Terroir is all about “difference”—the French, who seme to have semiology deeply embedded in their genes, are notoriously preoccupied with “difference,” and while it can certainly be said, somewhat tautologically, that all sites possess terroir in some form of another, strong or weak, the notion of a great terroir is about one that somehow manages to rise above the others in the distinctiveness of its signal. It is the difference that seems to make a difference.

A great terroir stands out; it is remarkable. In Europe, where elegance and complexity have historically been in great esteem, grapes are generally grown at the coolest, most extreme location of their possibility. A great terroir will ripen its grapes more completely more years out of ten then its neighbors; its wines will tend to be more balanced more of the time than its less fortunate contiguous confrères. But most of all, it will have a calling card, a quality of expressiveness, of distinctiveness, that will provoke a sense of recognition in the consumer, whether or not the consumer has ever tasted the wine before. Without becoming overly anthropomorphic, I would suggest that a great terroir site has something akin to intelligence, which is the ability to successfully adapt to a variety of climatic challenges.

The soil of a great terroir will have the physical characteristics that allow the vine to extract more or less the correct amount of moisture from the soil appropriate to its needs, and trigger certain physiological signals in the plant at appropriate times—again, more consistently than its neighbors. It will have a chemical make-up that provides for all of the macro-elements in more or less balanced ratios, and very critically, will possess a definitive, eclectic assortment of oligo-elements. But, it should also be noted that great terroirs are not merely an inventory of various minerals in appropriate ratios. There are also the geophysical characteristics of a particular terroir that critically mediate water availability to the plant; this is a function of both soil texture and the movement of the water-table during the growing season.² Thus, a great terroir will lead to a Goldilocks and the Three Bears-like solution for the vine, neither too much available water, creating excessive vegetative growth and flavor dilution, nor an acute water deficit, leading to jammy, vaguely Antipodean flavors at best, raisinettes at worst.

I fancy great terroirs to be a bit like wise parents of teenage children, dispensing water to their plants parsimoniously like a weekly allowance, making sure that that which is given out on Monday will last all the way to the weekend. Lastly, very significantly, it is literally the very finest detail of the soil’s structure in a great terroir, its degree of microporosity, that allows for the proliferation of beneficial soil microbes, specifically mycorrhizae, bringing minerals into the plant roots; they are thus terroir’s pre-amplifiers, if you will.

The French make a salient distinction between vins d’effort and vins de terroir—wines that are notably marked by the imprint of human efforts, as opposed to wines whose character primarily reflects their place of origin. Ultimately, vins d’effort are wines easy to like—presumably they are constructed with precisely that in mind—but difficult to love, at least truly and deeply. Vins d’effort, especially those of the New World, attempt to hit the stylistic parameters of “great” wine—concentration, check; new wood, check; soft tannins, check. And yet the net result is like a picture of a composite, computer-generated “beautiful” person; it is never as compelling as the picture of an aesthetically “flawed” but unambiguously real person. I believe that some part of us—very likely a part that doesn’t function on a conscious level—responds to the deeper order of a vin de terroir, to a level of complexity that derives only from the ordering of Nature itself, not from the order imposed by a human being.

But what of the possibilities of a vin de terroir in the New World? The sheer unlikelihood of its discovery in a short lifetime has been, for me, a kind of ongoing, ultimate buzz killer. While certainly many modern New World winemakers have protested—methinks rather too loudly—the sincerity of their intentions to achieve a vin de terroir, the reality is that so much of modern grape-growing practice, at least in the New World, is very much at odds with the systematic discovery of terroir. The problems are generally everywhere, beginning with the location of vineyards in climatically (as well as geologically) the wrong sites, thus requiring the need for gross manipulation of the must post-harvest. And of course—and this is the real root of the problem, as it were—because we New Worlders like to control most everything we can, we therefore do. We subject our vines to drip irrigation; on the face of it, this seems like a good idea, but it has the effect of growing the plants hydroponically—looks good on the outside, but not much happening on the inside. We tend to use a limited number of the “finest” clonal selections—nothing but the best for our wines—but this tends to give us wines of greater sameness, not real distinctiveness.

Historically, at least, vines were spaced widely apart and were asked to carry rather heavy yields, at least on a per vine basis. (As an aside, there is probably no better predictability of wine quality, all things being equal, than looking at the ratio of the total weight of vine roots to the volume of fruit they are producing. This, along with the vibrancy of the microbial life in the soil, is perhaps the most important factors in how one turns up the volume up on terroir.)

