bit like the pride a carpenter takes in constructing a well made mitered joint. The aesthetic frisson comes from the fact that the words sometimes just come as gifts from the gods that watch over us, toy with us, give us such amusing playthings with which to work, such as the words “aesthetic frisson.” [↩]

Life is a recursive circle. We are given our genetic or karmic marching orders, it would seem, as some sort of holographic imprint, a model we follow, and we follow it over and over again, like the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, until the end of our days. Maybe, with luck, in each successive iteration, we are able to interpret and act on this internal siren song with ever-greater skill and insight.

My initial impulse to enter the wine business was the result of an obsessive ideational stream more or less fixated on the production of the Great American Pinot Noir.¹ The GAPN proved to be systematically elusive – I’m not complaining mind you, as this apparently closed door has opened other vast hallways, vestibulae, populated with other magnificent doors, other wondrous possibilities; I have been blessed with the opportunity to explore the dizzying range of Mediterranea’s Greatest Viticultural Hits. I have, in candor, sowed more than my share of wild grape oats, as it were, en Hautes and en Bas.

But while Pinot Noir has always been in my dreams, I have become a complete realist as to the enormity, if not impossibility of the task of producing The Great American Pinot Noir.² But, what might in fact be the GAPN and is it indeed something worth pursuing? In what sense might such a wine ever be a paradigm shifter, an expander of the possibilities of the grape?³ A truly distinctive Pinot noir in the New World, revealing unexpected facets of the most elusive grape of all, would be, I would be the first to concede, rather a long shot. We might, with a little luck, achieve a wine with some of the obvious features of Old World Pinot, a reasonably well balanced, varietally correct exemplar, a passing whiff of a vrai Pinot nose, a simulacrum of a village Burgundy from a warmish vintage. But I am still far from persuaded that we in the New World can produce anything like a true vin de terroir from this heartbreak grape; maybe it is really just a technical, band-width problem of not enjoying in the New World the unique set of circumstances obtained in Burgundy, where a single grape variety might be obsessively studied, perfected and adapted to its terroir over multiple generations.⁴

And yet, just a couple of weeks ago, we planted a little over a half acre of Pinot noir at our new estate in San Juan Bautista.⁵ Might this little plantation ultimately yield a wine of great and unique distinction? I will try to persuade you that this is ultimately not the most relevant question.

We are clearly doing a number of things right (and likely a number of things wrong). The little knoll, which is planted on a perhaps 15% slope, has a very sweet aspect, tucked into a protected flank of the property, surrounded by a scattering of oaks, madrones, buckhorns, coreopsis shrubs and an ungodly amount of poison oak.⁶ Its exposure is north by northeast, an aspect that I believe to be absolutely ideally for Pinot, at least in the New World.⁷ We’ve found some interesting clones of Pinot and the vineyard is planted without rootstock,⁸ vignes franches, the French would say, believed to be the most transparent way to express the qualities of the grape variety. There is limestone in the subsoil and we’ve gone deep, as it were, planting very long (18”) rootings, ones that had been propagated in pots specifically designed to encourage geotropic root development. This year and perhaps next water to establish the vines will be parsimoniously delivered, courtesy of a (one profoundly hopes) temporary drip system we’ve rigged up, with “spaghetti” tubing buried at the bottom of each planting hole.⁹ But, certainly the most distinctive thing that we’ve done is to plant the vines at a claustrophobic density – .6 x 1.0 meters apart. I’m not quite sure how to justify this hyper-close spacing in a clearly water-limited climat, apart from my belief that Pinot vines will appreciate all the more the freshness of the evaporative cooling all of these leaves in their immediate neighborhood provide.¹⁰ The vines will be quite small, of necessity, and not trellised on wire, but rather tied up to their own individual stake, northern Rhône-style, further maintaining a nice humidity around the vine and shading the clusters from the direct sun.

We’ve only planted a small section and maybe planting as densely as we have has been a bit of an extravagance. In general, I believe that one should not plant a particular grape variety on a given site simply because this grape produces the wine one most dearly loves or admires – this tenet is a cardinal principle of my belief system. But I have done essentially the opposite. I’ve planted Pinot simply because I love it so much. I’ve planted it against great odds – it just may be a bit too warm for totally brilliant Pinot in San Juan – because is just something I have to do.¹¹

After graduating UC Davis and working a year for Dick Smothers in Santa Cruz, I set out on my own in 1982, leasing some space from Josh Jensen at Calera Wine Company in Hollister. I didn’t really understand much in those days but was able to hang out with a couple of winemakers who actually did know what they were doing – Steve Doerner and Ted Lemon, both working at Calera. I was living in Bonny Doon at the time, twenty minutes north of town. I drove every morning through Santa Cruz, down Highway One through the sleepy town of Watsonville, across the strawberry and lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley, to Highway 101, then reversing course to head north for a couple of miles, passing the stately, magical eucalyptus portal that welcomed one to San Benito County, terra mysteriosa. Hanging a right at Highway 156, I would drive right past the turn-off for San Juan Bautista, heading out to the Cienega Valley where Calera was located.¹² In some deep part of me, I know I was then creating a model of my as-yet-to-unfold career as a winemaker; the repetitive route was a sketch of a dreamscape. Maybe I have come back to this area because it feels so much to me as if I am just now beginning again. You get to San Juan from Bonny Doon by following a bit of a circular route – rather like an ouroboros finding itself.

As the Mutsun would say, “Wattinin-ka rukkatka.” (I am home.)

