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.”

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.

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.