Obviously, old vines with deep roots, and dry-farmed vines that have to search far and wide for water, will be ones that will capture a greater sense of the distinctive qualities of the site itself.

And then in the winery, we have used designer yeasts, designer enzymes, organoleptic tannins, wood chips and or 100% new oak, on wine made from grapes harvested at preternatural levels of ripeness in climates too warm to allow for proper acid balance—but don’t worry, we can fix that with a good dose of tartaric or maybe take the wine for a spin in the spinning cone. We thus tend to systematically obliterate any possible expression of terroir, should the faintest glimmer of it accidentally emerge.

Think of it this way: the qualities of a wine emerge from essentially three factors: 1) its terroir, 2) its genetic patrimony—the rootstock and grape variety or mix of varieties that have been selected, and 3) the myriad of stylistic and technical decisions made in the fermentation process and élevage of the wine. In the New World, we tend to be very good at the deployment of factors 2) and 3), but not quite so clever in expressing factor 1). There are certain soil types that are particularly marked in their unique expression of terroir; limestone soils, granitic or schisteous soils, and volcanic soils often have such a strong character that the variety itself may not even be discernible in the wine. I recently tasted an amazing Listan negro from the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands—these are vineyards that look as if they are grown on the moon, if the moon had palm trees.

The growing conditions there are quite extreme—warm, dry, and very windy; this is likely one of the most extreme places in the world where grapes are grown. And yet, the wine is totally brilliant. But what is also amazing is that Listan negro is a synonym for another grape—the Mission grape, believed to be the first grape brought to the New World by the Franciscan monks in the 16^th century. What is fascinating is that the Mission grape, at least in California, is arguably one of the very the worst vinifera grapes in creation—no redeeming qualities to speak of—no flavor, no color, no acid. And yet, under these special conditions in Lanzarote, it is but a carrier of terroir, and performs beautifully.³

What I would like to suggest is that the apprehension and appreciation of terroir may ultimately be a question of gestalt, i.e., instead of a focus on the more obvious charms of the wine, the fruitiness or oakiness or varietal distinctiveness, one instead brings into view those deeper elements seemingly lurking in the background. This is the mineral character that I sometimes conceive of as a sort of capacitance of the wine, its persistence or dimensionality, giving the primary flavor a sense of depth or relief; I can almost visualize this as kind of duotone, that slight shadow or sense of dimension that you can see in a printed image.

I know that grokking the notion of “minerality,” and specifically its great virtue, can be quite frustrating to many people. Personally, it took me many years to “get” Cornas. I didn’t like it because it didn’t taste like Côte-Rôtie: flowery, sexy and voluptuous. Cornas was about stones. Then one day, something shifted, and I realized that it was the austere stoniness of Cornas that in fact gave it its real interest, its soulful depth.

The most radical conclusion that may be drawn is that in the instance of a hyper-expressive terroir, perhaps the choice of variety and clone may matter very little, providing that you are more or less in the ballpark of selecting a variety that ripens at the right time with an appropriate acid balance. So, in the event that I can find a way to grow grapes with a strong mineral character, I am not going to sweat so much whether I get the grape variety and the clone or clones precisely right; it just may not matter so much.

So, returning to the idea of the discovery of terroir in the New World: I have an idea that may be utterly mad, but equally may be inspired, perhaps revolutionary, if not the most impractical viticultural practice ever contemplated. Why not grow grapes from seedlings?

The best way to do this—that is if one is not to so concerned about the insane amount of highly trained, specialized labor involved in doing it, as well as the tedium of the process itself—is to hybridize several different grape varieties with a single genetically stable vine (such as grenache or carignane)—this “stability” attribute seems to have something to do with how long the variety has historically been cultivated. One would select the varieties for the characteristics one imagines will be aptly suited for one’s site. (It’s far more convenient, though still a chore, to simply collect seeds from a single variety of grapes, and this perhaps can also be interesting, but too much interbreeding, whether in grapes or in Hapsburgs, does seem to weaken the bloodline.)

The process of hybridizing grapevines is amazingly painstaking—you have to remove the male parts of the flowers with a teensy tweezers, whilst peering through a jeweler’s loupe. (This is called “emasculating” or “castrating” the flowers—ouch). Then, shortly thereafter, you sprinkle pollen from the lucky sperimenti club on the receptive flowers, cover up the cluster with a paper bag to prevent random intruder pollen, and hope for the best.