1. Alas, for me, I underestimated the complexity of the task by perhaps several orders of magnitude, and my initial results were rather less than stellar. [↩]
2. Obviously, there is no such thing as a “realist.” We are all surrealists to one degree or another. The more often our hearts are broken, and the more profoundly broken they have been, the more “realistic” we tend to become. [↩]
3. These questions are in fact so rhetorical as to verge upon the absurd. [↩]
4. I recently saw the movie Avatar, and apart from the brilliant special effects, was greatly taken with the metaphor of the tree of life, which possessed an extraordinary level of connectivity with other entities, thus multiplying the working intelligence of the entire system. The Appellation d’Origine Controlée, despite nepotism, political infighting, and veniality, does represent something like a collective intelligence, a building upon a learning hard won. [↩]
5. We’re still working on an appropriate name for the place, researching some of the historical nomenclature. What is significant is that very close to our new property stands a hilltop considered sacred area to the Mutsun, the indigenous people of the area, descendents of the Ohlone. I am given to understand that missionaries essentially co-opted the hilltop and claimed it for their own place of worship. A cross was installed at this site, where it remains to this date. (The ironies attendant to this fact are so legion that we needn’t go there at all.) But suffice to say that there are ample opportunities for some major cultural faux pas. Note to self: Tread very carefully. [↩]
6. The bucolic woods soften the landscape, but there is peril everywhere! A recent soil analysis disclosed a high titer of oak root fungus in the oak trees proximal to the new plantation. “Experts” are concerned, but I, in my usual blithe state of denial, am not. [↩]
7. You really want to avoid the afternoon sun for all thin-skinned grape varieties (and thin-skinned winemakers). Direct sun on grapes (especially black ones) greatly increases the internal temperature of the exposed berries, resulting in rusticity at best, stewed fruit/raisinettes at worst. [↩]
8. There are those who would argue, and very persuasively as well, that there can be no such thing as a vin de terroir in the absence of selection massale, an iterative process that seeks to identify the particular vines most appropriate to a given site. Any vineyard planted to clones, even in some profusion, will perforce be somewhat generic. But wait; there is a way out of this seeming conundrum – though perhaps this way madness runs. If the Pinot noir wine that we produce turns out to be somewhere in the range of excellent to superb, we just may try a scheme that I’ve been threatening to implement for a few years now – the notion of actually propagating vines from seed. The thought would not be to identify the “best” Pinot and propagate it wildly, but rather to establish a set of criteria for inclusion or exclusion of the new seedlings in the population as a whole, with the belief that this very great diverse population – all more or less playing the same tune and variation – would yield a wine of great nuance and complexity. Such a scheme might well create a wine of true distinctiveness, and potentially a genuine expression of terroir. [↩]
9. Another stratagem to encourage the deepest possible rooting, and provide greater protection against drought stress. [↩]
10. San Juan Bautista also enjoys quite a bit of morning fog; I wish to create as much surface area as can be managed on which this condensate might accumulate. [↩]
11. I don’t know whether this is analogous to going back and looking up one’s high school sweetheart some thirty years after graduation, but it does rather sound like it. [↩]
12. The Cienega Valley is truly mysterious and magical and one imagines any number of Carlos Castaneda-like episodes there involving talking coyotes and the like. In this miraculous land, perhaps miraculous wine might well be fashioned. [↩]

Vintner Hall of Fame at Greystone

It was just about a month ago (March 13^th to be precise) that I was inducted into the Vintner’s Hall of Fame at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, CA.¹ (Dramatic pause here, to let the irony sink in.) I confess that as much as I seek approbation from my peers – perhaps even to a neurotic degree – I often do have some problems in graciously accepting it when it is actually proffered. So, this particular honor has been a real tough one for me.²

The event itself actually turned out to be just fine. It was not as widely attended as I had hoped, (maybe the CIA had priced the event higher than they should have in these economically challenging times, but Napa will be Napa. What are ya’ gonna do?) I spoke briefly when called to the stage, and as graciously and respectfully as I could manage to the people who were there to honor me. But the event has really set off a bit of an existential panic, albeit one that has been in the making for some time. It’s not exactly that I feel as if they have given the award to an arrant fraud. I have perhaps accomplished a thing or two in the business over the years; I am still incredibly struck by the fact that everything I have done to date has seemingly existed in the realm of “play.” What could be more fun than to see if Rhône varieties could do well in California? What could be more fun than to see if you could make an interesting dessert wine by freezing Muscat grapes in a freezer down in Castroville.³ And how amusing might it be to restage Huysmans’ “Black Dinner” in Grand Central Station as a funeral for the cork, and invite Jancis Robinson to deliver the eulogy for M. Thierry Bouchon?

Nothing I have done to date has ever appeared to be particularly challenging or hard; it has just seemed fun. And what a great privilege that has been. But, I am reminded, or perhaps I am reminding myself that maybe it is time to put aside the childish toys and now really essay to accomplish something of real significance, of some gravitas. In fact, certainly, this is what I must do.⁴ And yet, moving forward, it is very likely that without some sense of play, my efforts will likely come off as pretentiously as those of some of my colleagues that I occasionally needle. Maybe this the essential challenge of life itself – to live life with a certain grace and ease, not letting the all too real challenges and possibilities of failure discourage you from getting into the game. I am trying very hard to redefine success. It will certainly not be a function of receiving an impressively high point score from an influential critic on a new wine made at San Juan Bautista. Neither will it be the irrefutable discovery of terroir in the aforesaid vineyard, nor even finding that it will be possible to farm the whole plantation with no supplementary irrigation.⁵ It is difficult to imagine a life that is not spent running from airport to airport, a life without endless conference calls, meetings with bankers, wine writers and candlestick makers. A life spent, being present in the vineyard,⁶ learning how to see, and at least most of the time, being able to indulge one’s sincere curiosity, is about as close to bliss as I, for one, can possibly imagine.

1. In the very soft underbelly of the Napa Valley bête. Ironicin so many ways as Napa Valley has been my bête noire, or more accurately, the piñata that I have so mercilessly whacked over the years. [↩]
2. There aren’t that many inductees into this vinous Hall of Fame who are still actually still, um, alive. So, this is causing some additional existential Angst about the relative brevity of time still allotted. [↩]
3. As well as Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Semillion, Riesling, Grenache, Orange Muscat, and maybe one or two others that I’ve forgotten about. [↩]
4. I am absolutely bound and determined to plant our new site in San Juan Bautista and attempt to produce a real vin de terroir. [↩]
5. We’ve been told by “experts” that this is just not possible – all the more reason for wishing to pursue the course amain. [↩]
6. With a good sunscreen, of an SPF value of 45 or higher. [↩]

We are just about to bottle the 2008 vintage of Le Cigare Volant and celebrate, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its continuous production. I’ve written elsewhere¹² about a number of the winemaking details and the stylistic evolution of this wine, as well as about changes in my own thinking in regard to what we have achieved and might hope to achieve with Cigare.

But in this note, I’d like to write a little bit about some of the real hard-core, nitty-gritty geeky vineyard and encépagement details, as well as to candidly reflect upon what it feels like to have produced twenty-five vintages of Cigare. Allowing myself to act as a historian of Cigare, I might also attempt to somewhat arbitrarily and impressionistically divide Cigare into discreet “eras,” coinciding loosely with more global shifts at the winery itself.

1984 – 1989. The Hecker Pass Era.

When I first thought to produce a Rhône-like blend in California, I attempted to determine if anyone had successfully produced a full-bodied red wine from Grenache in California heretofore, with the prevailing wisdom being that Grenache might be well suited to producing lovely if inconsequential pink wine, but tragically, the grape was irrevocably chromatically challenged. A little research disclosed that David Bruce had produced two full-throttle domestic red Grenache bottlings in 1970 and 1971.³ I was able to track down some extant bottles at Hi Times Wines and Spirits in Costa Mesa in 1984, somewhat dusty for their tenure on the shelf.⁴ One bottle – I can’t remember which – was totally shot and possibly had some technical defect, but the other was quite lovely, still fruity, alive and complex.

