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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sub-terroir Rhônesick Blues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So, what do you get?”

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

“What else?”

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

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

“What do you smell?”

“I smell honey.”

“What kind, sweetheart?”

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

“You’re scaring me, sweetheart.”

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

“Uh, anything else, Melie?”

“It just smells like earth, Dad.”

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

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

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

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

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

6 Nailing of this descriptor was particularly astute.

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

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

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

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

Sign up for Bonny Doon email, including upcoming events, irresistible offers and occasional Dooniana.

Just one goat

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

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

Recently purchased San Juan Bautista property where a great, classic, old-fangled vineyard will be located.

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

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

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

Cellar Door Cafe

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

Cigare landing

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

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

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Citroën

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

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

mycorhizzae

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

daughter Melie on stilts

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

Commissioned "Doon to Earth" poster

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

Ca' del Solo Albariño label

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

Part 3 of 3 continued Monday, October 5.

Boston cab driver

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

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

Monty Python knight

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

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

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

"Don Quijones"

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

Wreck of Medusa

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

Part 2 of 3 continued Thursday, October 1.