The aim is not necessarily to identify the “best” individual selections—probably as challenging as identifying the newly reincarnated Dalai Lama in a crowded Tibetan delivery room—but rather to consider what might potentially be expressed by the totality of the vines in a given terroir. It won’t be “varietal” characteristics, that’s for certain, but if not that, then what might it be?

This is a very ambitious project, and it rests on a couple of core beliefs, the validity of which is essentially unknowable until the deed is doon. The first is the belief that the wine produced from grapes grown from a large number of genetically distinctive vines, none or few of them possessing “superior” characteristics, will in fact be more interesting and complex than a vineyard planted to relatively few genotypes, all possessing highly favorable characteristics; perhaps from this diversity of voices, a rather different set of signals will emerge; that which was formerly in “deep background” is now front and center. The second belief is that the rooting characteristics of vines grown from seeds might allow one to render a much more amplified and perhaps distinctive expression of terroir.

Vines grown from seeds exhibit a much higher degree of geotropism, or the tendency to form a vertical taproot, growing straight down to China.

You can observe this in volunteer plants that pop in the garden, which have germinated from a seed. A vine with a more downward rooting habit will root more deeply and possibly exploit a wider range of minerals; my surmise is that it will make a hardier, more drought-tolerant plant. All of this assumes of course that one is planting in an area sufficiently isolated and without a history of planting, so a vinifera vine might peaceably grow without fear of imminent phylloxera infestation.

What I find compelling about this project is the opportunity for a grower to take advantage of the stunning richness, diversity and adaptability of nature, expressed in the seed’s potential, as well as of the experience of a collection of grapevines responding to a particular set of environmental challenges.⁴ But what is also interesting is the opportunity for a human being to employ his or her intelligence to make discriminating, empirical judgments concerning the kind of vines that seem most harmonious and congruent for a particular site. I like the tremendous open-endedness of the project. In fact, you don’t really know where it’s going to go. Maybe this is the only way to invite some degree of magic into our world.

On the subject of magic, I recently met a fellow named Hans-Peter Schmidt in the Valais region of Switzerland. Peter is involved in a number of very interesting projects in Switzerland and southern France, but most notably those that think about vineyards and farms as truly sustainable, biological systems. His vineyards do not look anything like conventional ones: there are fruit and nut trees; flowering, insectary bushes; hedges and herbs embedded amongst the vines. His aim is to create optimal diversity within the system, as well as to extend the length of the season in which a greater range of biota might be able to grow and flower.

By dint of the additional organic material incorporated into the soil, as well as by the increased number of diverse species, from leaf-borne fungi and bacteria to honeybees, cohabiting the site, there is an enhancement of natural homeostasis, both hydrologically and biologically. He is also working with an extremely interesting material called bio-char, something you will all be hearing about within the next few years, if you don’t know about it already. This material will, in my humble opinion, be very tied up with the future of our plane for many, many reasons.⁵

Bio-char is essentially activated charcoal, the product of pyrolysis, or the combustion of organic matter in the relative absence of oxygen. The material that you derive looks pretty much like charcoal—crumbly, light, particulate. If you mix bio-char with some good compost and incorporate it into the soil, some wonderful things happen: at high rates of application,⁶ the soil now has up to 30% greater water holding capacity.

Secondly, partially because of the physical shape of the bio-char, and partially because of the number of interesting, reactive organic chemical groupings sticking out from its matrix, there is profound stimulation to the beneficial microflora, the aforementioned mycorrhizae that live in the soil.

So, you end up with produce that is naturally more disease resistant, and with much greater nutritional value. (Note, minerals found in a natural biological form are far more available to us than minerals that come out of a supplement bottle.) Lastly, and not at all trivially, the incorporation of bio-char into the soil sequesters atmospheric carbon for approximately 10,000 years; the production of it is non-polluting and it is profoundly carbon negative. (You can think of it as reverse coal-mining.)

So I put the question to Peter: “Obviously, the use of bio-char in vineyards is quite interesting, especially for those of us in California where there is no summer rain, and of course for those of us unregenerate seekers after terroir, lovers of wines with a strong mineral character or what you might call qi or ‘life-force.’ And, Peter, while I’d like to think of bio-char as a kind of amplifier of terroir—that suits my own personal agenda—could it not also be argued that bio-char is in some way a deformation of terroir?”

“Yes, you could say that,” said Peter, “but it is less of a deformation than say, plowing your vineyard with a disc.” At that comment, I fell into a slight swoon.