Now, it is always a delicate and slightly fraught process when you approach another winemaker about his vineyard sources, but David was forthcoming, having only made the wine for the two vintages and never again. He told me that he had purchased the Grenache grapes from the Mary Carter Ranch in the Hecker Pass area of the town of Gilroy, but that Mary had died a while back and the vineyard had been ripped out. This neighborhood, however, was a good place to start, and in investigating the area, I found that there were still a few Grenache vineyards nearby still in production. For those who don’t know the Hecker Pass, it is one of several viticultural areas of California that the modern era of the wine business has largely forgotten.⁵ With the exception of a couple of a few recent plantings, displaying lots of galvanized wire, steel stakes and black plastic drip irrigation hose, most of the vineyards in the area were still head-trained and dry-farmed, though typically infected with rather visible leaf-roll virus.⁶ I believe that I located the largest reasonably healthy Grenache plantation in the area, in George Besson, Sr.’s vineyard, planted in the 1940s. George was a warm, garrulous man, somewhat given to malapropism, who reminded me quite a bit of the elder Walter Brennan. When he said something that he found particularly pithy and worthy of emphasis, he would emit a screeching whoop of amusement.

The Besson vineyard is located alongside a small watercourse, and contains a fair amount of heavy clay along with some smaller gravel. It was eminently dry-farmable, and the only real quality issue, apart from the old-fangled genetic material of the vines themselves, was the presence of some virus in the vines, which undoubtedly hindered complete ripening of the grapes; very seldom did they attain more than 24.5° Brix, or 13.5% potential alcohol. The vineyard was also seemingly beset by the phenomenon of “alternate bearing,” as well as being sensitive to “shatter,” or poor pollenization, which can be a bit of a problem with Grenache, especially in areas that have wet springs.

We would harvest anywhere from eighteen to thirty five tons from about ten acres of grapes at George’s, and in smaller vintages like ‘85 we would get particularly expressive Grenache; by ageing the wine in larger vessels, it seemed that we were able to retain a lot of the natural exuberant fruitiness of the grape and not have it overly deformed by the presence of new oak.⁷)

A few years later I discovered the Bertero Vineyard, which was located more or less across the street from Besson. The soil was much rockier and located on a north-facing slope. Because of the thinner soil, the head-trained vines were much smaller, and the clusters themselves more petite, the fruit more concentrated. No question that the Bertero Vineyard gave us the very best Grenache I have been privileged to work with. The family had operated a winery at an earlier time in the area, but these were unfortunately the sunset years of the vineyard, and the failing health of Angelo Bertero ultimately led to the vineyard’s abandonment.

It was miraculous that the 1984 turned out as well as it did; it was possibly the lightest colored Cigare, but oh so elegant and minty in its youth. We harvested the ‘85, a bit later; the fruit was more concentrated, and the wine smelled like ripe raspberries from the get-go. I was not the most careful winemaker in those days, and the wine was bottled with a little over 2 grams of residual sugar – not a biggie under normal conditions, but some bottles appeared to have refermented ever so slightly. I’m not totally convinced that this has been a bad thing; because of the slightly more reduced conditions and light petillance in certain instances, the wine has tended to retain its freshness and the best bottles are still remarkably alive. The 1986 vintage was not as obviously charming as the ‘85, maybe a little meatier/earthier, but still very sturdy.

We had at this point found superb old-vine Mourvèdre at the DuPont vineyard in Oakley, and this gave the subsequent vintages more structure and complexity. The 1987 vintage represented a real stylistic shift in Cigare, with Grenache no longer taking the dominant role. I wish I could say that this was entirely the result of a great winemaking epiphany on my part. However, no doubt some part of my decision to increase the Mourvèdre component was due to the first article published in The Wine Spectator on the winery, and we had begun to get some calls from distributors throughout the country asking to represent our wines. I felt I needed to increase the production of Cigare, but could not (apart from Bertero) find Grenache of any great distinction, so it would have to be Mourvèdre that made up the volume.⁸ A few years later production would increase again, and while I had become a more experienced and learned winemaker, I also seemed to forget, at least for a while, the most important winemaking lesson: one must begin with exemplary grapes.

1988 was an atypical vintage for us. The blend contained a significantly larger Mourvèdre component, and perhaps coincidentally suffered, if that is the right word, from a marked brettanomyces issue.⁹ 1989 saw quite a bit of early rain in the fall and the vintage was largely reviled by the popular wine press. But that was the year that I found myself on the cover of The Wine Spectator in its April 1^st issue; clad in blue polyester, I was “The Rhône Ranger” and this certainly gave the brand a dramatic jet propulsive boost.  The ‘89 Cigare we produced was a “lighter” vintage, not as impressive as earlier bottlings, but oddly enough, has held up quite well over the years, especially in the larger format.

1990 – 1995 The Era of Exuberant Fruit and Slightly Exuberant Growth.

I have such vivid memories of the first six vintages of Cigare, but comparatively fuzzier memories of the wines over the next ten years. Some of the comparative haziness is due to the enormity of the changes occurred at Bonny Doon in the latter years, in both in the scale and complexity of the operation. By 1990, we were making wine in two facilities – one in Bonny Doon and another on the west side of Santa Cruz, next door to our current facility; soon after, we began to outsource some winemaking to other facilities as well. We had also just begun to produce the large commercial blend, Big House Red at about this same time. While Big House might well have ultimately turned into a significant distraction, it’s important to remember that it also gave us an opportunity to experiment with a number of new vineyards for Cigare, in the knowledge that if a particular wine was “close but no Cigare” there would always be an acceptable blending option. This emboldened me to try a variety of winemaking methodologies – the use of microbullage,¹⁰  for one, again, with the security that there was always a viable blending option should a particular lot turn out to be less than stellar.

In 1991 we began a long-term association with the San Bernabe Vineyard in King City, Monterey County, but they were seldom able to provide great Grenache; we made a lot of Vin Gris in the day, principally from juice drawn off in heroic volumes from the crushed fruit. Saigner juice is more concentrated and darker in color than that of a conventional must, but always strikes me as a bit out of kilter. You don’t just concentrate the lovely fruity parts and the soft tannins, but also the astringent, bitter elements as well. Owing to the proportionately higher potassium concentration in the grape skins, your pH tends to go to hell and you have to correct that by adding tartaric acid. So, you’re never quite in balance you’re a bit of a tightrope walker in a strong wind. A lot of winemaking legerdemain needs to take place to create the semblance of balance and harmony. The San Bernabe Vineyard was/is quite sandy – a sandbox really, and whether it was the comparative youth of the vines, or the lack of clay in the soil, or a million other factors, we just never got much more from it than filler, never killer.

We purchased Grenache from the Scheid Vineyard in the Arroyo Seco of Monterey County in these years – essentially a gravel pit of a vineyard. The vines seemed always to be overcropped, and we often had to wait an eternity for them to ripen, but the grapes had wonderful acidity and were responsible for a unique quality of pepperiness in the wine.¹¹ From whence this quality arose I still cannot say, but it was a welcome contribution. For a few vintages, we were privileged to obtain grapes from the Almaden Vineyard (later bought by Diageo) in the Paicines area of San Benito County. These were old head-trained vines, planted in the ‘40s if memory serves. Freakishly large, they were rather like a vine one would meet in a Grimm fairy tale.¹² We bought grapes years later from the vineyard under the new regime, but new management had installed drip irrigation, and the fruit, while still lovely, was never quite as special.