It seems that we sometimes draw the line a bit arbitrarily at what is a “natural” wine and what is not, what is a vin de terroir and what is a vin d’effort. But we terroiristes are a very earnest bunch. Certainly there is something like a continuum; some of us favor wines that are absolutely “natural,” made with no additives, no maquillage at all, including SO₂; others generally favor wines made with its very discreet use, to perhaps retain a little more digital clarity, if you will. But, it is my belief that with experience, most wine consumers gradually do migrate to a deeper appreciation of those wines reflective of nature’s vast intelligence and complexity, and at the same time become more in touch with their own bodies’ imperatives, naturally seeking wines easier to digest and to assimilate.

Terroir, you could say, represents a deep paradox. In a certain sense, it is that which is eternal, beyond the stylistic aims of one generation of vigneron or another. And yet in a very real sense, terroir cannot exist without human beings to discover it, express it, and in the end, to appreciate it. We can think of terroir as a region between the human and the natural world, a zone we can cohabit with the natural world in a gentle, minimally perturbative way. Perhaps Peter’s use of bio-char and the massing of so many species in his vineyards is a kind of manipulation of the “natural” terroir, but with his efforts, he reports the appearance of 60 different species of butterfly, multiple species of honey-bees and with every passing year, a deeper entrenchment of biological diversity and a greater independence from vineyard treatments, even in very humid Switzerland. This has to be some sort of criterion for success, and for perhaps the supposition that the land has returned to a more pristine state.

And, oh yes, the wine. He makes his wines without any sulfur dioxide whatsoever. I tasted his Pinot noir; it tasted more “Swiss,” if that makes any sense, than Burgundian, and maybe more Swiss than Pinot noirish. It is not a simple wine; it changes dramatically with time in the glass and time in the bottle. But what is interesting is that the wine does not oxidize, even without SO₂. You can leave it open for weeks. This mystery—why do some wines live and some wines die young?—should haunt every serious winemaker in the New World; I sincerely believe that if you are not obsessing about that issue, you are not really taking your job seriously.

I believe that the notion of terroir began in France at a particular moment in time, when there was enough cognitive bandwidth or at least more of a connection to the natural world—people were not distracted by the internet or by 400 television channels, and a certain culture, the monastic one, was able to focus on the identification of viticultural sites that could produce wines of a certain consistent quality and organoleptic signature year after year. I believe that as a wine-consuming culture, we have perhaps lost the ability to make the finest discriminations between subtly different terroirs. Nevertheless, there remains a deep thirst for the real, for the authentic, and for the wholesome. A great vin de terroir can provide an occasion to experience all of those things, and therefore nourishes us so deeply and on so many levels.

1. This  speech was originally delivered at the Wineries Unlimited Conference in Richmond, Virginia, on March 30, 2011.
2. In San Juan Bautista, we are not so preoccupied with the water table, as it is at a depth (600+ feet) that is most likely unattainable by the vines in their lifetime. But the world, at least the world of wine, is quite mysterious, so one never knows.
3. To some extent, this little detail appended in a footnote may well slightly invalidate the premise of the radical notion of diversity at all costs being the greatest good, at least viticulturally. The Mission grape was most likely brought over from Spain to the New World—Peru, initially, if I’m not mistaken, and then up through Mexico into California—as a seed of Listan negro, genetically very close but not exactly identical to the Mission grape. (Seeds are undoubtedly far more sea travel-worthy than grape cuttings or actual potted vines.) And seedlings of course don’t necessarily share all of the favorable characteristics of the plant. So, perhaps against my stated aversion to make selections for perhaps indeterminate quality factors in a field of seedlings, it may well be necessary.
4. In planting a vineyard de novo, even if one is not taking the radical step of planting grapes from seed, one does wonder how much complexity of varietal mix is appropriate.
5. Human beings are particularly unskilled in imagining the future, especially futures that are radically different from their presents; hence, as a group, we tend to wait until the very last minute, when the prospect of change/disaster is nothing short of imminent. For obvious reasons, this makes it particularly difficult to address the very real question of global climate change, which still to many (amazingly) seems a bit tenuous. The widespread adoption of bio-char will likely only happen when there is something like a political commitment to take real concrete action, i.e. there will be a strong economic incentive to produce the material. It is also possible that someday people will wake up to realize that the food that they are consuming, even that which is called “organic,” may largely be devoid of real nutritive value; food that actually nourishes us might become demanded.
6. To really enhance water-holding capacity, rates of approximately 20 tons/ha are required, but to effect enhancement of the microbial life of the soil, substantially less might be used.

You should probably know that I’m not really from around here, I’m from Santa Cruz—and there is no shortage of baggage that comes with that appellation. Surf’s up, dude, and just what kind of Cigare are you smoking? But for me, coming to this part of the world is a bit like traveling to another planet. Maybe Planet Wine Hollywood?

What I’d like to talk to you about, in fact, is the state of the wine industry, at least as I see it, and maybe reflect a bit on what the future might hold for us all.

I’m sure it hasn’t escaped any of you that the California wine industry is in a rather parlous state these days. There is no longer as much good-natured competition among neighboring colleagues; the discourse is dominated instead by rather grim zero-sum calculations, as we each vie for a diminuendoing slice of the pie. We are competing now with winemakers and wineries from all around the world, large and small—from sheep-loving Kiwis; with militarily-efficient Chilean operations; with the artisanal, vowel-challenged winemakers in Slovenia and other parts of Eastern Europe; and with of course the opportunistic virtual wineries or “negoce” businesses—those creatures-of-a-day brands that are predicated on sourcing wine in bulk, (well below the cost of its production) and selling it on the principle that one person’s misfortune is another’s opportunity.

Meanwhile, up on the higher end, it does appear that every high net worth individual—be he rock star, aging professional athlete, plastic surgeon or periodontist, dot.com windfall millionaire or billionaire—has simultaneously decided that he (it usually is a he, because the wine business is largely dominated by male hormones) needs to have a second life, a new avatar, as it were, as a winemaker or winery owner. Maybe this phenomenon accrues because we live too much in the cult of celebrity; most of us don’t have the chops to become great actors or great chefs, but winemaking…you buy some grapes, hire the best consultants that money can buy, and suddenly you’re a winemaker—or God forbid, a vigneron.

I submit to you that the tragic downfall of the California wine industry is largely a function of its great success in recent years. In an earlier, simpler day, people gravitated to the industry because they loved the life of a grape-grower or winemaker, and they had no illusions about making either a large or small fortune in the wine business—simply being part of the business was thrill enough. Winemakers would typically say things like, “I make wines to please myself; I really don’t care if people don’t like them. %#@* ’em, I’ll just drink ’em myself.” These days, the wine business has become a real business. There is more capital investment needed than ever before, not least because land prices, especially in these parts, are staggeringly expensive. And so as a result, essentially nobody says, “I’ll drink it myself” anymore. The wine’s just too darn expensive to drink it oneself.

What is really more troubling to me is that at least at the super-premium level, winemakers have become even more dependent on the killer wine score from Robert Parker or the Wine Spectator. As a consequence, they have become far more risk-averse, and rather tragically, many wines—especially, dare I say, some from around these parts—are beginning to taste more or less the same, seemingly all following a certain stylistic prescription.

I am acquainted with a man named Leo McCloskey—a nice enough fellow whom I used to know when he lived in Santa Cruz. He operates a company in Sonoma called Enologix, which purports to help its clients make wines that will get higher point scores. Note: not wines that are more distinctive. Not wines that are somehow more expressive of their particular terroir. Rather, using models that are reverse-engineered from Wine Spectator and Robert Parker palates, they guarantee wines that will squarely hit certain stylistic parameters and will therefore be “successful.”

This is not a happy outcome; it’s oenvil, as I’ve characterized it—and is not a sustainable model for the future of the wine business. That this particular opulent, overripe style is also essentially undrinkable—at least more than a glass of it is, for me—is also somewhat troubling.

As far as the staggering amount of competition out there, I’m sure it’s not lost on you that far more effort is needed these days to sell a bottle of wine than ever before. Whether this sort of competition is “healthy” is anyone’s guess, but for now it’s just a fact of life, like the weather, and I don’t imagine this weather is going to change any time soon. I’d venture that there are currently perhaps twice as many wineries or wine labels in the brandscape than can actually carry on a sustainable, profitable existence. The larger end of small, as well as “mid-sized” wineries—I’m not even sure what that term means anymore—are particularly vulnerable to challenges in distribution, and by extension, in sales and profitability. They’re too big to be desirable in virtue of their scarcity, and too small to have the marketing clout to make much of an impression on your lot.

For small producers, the scale that might actually work is the true no-frills, micro-model, with very few employees and, through wit and or particularly good karma, the ability to produce wines that a) are truly distinctive, and b) have the ability to communicate that true uniqueness to the end user. Alas, the combination of these two skill sets is not often found in the same set of chromosomes.