1995 was also the end of an era for the Besson Vineyard, though we continued to buy fruit from the Bessons for another ten years. George Besson Sr. had turned the reins of vineyard management over to his son, George Jr. in that year. Jr., who had a full-time job with the Santa Clara County Water Dept., decided that the old head-trained vines were just too laborious to cultivate as they were configured, and betook to retrain the goblet shaped vines to a bilateral cordon system for greater ease of cultivation. I cannot explain precisely why from a plant physiology perspective this was a bad idea, but the best analogy might be to equate it with geriatric patients suddenly taking up roller-blading or break dancing – just too big of a stretch at that point in their lives. The fruit never quite ripened up evenly after that, and just never had the flavor intensity of the earlier years. This further compelled the search for replacement Grenache vineyards, as Grenache, as we know, is the very heart and soul of the Cryptoneuf encépagement.

We had been purchasing Mourvèdre in the rustic town of Oakley, as I had mentioned, not more than a quarter of a mile from the Sacramento River. The vineyards themselves were a bit surreal, surrounding the seemingly sinister DuPont chemical plant, manufacturer of God only knows what petrochemical with a half-life measured in eons. It was an ongoing, whistling-in-the-dark joke that we were producing a wine that would give you that certain je ne sais quoi, and would give you both an inner and outer glow. The DuPont vineyard was managed by the Cline brothers, Fred and Matt, and at a certain painful moment they unceremoniously de-Clined to continue to sell us those grapes, which was a rather heartbreaking turn of events for us.¹³

I have looked back on what I had written in the biannual newsletters about the Cigares of that era. I spoke about the muscular quality of the 1990 vintage, which may well have been true, but from the perspective of time, likely as not, this may have been a bit of a defensive reaction to the reviews critical of the 1989. The wines of that era really did exhibit great fruitiness; maybe it was that they were not handled much, generally racked but once, and tending to retain a lot of primary aromas. We began to include Cinsault in the blend in 1992, originally from an old vineyard in Kenwood in Sonoma County, the name of which is lost to history, and then from our own vineyard in Soledad: this further augmented the exuberant fruitiness of the wines.

Judging from the somewhat florid written descriptors of the wine in those days, it seems I had become more than little possessed, a prisoner trapped in the realm of the senses. I wrote that the 1991 was “a spicy wine, a feast for the olfactories – white pepper, fennel, dried sour cherry, black currant and rosemary. Anent the 1992, “Confiture des fraises (sounds better in French), hard sour cherry candy and the red licorice whips about which British wine writers fantasize. Soft, dense tannins and raging ripe blackberries.”

My prose in that era did get perhaps a bit overheated. “The 1993 is shameless… Crushed junipers, mulberries, fraises des bois, wild plums, dried cherries, anise root and raw meat. It is a wine for the urban hunter/gatherer. But what is it really like? It is like living to be two hundred years old. It is a bouquet of ultra-violets. It is the sun pouring through one’s sieve-like body. It is the taste of the colors mauve, nutmeg and rosemary, the muted moan of violaceous velvet. It is all of the virtues and more vices than are dreamt of in Miami. It is one’s self, that hollow shell, being stuffed with veal and pork, heavily infused with cloves of garlic, anchovies, capers, parsley, tomato and rosemary. It is being ready to eat or to be eaten. It is more than that… Very limited, but then so are our days.”

About the 1994: “A slumbering giant, prodigally suggestive of plum, white pepper, cured meats, licorice and the ubiquitous framboise. In 1995 I believe that I must have been at the end of my rope as far as finding suitable Grenache and more or less surrendered to the dark forces of Syrah. The ‘95 and ‘96 were composed of almost one half Syrah. I desperately wanted the critics to like the wine and was looking (in the wrong places) for qualities that I imagined would somehow give the wine more presence/imminence on the palate.

1996 – 2000 The (Partially) Lost Years.

I am looking at the sheer number of words that I have written about Cigare to this point, and can point out the obvious to you (if you have gotten this far): You are reading the words of a true obsessive. I have identified so much with Bonny Doon, and Bonny Doon, for good or for not, is itself rather completely associated with Cigare. It is a wine of which I am inordinately proud, and likewise about which I have become at times enormously defensive when it has not been well loved. Sometime in the early to mid-’90s we stopped getting brilliant reviews from Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator.¹⁴ This provoked my juvenile ire, thus more or less insuring (at least according to my own personal hypothesis) that the wine would not be reviewed at all for some years to come. Mr. Parker’s critique of Cigare appeared to be based to some extent on the sheer volume of wine we were producing, as well as the fact that the wine was not enormously powerful or profoundly concentrated on the palate, generally a sine qua non, as it were, for favorable critical notice in the American press. And yet, in the end, he may well have been right about a certain doon-turn in quality (or maybe it was just a lack of real advancement) – this is, of course, very difficult for me to talk about objectively. The first few vintages of Cigare, which were virtually all about Grenache, had a certain purity of expression to them. They were about a single idea – old-vine Grenache, and maybe any attempt to really improve upon this idea was bound to create a muddle.¹⁵ Certainly in my Sorcerer’s Apprentice-like frenzy to improve matters, maybe some things just got worse.

The 1996 vintage represented a prodigious leap in production volume; concomitantly our great Grenache and Mourvèdre sources were going straight to hell, though new Syrah vineyards were coming on-stream. While it was painful to lose the Bertero Vineyard and the DuPont Vineyard, as well as observe the degradation of the Besson Vineyard, I was grateful that the Bien Nacido and Chequera Vineyards, both impeccable sources for Syrah, were now really carrying the wine.¹⁶ I wrote that the ‘96 had a scent of “roasted meat, tobacco smoke, cassis and mint.” It will be most interesting to see how well this wine, an assemblage of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, is now faring. The 1997 and ‘98 vintages were wine I never really got to know well. I remember them both as being wonderfully delicious in their youth, but tragically they died young, owing to their misguided mise with Supremecorq closures. It is a rare opportunity to be able to try them in a larger format – almost like a visitation from their departed spirits.

We were well into the practice of microbullage with these vintages¹⁷ and I had written such gobbledy-gook, as “My mantra is: “I will fear no tannin.” While it had been a rare opportunity for me to spend a lot of time with Patrick Ducournau as he was in the process of developing the technique of micro-oxygenation, I did pick up some

unfortunate tricks while in France, mostly from the very cynical Midi, where winemakers really had to rely on their wits to make a go of things.¹⁸ We began using wood chips and organoleptic tannins, two items that I had never taken up before.¹⁹ The untoasted chips were used (indeed, until quite recently) very discreetly in the fermenter (never during élevage) as a means of helping to stabilize the anthocyanins; I am not really ideologically opposed to them – I just feel now that they can make the wine a little coarse and somehow obvious. The 1999 Cigare was a wine I really over-did with winemaking “tricks.” My fascination with organoleptic tannin began in ‘97 or maybe it was ‘98, and started relatively innocently, a bit like a junior high schooler taking a few puffs from a joint with his buddies.²⁰ However, in 1999 I decided to increase the dose just a little bit,²¹ and afterwards immediately regretted that intervention. For several years and perhaps even still the wine appeared to have been somewhat manhandled, and I have never used organoleptic tannin again.