There was a famous Harvard Business Review paper published in 2004 about how one can find success in business in times of extreme competition. The postulate was that success can really only come if you are capable of finding “blue ocean,” i.e. delivering a product or service that is so utterly differentiated and superior to that of your competition, that you essentially have no competitors. In the world of wine production, it is my most tenacious belief that, despite occasional evidence to the contrary, producing a distinctive vin de terroir is the only lasting way that a wine producer will ever be able to find blue ocean—a truly sustainable niche. In other words, chasing scores by changing your winemaking practices to favor a particular à la mode style may offer short-term success, but in the end, is a fool’s game. Winemaking trix are for kids, and we must grow up.

But to the question of the real value of terroir: I’ve written before that vins de terroir are more interesting than composed or confected wines—vins d’effort—because they somehow manage to reflect the deep complexity of nature itself. Maybe we grasp their depth—if, that is, we are paying attention—similarly to how we grasp the depth, intelligence, and sensitivity of an individual we might meet. We look for affect and expression, responsiveness, some evidence that they are switched on, connected. Maybe we look for something analogous in wine—movement or change, the ability to evolve, even as we experience it; these wines have a real presence (at a minimum), and maybe even something like a rudimentary consciousness. At least that’s how it seems to me.

But you’re probably not so interested in these wooly philosophical musings, and so perhaps some concrete examples of what is lately most interesting to me these days, in my own personal quest for a vin de terroir, could be germane. I’ll get to that, but I’m also still determined to give you the larger philosophical context. Please bear with me.

I recently had dinner with my best friend from high school, a psychiatrist, as it turns out. I talked about how challenging the wine business had become, and he somewhat facetiously—though not entirely facetiously—suggested that I consider peddling my wares (presumably virtually) in the virtual world on a site called Farmville. There, participants act as if they are growing various virtual crops, bringing them to virtual market and attempting to operate a virtual profitable enterprise and so forth. (Note: this is actually more or less what I’m trying to do in real life.) The model for monetizing this business is that the site provides the opportunity for participants to “upgrade” to a better virtual tractor by spending non-virtual, i.e. “real” dollars in Farmville. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by explaining that the solution he was proposing was essentially a great part of what I see as our current problems, namely the inability to differentiate between actions with consequences in the real world, and actions that simply make us feel slightly better about what we are doing. This is a conundrum maybe worth considering here in quasi-virtual “wine country.”

The digital world is incredibly rich and powerful, as far as the opportunity it provides us to connect with people. I’ve experienced this myself. But a wholly virtual world also carries with it a certain implicit danger, which is that by participating in it, we may at a certain point lose the ability to differentiate between the really real and the virtually real. It is certainly beyond the scope of these remarks to comment on whether the formation of “virtual relationships” ultimately erodes our ability to form “real” relationships, but I do believe that the world we live in right now is beginning to offer us something like a forking path. On one fork: the opportunity to embrace the truly real (a very scary proposition, I might add). On the other: the opportunity to allow something like pernicious irreality to gradually, imperceptibly seep into our belief systems.

Granted, delusional thinking has always been with us, but it seems more prevalent than it has ever been. In the wine business, this fantasy may be something like:

“My domestic Pinot is every bit as good as Romanée-Conti—blind tasters (or critics) tell me so;” or,

“My ‘Meritage’ just smokes Cheval Blanc;” or,

“If I could just figure out how to get a certain influential wine writer to like my wine, my depletion issues will be solved;” or

“If I could just figure out how to get millennials to purchase my wine, my business will be saved;” or

“If I could just get my distributor to return my phone calls, my business will be saved;” or

“If I could just figure out how to master social media and sell all of my wine on-line, I will be poised for success.”

I’m not sure if this last delusional thought is entirely delusional, but regardless, the list goes on and on.

Which brings me to the meat of my message, and perhaps the larger lesson to be learned:

I honestly don’t believe that there are any silver bullets, any recipes for success, including the evil ones that Mr. McCloskey is peddling, and as I said, that kind of “success” is, I believe, as fleeting as a passing cloud. What I’m suggesting is that real success in the wine business simply may lie in making real wine, and of course having the ability to communicate about this real wine you have somehow achieved. In this era of the illusory, of the virtual, of the half- or three-quarters baked, the real shines as brightly as a diamond.

Now, bear in mind that for most of my career as a winemaker, I’ve lived something like a virtual existence. Yeah, I’ve done my share of cellar work, though not so much lately, and I’m of course always present at the blending bench. I do also still visit the vineyards that supply us grapes—usually to complain about some error of omission or commission, and generally too late to effect any real positive outcome. In truth, Bonny Doon wines have traditionally been created by one sort of winemaking legerdemain or another—we’ll throw some of this stuff in, and maybe some of that. I might toss in some sort of cute trick I learned kicking around southern France, where there is no shortage of cuteness in winemaking. And in truth, it has—or had—worked out reasonably well; customers couldn’t seem to get enough of the flashy, clever labels.

However, this is no longer acceptable to me. I am now possessed of a deep thirst for the real, for wine that comes from a place. And I firmly believe that to be able to express that sense of place, one needs to be thoroughly present. For me personally, this will require some non-trivial psychic and spiritual retooling, but I am up for it; it is the only path forward for me.

At Bonny Doon, we’re presently into some pretty esoteric practices—some on the drawing board, and some being implemented even as we speak. We’re growing some of our grapes from seeds, creating a vineyard of vast genetic diversity and potentially great complexity. (We can talk about why this may be a particularly brilliant idea—or not.) We’re aging some of the wines in glass demijohns, which, while strictly speaking is a form of legerdemain, is still incredibly cool. I’m very keen on experimenting with aging wine in amphorae, especially if we can fashion the vessels from clay collected at our new property in San Juan Bautista.

We’re also learning how to produce a material called bio-char, essentially a form of activated charcoal, and mixing it with compost and incorporating it into the soil. Bio-char dramatically enhances the microbial life of the soil, which is in fact the real repository of terroir. Also, and non-trivially, the use of bio-char is a carbon-negative process, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and sequestering it in the soil, and maybe helping to do a small part to reverse global climate change. Our new vineyard in San Juan Bautista will not look much like a conventional vineyard. I am completely dedicated to the idea of establishing true biological diversity in the vineyard through the plantation of a real polyculture—fruit and nut trees, flowering shrubs and aromatic herbs interplanted among the vines—in order to foster a balanced and truly sustainable ecosystem. I’m hopeful that with these practices we may well be able to farm our new vineyard without irrigation and produce wines filled with life and expressive of the place where they are grown.

Maybe it is a bit paradoxical, but embracing the real, as I have said, does not mean gritting one’s teeth and hoping for the best. Embracing the real requires the realization that one must look deep within oneself to find an imaginative path toward success, maybe one that has never been attempted before. It is the understanding that there is no longer any way at all to “play it safe.” There is only risk. In other words, maybe I am utterly deluding myself to imagine that we might produce something like an authentic vin de terroir by growing grapes from seeds, dry-farmed, in an area where there have never been grapes before. But, we will just have to see now, won’t we?

When I first thought about giving this talk, I wasn’t really sure what kind of good information I might offer to you, a group of wholesalers. So, I will only tell you this: hang on to the suppliers who are doing or attempting to do something real. Add real value to what they have to offer. Make your portfolios as coherent as they can possibly be; let them stand for something. Lastly, try to find the joy that is still present in this very challenging business that we share.

Thank you.

1. These remarks were delivered at the annual meeting of Ohio wine and beer distributors, held February 18, 2011, in Napa Valley.

The one thing that was really clear to me was that we are all here to talk about the virtues of Grenache, but it is really a chameleon, sort of Woody Allen’s Zelig of grape varieties. It seems to suffer a bit from the perception that it is a second class citizen, a supporting actor rather than the star cépage. In an age of the cult of personality, of the superstar chef, superstar everything, how is Grenache to comport itself?

In some sense Grenache is really on the front line of the various vinous culture wars that are always breaking out—really almost a kind of Rorschach test for how one thinks about wine. It’s interesting to consider the language and aesthetics of Grenache as sociological relics of the culture from which they derived, and for me what was most interesting in our discussion group was observing how differently the various vignerons thought about it. There are just so many different ways to parse the cultural and aesthetic boundaries that Grenache straddles. There is certainly a rather different aesthetic expressed in considering New World vs. Old World; Spanish vs. French vs. California; and Australia vs. everyone else. As far as other ways of dichotomizing it, you can also consider “traditional” vs. “modern” Grenache. (“Traditional” is of course a loaded word, and it depends on what sort of historical horizon one wishes to consider, but possibly might entail the storage of Grenache in larger vessels vs. smaller barrels, or the use of indigenous yeast vs. cultured yeast, for example.)

There are also the dichotomies of “Continental” vs. Mediterranean, and of vins de terroir—wines made with the intention of pleasing the vigneron himself or herself—vs. vins d’effort—wines made to please the imagined, idealized customer or critic. (As an aside, I made the half-hearted effort to elicit some discussion in our group about the huge gravitational effect of a certain influential Marylandian critic on winemaking styles of Grenache-based wine, but that discussion was a non-starter.)