We sold the 1999 in a beautiful “Cigare Box” case. I loved the very extravagant packaging, (as did our customers), but in retrospect, maybe this was an inappropriate allocation of resources. With the 2000 vintage we went back to cork, and while we still hadn’t yet made dramatic strides to improve our grape sourcing, we were now once again getting more serious about winemaking (the organoleptic tannin episode notwithstanding). More systemic efforts to conserve and incorporate lees had begun to give the wines a rather savory, umami-intensive character, carrying through to the next epoch.

2001 – 2004 The Era of Elegance and The Uses of Enchantment:

(Learning to Master the Awkward Teenage Years of the Stelvin Screwcap)

In the Waldorf Schools, founded by Rudolf Steiner, there is the belief in the wisdom of maintaining the dreamy, enchanted, magical state of childhood for as long as possible. It is almost as if the intellectual potential of the student is coiled up like a spring, and when the spring is released, the latent abilities dramatically emerge with greater force and persistence. I do believe that something analogous to this happens in the reductive élevage of a wine, especially in its conservation with a very airtight closure. Withal, there is a certain note that seems to have appeared in the vintages of this era, very prevalently in the 2001, that was not there in previous vintages. You get the quality, first detectable in the nose, and it is something like what may loosely be called “mineral” – or maybe “reduced.” It smells a bit like wet stones or loamy earth or a sort of electricity in the air. But what creates the aesthetic frisson, at least for me, is the strange juxtaposition of the sweet, welcoming fruity, cherry/raspberry note in apposition to the austere stony mineral aspect. A wine that can somehow reflect these dual natures reminds us of the ashes to ashes, dust-to-dust quality of all of creation and is thus somehow strikes me as more soulful. The critics never cared much for the ‘01, but it is one of my favorite Cigares. Yeah, it isn’t a powerhouse, but it reminds me of what I really love in red Burgundy, and that cannot be a bad thing. The 2002 is a darker wine, maybe more winsome. It just seems to be all about cherries, and is perhaps a tad simple with respect to the vintages that flank it.

We began working with the Alta Loma Vineyard in the Arroyo Seco area of the Salinas Valley as a new source for Grenache, beginning in 2003, and in general, have been very pleased with the results. We’ve not been shy in allowing the grapes to attain prodigious levels of ripeness, especially in recent years – 15% potential alcohol is not unheard of.²² But what very satisfying to me is that the grapes now require essentially no manipulation – we needn’t bleed them (much), nor do they require acidulation.²³ Even very, very ripe, they are exceptionally bright. And, then there is our own Ca’ del Solo Vineyard in Soledad, which has given us beautiful small-clustered Grenache from 2004 onwards. I am convinced that Soledad is the (climatically) coolest place in California where Grenache might still ripen, and the wine that comes from it is vibrantly electric.

The ‘03 Cigare experienced perhaps the most marked period of mild retardation after bottling of any of our wines to date. It was not at all presentable until the last year or so, when it has brilliantly emerged from its temperamental funk. Even so, it still benefits greatly from decantation; there is a savoriness and succulence to it that knocks me out. The ‘04 was a bit of a stinker during fermentation, a colicky fermentation, as it were, and we added just the smallest touch of copper sulfate to the wine just prior to bottling to insure that we would not see the return of any sulfide issues post-bottling.²⁴ I never experienced any rude or untoward character in the wine after bottling, but the wine was, how might I say it, maybe just a tad rustic. We elected in ‘04 to add a small dollop (8%) of old-vine Carignane to the blend for the first time.²⁵ I am utterly persuaded that the Carignane gives the wine a sort of organizational coherence that it would otherwise lack; I think of it as sort of enhancing the capacitance of the wine – its ability to hold charge, or in this instance, ability to hold flavor. It is certainly not fatness, maybe its opposite, a hardening of the cartilage, perhaps due to Carignane’s presumed mineral aspect.²⁶ I do love the brambly wildness it adds to the blend.

2005 and Onward: The Cigare of the Future.

This is undoubtedly the modern era of Cigare, and there have been some great qualitative leaps, as described in the “Apologia.” Most notably, we have begun working with a greater number of more self-contained, balanced grapes, ones that do not require heroic levels of intervention. Whether this is due to our putting out biodynamic compost and spraying biodynamic preps in many of these vineyards, I can’t really say. We have gone in the last several years to the use of indigenous yeast, and eschewal of enzymes, inorganic yeast food, and have tried to take the lightest hand in our use of tartaric acid. Last year, we essentially did away with all pumps in the actual fermentation process, and have cooled our wine cellar by a good 10°F., which is possibly the single most important quality step we have undertaken.²⁷ Most significantly, we are committed to transparency in everything we do, freely indicating all of the ingredients that have touched the wine on our back labels.

The ‘05 is just plain wonderful, full stop. We became slightly more proactive in recycling lees every time the wine was moved, and I love what that extra infusion of lees has done to the texture of this wine. ‘05 is still a crafty, polymorphous shape-shifter, but seems to speak with enough authority to calm the jitteriness of its would-be critics.  I suppose that after all of this discussion of the minutiae of Cigare, a student of the wine, a Cigare-ologist, might be permitted to pose the obvious question: “So, Randall, you have more or less intimated that Cigare is really your love-letter to Grenache. How is it that every four or five years or so, Grenache loses its Most Favored Wife status and is relegated to the level of the amusing, if perhaps exotic concubine grape? What’s up with that?” The answer is really that for all the progress we have made, we don’t as yet grow or have access to the Ur-Grenache, the Boddhisattva-Grenache, possessing the sage wisdom of deep-rootedeness, meeting all of Nature’s occasional challenges (read insects, drought and fungi) with great poise and equanimity. Grenache has the potential to be a true original in California, and perhaps we will get there some day; at the very least, I will make the noblest effort to do so.

The 2006 Cigare is a brawnier, earthier wine than the ‘05, not quite redolent of the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles, but truly a country wine, a wine of the outdoors; its meaty Syrah character quite in evidence. It has been a while – indeed not since the very beginning – that we began to embrace whole cluster fruit again in the ferments (upwards to 50%), a great source of elegant tannin, if the stems are not too sappy.²⁸ We’ve also been popping the heads out of the puncheons and using them as fermenters – a technique, while quite labor-intensive has also punched up, quite literally, the structure of the wines, and that, with no regrets. The 2007 Cigare is a wine that carries its power effortlessly; not muscle-bound, it does have more evident presence on the palate than Cigares of an earlier time. Following the evolution of the puncheon-aged ‘07 and the lot aged in wood-upright has always been quite a horse-race, so I decided to bottle up some portion of each separately and follow them over the years; it is not at all totally evident to me which will be the greater wine in years hence.²⁹

There is always the dialectic, an internal dialogue – how much “presence” or concentration is too much? At what point does the structure of a wine become a distraction from its essence, its originality and distinction. The ‘08, still a work in progress is maybe our biggest Cigare of them all. Candidly, I don’t know if we have gone too far, but certainly love what has happened with the wine in the experiment that we are conducting in ageing a portion of the wine in demi-johns. (Maybe bringing a touch of softness, and warmth to a wine that would otherwise be too mesomorphic.)

In looking back at all of the verbiage assembled herein, defining and explaining what I’ve been working on for the last twenty five years or so, I am maybe a bit like J.D. Salinger, famously taken to task by the critic, Leslie Fiedler for loving his characters more than God Himself did. I certainly love Cigare more than is reasonable, and incommensurate with its contribution to the world’s wine resource. For, at the end of the day, Cigare, resolutely remains a “wine of effort,” not expressive of any particular terroir, but an expression of my desire to find a wine that continues to hold an aesthetic fascination, and can continue to grow in complexity and depth. It has been my “controlled folly,” in the parlance of Castaneda. I am so incredibly privileged to have been able to dream idle Cigare dreams, and to work to produce a wine that has sincerely delighted me, and the occasional Other.

1. An Apologia for Le Cigare Volant,” c.f. supra [↩]
2. “The Etiquette of the Etiquette,” in “Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology.” [↩]
3. I can’t remember what was the alcoholic degree of the wines, but certainly well north of 14%, which was not atypical of the David Bruce wines of that era. David was certainly ahead of his time in so many ways. [↩]
4. I should have drawn some sort of conclusion about the relative commercial viability of Rhône-style wines in California from the fact that the bottles were still gathering dust on the shelf fourteen years after the vintage. [↩]
5. This actually has become quite a recurring theme with most of Cigare’s history – find largely unknown viticultural area (before everyone else) that possess some forgotten vitaceous treasure. Buy excellent grapes at relatively low prices, and try to add value in capable winemaking and clever marketing. Then lose vineyard to someone else who has deeper pockets, or to grower, who uses the grapes himself. [↩]
6. The leaves of many of the old vineyards in the Hecker Pass area turn bright shades of crimson in the fall, indicating the presence of the virus. [↩]
7. There is the belief in the Southern Rhône, which I did not comprehend at all at the time, of the necessity of Grenache undergoing a “reductive” élevage during its first winter. This reductive treatment helps protect the fruitiness of the wine, as well as builds complexity and perhaps enhances longevity as well (analogous to the Taoist practice of the retention of “essence.” [↩]
8. I know all too well that I’m heading into my anecdotage, as I have lately begun to tediously repeat myself. But it does bear repeating that in these early days there was very little Syrah planted in California, and most of it fairly dreadful. (Until the Bien Nacido Vineyard was planted, there was essentially no real cool climate Syrah in California.) So, Syrah was not in the early days much of an option as a Cigare-stretcher. Further, Syrah is a blend is a bit like a drunken friend, who while under different circumstances might be thoroughly charming, but in a blend, it just totally dominates the party. [↩]
9. Most tasters were oddly discomfited by the wine’s microbiological challenges. In numerous tasting flights, it was remarked how “French” the wine tasted. But, certainly within the range of Cigare vintages, the wine remains a stylistic outlier. [↩]
10. Microbullage or micro-oxygenation is generally not a recommended practice for Grenache, which lacks the protective tannins to endure even gentle oxidative treatment, but was an interesting tool for those musts that were fermented with a significant percentage of whole clusters and had tannin to burn. [↩]
11. The vines, in seemingly alternate years, suffered from a presumably benign grape disorder called “black measles,” which may have contributed some exotic element to the grape’s taste profile. [↩]
12. It is perhaps my over-fertile imagination but I’ve always felt that the Cienega Valley of mysterious San Benito County held a psychic landscape not dissimilar to that found in the world of Carlos Castaneda. One easily imagined the random coyote one met to be capable of human speech, if not ironic commentary. [↩]
13. While there are no “clones” per se of Mourvèdre in the old vineyards of Oakley, there do appear to be something like two very different selections – one small-berried and one large-berried version of Mourvèdre. The small-berried selection can produce fabulous wine and the larger-berried version is largely worthless. The DuPont vineyards seemed to possess a rather high percentage of the smaller-berried selection, and we’ve been chasing after plantings of small-berried Mourvèdre ever since. [↩]
14. Whether the wines actually declined in quality at this time, I rather doubt, but there were now other wines appearing that may have been more congenial to the palates of the relevant critics, whose tastes themselves might have been changing. [↩]
15. I would argue that assessing “quality” in the New World is not as straightforward as one might imagine and may well be a function of a rather slippery set of assumptions and breath-taking leaps of faith. Our sheer lack of winemaking and grape-growing history would suggest that it is generally premature to either greatly laud modern New World wines, or to preëmptorally dismiss them. [↩]
16. These were, in a quite literal sense, rather dark days. [↩]
17. The practice is believed by many (though erroneously, I would hold) to necessarily foreshorten the life of a wine. Like any powerful technology, the practice is well capable of abuse. [↩]
18. One exceptionally benign trick that I picked up from Patrick himself was the idea of “lees hotels,” a practice that I don’t believe he has ever implemented himself. [↩]
19. It is a common belief that the New World is the great winemaking trickster, but many if not most of these “tricks” were created in the Old World, which typically experiences far more problematic vintages. Not that that makes it right. [↩]
20. The analogy is pretty good; one has to get this experimentation out of one’s system before being ready to put aside childish ameliorants [↩]
21. I must put this in context. What strikes me as an absolutely lethal dose of organoleptic tannin is still (I am told) at the lower end of dosages in many industrial-grade antipodean Shirazes. [↩]
22. Thank goodness we are able to blend in substantial percentages of Syrah and Mourvèdre with alcohol levels of 13-13.5%, bringing the final blend down to within hailing distance of 14%, no mas. [↩]
23. The pallet on which repose many bags of tartaric acid, a relic of the practices of the ancien regime, has been gathering dust in recent years. [↩]
24. We no longer add copper sulfate (a thoroughly licit addition) to any of our wines, trusting that we can, with appropriate vineyard practice avoid the issues that will create the sulfide problem in the first place. [↩]
25. Rather arbitrarily I had excluded Carignane for all these years because it was not one of the thirteen officially sanctioned grapes of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. [↩]
26. I am also quite happy to know that not every bright wine critic either “gets” Carignane. Jancis Robinson , for example, most definitely does not. There are numerous ways one might draw the contours of a mental map of “wine quality.” Most recently, Robert Parker has begun to speak out against the “anti-flavor wine elite,” which are presumably those wine writers and buyers who don’t agree with his taste in wine, i.e. are not crazy about wines that are very ripe, highly concentrated, high in alcohol, perhaps significantly oaked, etc. The nay-sayers in this group presumably favor more “natural,” less manipulated wines, and one end of this continuum would be those who rabidly support “natural” wines, inclusive of those with certain attributes that for some would be considered flaws – higher volatile acidity, a slight degree of oxidation, Brettanomyces character, all the result of “non-intervention.” Then, you have that styles of wine with a markedly austere or “mineral” character, and this would include perhaps wines made from Carignane, maybe Cornas as well, or the wines of St. Chinian. These are all “stony” wines that one either loves a lot or not at all. Not wishing to be overly provocative here, but I do wonder to what extent an acceptance of wines with perhaps detectable “flaws” might well correlate to some degree with an acceptance of certain dark personal qualities of the taster himself, an indication of integration of aspects of his unconscious. Perhaps someday there will be a small cottage industry of oenophile psychoanalysts who will read wine critics for what they are unconsciously saying about themselves in their wine criticism. [↩]
27. Malolactics can be interrupted, or at least deferred till springtime in many instances, deferring the need for sulfur dioxide addition, (ultimately we can use less), and greatly keeping the opportunistic microbial rabble down to a very dull roar. [↩]
28. It is an urban winemaking legend that there is such a thing as ripe, i.e. brown stems, but on certain days of the lunar calendar, there is appreciably less sap flowing to the stems, and these are advantageous days on which to harvest. [↩]
29. I am not so secretly rooting for the “tortoise,” the wine aged in upright to emerge victorious. [↩]

…in The Golden State Where All is Sweetness and Light Anyway?

Speech delivered by Randall Grahm at University of California at Davis on 2/5/2010

What I’m really thinking about these days – above and beyond how to survive in this extremely challenging economic climate - is how one might find real meaning in the wine business, in the Maslovian sense, after one’s basic needs for survival have been met. I believe that we in the California wine industry have to take a serious look at how we think about our wines, as our business as usual practices are no longer working so well. I think that it is time for us to take seriously the idea of terroir, not merely as yet another marketing ploy, but as a way to forge a deeper, more meaningful connection to the wines that we make.

I’ve been dipping into Naomi Klein’s recent articles – she who wrote the book, “No Logo”

about the insatiable ubiquity of corporate branding. (Ironically or maybe even double-ironically, if such a thing is possible, had she the desire to have copyrighted the name “No Logo,” she would have potentially been able to cash in on the current backlash against “branded” or more accurately, branded to a fare-thee-well merchandise.) Klein’s original critique of corporate American business, using Nike and Starbuck’s as paramount examples, was that corporations have gradually moved away from a focus on the actual real qualities of their products to a near obsession with the transcendental “idea” of their products. Sports shoes are no longer mere shoes, but proxies for “just doing it,” – presumably following one’s dream with an unholy amount of perspiration.

A cup of coffee is now about finding a safe living room (maybe safer than the one found in one’s own dysfunctional family) or perhaps it is about finding a virtual “community,” in which to ensconce oneself after one’s real community has more or less evanesced. Our products are no longer esteemed for what they actually are, where they are made, who actually made them, but for what they abstractly represent. There is now, as it is said, no more “there” there, and this is nowhere more acutely visible than in the wine business.

I would argue that the current contretemps that we are experiencing in the wine business is not merely the result of the perfect storm of the melting down of the world economies, combined with the phenomenon of every plastic surgeon, reconstructive dentist, rock star, sports star and dot com refugee deciding to enter the wine business at precisely the same time. At a minimum, I believe that there is also something akin to a spiritual malaise, a sort of “brand sickness” developing in our industry – just far too many wineries, brands, brand extensions they’re called, and

suddenly one has the rather vertiginous feeling that it is rather difficult to find the real value of anything any more. You walk into a wine store and it is a bit like walking into a dream, or maybe a Borgesian nightmare. Every label from those with depictions of stately faux chateaux to the goofy bears, naughty crocodiles, 48-pound roosters, and mad fish, is seemingly shrieking at top volume, trying to tell its story. Like Hansel and Gretel, you’ve wandered into a dense, enchanted forest of signifiers, and it’s become very hard to get beyond these surfaces, to penetrate to the heart of the matter.

Paradoxically, with all of this signifying going on, what I really think we are experiencing in the wine business is something like a “meaning deficit” – Do scores really matter? Does scarcity matter? What do we truly mean by wine quality in the New World, in the absence of history, demonstrable track record? Who can I really trust to give me the skinny on what I should be drinking? Ultimately, will it be up to me to decide for myself what I should be drinking? (Hint: yes, it will be.) What does it mean that my 98-point impossibly allocated wine is essentially unpalatable with any food at all? And why do I now see it at Costco?

There is something afoot in the wine business and it is something like a complete revision of our values. As painful as it may be for many of us in the business, maybe this is ultimately not such a bad thing. Likely it is just my febrile imagination, but I believe there is a deep restlessness in the buyer of New World wines, who suspects that as attractive as many expensive New World wines might be, there is just nothing utterly compelling about them; if you miss out on one, there will always be another one coming down the road that will taste not dissimilarly, and will just as easily serve. (This does not bode particularly well for someone who is attempting to formulate a business plan for a truly sustainable enterprise.)

I, at least, have the notion that “Napa” has ceased being a real place and has become nothing so much as an ideational construct, much like “wine country,” - y’know, the place where you go to enjoy a life-style, (a term which I must confess utterly creeps me out). So, I think that in this era of deep thirst for meaning, in a time where there appears to be no “there” there, we can learn quite a lot from the French idea of terroir, which is more than just a quaint Old World notion. Terroir is in fact the precise opposite of nowhereness; it is truly “somewhereness,” and therefore deeply imbued with meaning, the very antidote to what is poisoning our industry right now.

So, here is what I think is at issue: We use the word “wine” in multiple instances to describe a certain fermented beverage that we all enjoy, but there is a fundamental ontological difference, a different order of being, in the essence of what the word describes. (As an aside, historically, I have myself been somewhat complicit, to my shame, in blurring this distinction, and perhaps we can talk about that later, but I do imagine that I am going to Wine Hell for my zins.)

In the world of wine you can certainly dichotomize the universe rather neatly between the industrial, and the artisanal, the standard and the truly singular.

But there is an even finer distinction to be made, a distinction between what the French call vins d’effort, or wines of effort and vins de terroir, or wines which express a sense of place. You can almost think of this maybe as less of a dichotomy but rather as some sort of continuum. A “wine of effort” is one that bears the strong stylistic imprint of the winemaker, and one where the winemaker has controlled virtually every aspect of the production, from the deficit drip-irrigation of the vines to the use of selected clones, selected “designer” yeasts, enzymes and malolactic bacteria; there is a strong overlay of “house style.”

(Allow me a parenthetical comment on drip irrigation: Despite the fact that on the surface, the idea of drip irrigation seems brilliant – who doesn’t think that small berries aren’t a great idea for red wine – I believe that this element of “control” also carries with it an unintended negative consequence, essentially infantilizing plants, restricting root systems, which means potentially less mineral uptake, and a much greater drought sensitivity, but most importantly a loss of the expression of the character of the site. It can be rather like growing grapes in flower-pots, making vines gatherers rather than hunters, the vitaceous equivalents of Chauncey Gardner, if you remember Peter Sellers in “Being There.”

For me, drip irrigation, followed closely by new oak and obscene levels of overripeness, are the most dangerous enemies of the potential expression of terroir.) But control is what we have been particularly skilled at in the New World, and it has given us stylistic consistency – the smoothing over of great vintage variations, which tend to vex many wine consumers, and in some respect has made New World wines particularly accessible to New World palates. But, I would argue that having eaten from the tree of wine

knowledge and seeking to control all unpredictable elements of the winemaking process, our wines have lost something precious, maybe a certain kind of quirky originality that makes them memorable. In becoming essentially flawless, I’m not convinced at all that they have become more interesting, maybe far less so.

Vins d’effort can in a certain sense be very impressive - think of Grange Hermitage produced in the Barossa Valley - but ultimately they are only as clever as the winemaker himself (or herself), which is to say, not that clever. They may be technically perfect and enormously likeable, but seldom if ever truly loveable.

In distinction, a vin de terroir is one that attempts to leverage (to use horrible MBA-speak) the intelligence and organization of nature itself, reflecting the unique characteristics of a uniquely favored site; the winemaker attempts to make his own contribution to the process essentially invisible, discreetly place himself in the corner of the painting.

Maybe just a quick word here about Biodynamics® and terroir: While I cannot particularly defend the methodology of Biodynamics from anything approaching the scientific/rationalist standpoint – it is essentially a kind of viticultural homeopathy with some other exotic bits thrown in

- it seems to be a very powerful practice to elicit both an expression of terroir in one’s wines, as well as a comprehension of that terroir in the practitioner. Biodynamics is agriculture with a very light hand – one never seeks to make gross changes in the soil composition to create a normatively “healthy” vineyard with of such and such levels of this or that oligo-element, but rather to attain a healthy, complex soil microflora, which leads to a greater expression of the qualities of the site. Biodynamic practice at the end of the day is really a form of meditation and an expanding of the consciousness of the practitioner – making him more present with his site, expanding his intuition and imagination. Without a level of great empathy, if you will, for one’s site, I don’t think an understanding of terroir is possible.

A producer – you can’t really even say “producer”, it is more like “discoverer” or “facilitator” – a something something of a vin de terroir tries to avoid the distractions of too many flashy bells and whistles – neither too much new oak, too much alcohol, and he eschews over-extraction.

Manipulating the wine to take the alcohol out of it, to put the acid back into, needing to make great and heroic interventions in the winemaking is an indication that all is not right with one’s terroir. It is a bit like the old vaudeville joke, “Doctor, I’ve broken me leg in three places. What should I do?” Answer: Stay out of those places. If you have to take your wine for a spin in the spinning cone, you should stay out of those places.

You can think of terroir as a sort of calling card, a fingerprint or a signal, a kind of radio wave that emanates from the site.

You have to begin with something like a strong signal – the vines are grown in a site that does a good job in meeting the vine’s needs for moisture, for light, for certain key nutrients, perhaps more consistently than proximal sites; soil moisture is held tightly and dispensed in a slightly parsimoniously manner, but wisely, as a clever parent would disperse a weekly allowance to a teenager. The vines can’t be over-cropped, and there has to be a deep, wide-ranging and healthy root system for the vines to pick up the signal - and it is up to the winemaker to amplify that signal without distorting it.

When it works, the result is breathtaking and creates a kind of sympathetic resonance within us; you apprehend the deep order of nature itself. The wine is elusive, a chameleon, haunting. It can be one of those “I’ve just seen a face” moments, and you are totally hooked. As they say on the MasterCard commercial, priceless.

So, it is clear to me that my personal path must be the pursuit of terroir, and as supremely worthy as this quixotic vision might be, it may certainly far more aspirational than realistically attainable, at least in one lifetime; I don’t know if I advocate this path for everyone, and wonder sometimes if I am not myself chasing after moonbeams. For one thing, there are just so many damn variables to consider - have you planted on your site the right rootstock, with the right spacing, the right exposure, and of course, do you have a felicitous match between your grape variety, the soil and the climate and microclimate? Is the site itself somehow unique and distinctive, with a unique geology, exposure?

Most importantly, you have to ask yourself, “Might I actually achieve something of true originality?” (I don’t even wish to broach the existential issues of the feasibility of identifying and understanding one’s terroir within a very short lifetime.) I must say that it really amuses me in a slightly sad way to see so many of my colleagues seeking to emulate Burgundy or Bordeaux or Côte-Rotie in the New World, when it would be a lot easier and probably a lot cheaper just to buy some real estate in the paradigmatic site itself.

As daunting as the prospect of discovering terroir in one’s very short lifetime, here is why I believe terroir is supremely valuable and why it matters here in The Golden State: Apart from the obvious benefit of producing a wine that is thoroughly differentiated from that of one’s neighbors – which, by the way, is perhaps obligatory for continued survival at the higher end - seeking to produce a vin de terroir is possibly the only way one might truly gain additional complexity and depth in one’s wine after all of the machinations of a vin d’effort have been exhausted. I sincerely believe that at least technologically, we have reached a certain glass ceiling in winemaking. We know well how to produce wines without any discernible flaws, and have also begun to unlock some of the dark secrets of tricking up wines to pander to our customer’s tastes (as mercurial as they may be) and as significantly, to the sensibilities of powerful wine critics, whom I am convinced, can be fooled a non-trivial percentage of the time.

But, whether we are the trickor or the trickee, as my late professor, Norman O. Brown used to say, “Fools with tools are still fools,” and fooling one’s customers is a fool’s game.

When everyone has learned how to do it, the game is over, as it now appears to be. A wine of terroir speaks with an openness, a candor - it is what it is, and that is so deeply refreshing in these most cynical times.

In California, I imagine a true vin de terroir to be the ultimate low-tech product and perhaps the only truly sustainable proposition for growing grapes - non-irrigated, perhaps free-standing head-trained vines, grown without trellising - state of the art viticulture circa 1880. Maybe this will be the solution pressed upon us when water for agriculture is no longer abundantly available, and that can certainly happen sooner than later. Perhaps soon the cost of establishing a vineyard infrastructure - wires and stakes and cross-arms, irrigation systems, etc. will as well grow to be prohibitively expensive.

But, in conclusion, my thought is that the great value aspiring to produce a vin de terroir is not so much in its practicality – I’ve alluded to the fact that it may well be impossible to find terroir in a single generation – but rather, it is the gift that terroir gives us in how we choose to think about what we do. An esteem for terroir makes us look at our land and its custodianship in a different way, engendering a deep love and respect, a great gift to ourselves and to everyone with whom we share this planet.

“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. [↩]