I could talk for the whole length of this presentation about any of these dichotomies, but I think I’ll instead confine myself to considering only a couple. First: Old World vs. New World. The Old World has the benefit of centuries of experience in working out what varieties grow best where on what sites, and with what particular culture—spacing, training, rootstock, etc. There is the ancillary benefit of the phenomenon of massal selection, where there can be, at least in theory, a very fine calibration of particular selection of grapes to a particular site. So to some extent the Old World cannot help but find itself as protectors, if not defenders, of the status quo, and I can’t help but think that the more prestigious the appellation, the more defensive/protective one is.

A vocabulary develops around what the appellation is able to do best, and the attributes that are positive are representative of cultural values. I am not much of a francophone, but I am a Francophile, and indeed have the benefit of driving a great, classic Citroën DS-21, and when I think about the seats of the DS, especially the back seats, I imagine that I’m given some sort of insight about how French vignerons think about their wines. The esteeming of plushness and suppleness seem to be deeply embedded in the French winemaking DNA. For the French participants here, the aesthetic discussion involves typicity, and terroir; there is clearly a deep and abiding respect for land and its mystery, which is seldom observed to such a degree elsewhere.

Certainly, in France, wine is far more integrated into the culture of gastronomy, and it would seem that the success of Grenache on the international stage will very likely be linked to its perception as a “food wine:” fruity, with softer tannins and an affinity not just for Mediterranean food, but for a range of cuisines, inclusive of Asian. But above all, at least in France, wine seems to be about sensual pleasure, about a kind of ripeness almost verging on decadence. It was incredible to hear Michel Bettane, who sat in on our session for a little while, dilate on le moment juste of Grenache’s maturity, which, by the way, is heralded by the appearance of the aroma of licorice; this represented for me a kind of extreme attention to the details of the metaphysics of pleasure.

In the New World, meanwhile, we are essentially making it up as we go along, neither informed by nor burdened with history. One very important distinction in talking about Grenache in the New World vs. the Old is that in the New World, winemakers can, for good or bad, guide the stylistic direction of their wine by making an election to plant vines in one climat or another, to be grown with or without irrigation, harvested at whatever yield they deem appropriate; this is enormous freedom, but also a source of great angst, or at least it should be.

And we didn’t get into a discussion of this at all, but certainly many New World wines are produced within a very different financial structure from those of the Old, often in new investment that needs to be paid back rather sooner than later. These constraints undoubtedly have an effect on New World winemaking, perhaps driving the New World to produce wines that have broader commercial appeal. Even the most serious New World winemaker is almost by definition working within the realm of vins d’effort, using every ounce of ingenuity to come up with a wine that will have some degree of attractiveness in the marketplace. Australia is blessed with the patrimony of some very old grenache vineyards—a great gift—but I would suggest that no gift comes without a hidden price; those in our group who were working with old vines in Australia and Spain were quite heartbroken to observe the disappearance of precious old-vine plantations in favor of  “modern” international varieties planted for greater productivity and efficiency.

We talked a bit about technically what might be done to improve grenache grapes wherever they are grown, and one notion that kept recurring was the need to negotiate a fine balance between inducing a discreet amount of hydrologic stress to hasten phenolic maturity without pushing the vines to the limit of acute deprivation, which of course results in dehydration and loss of finesse. Old vine grenache will typically have a deeper rooting system that helps mitigate water stress, and can also mine minerals from a greater rooting area, yielding a wine with much greater complexity and ageing potential. Any practice favoring mineralization in the soil, such as avoiding excessive nitrogen fertilization, or the use of biodynamic preparations or other organic practices, all work to help the vines keep their cool, as it were.

Grenache is a grape that has the potential to greatly overproduce as well as to achieve a very high alcoholic degree, which may result in disequilibrium. This brings us to one of the fundamental issues of Grenache, one that I wasn’t sure we were able to really meet head-on in our group.  In a certain sense, Grenache really walks a fine line with between elegance and rusticity. There are certainly some who would hold that higher alcohol wines are by definition somewhat rustic. Notionally, it could be argued that grenache grapes grown in cooler areas or north-facing slopes might yield wines of more finesse, minimally better acidity, and possibly greater phenological maturity with respect to alcoholic potential. I will gently suggest to my French colleagues that they may have become slightly habituated to the Mediterranean grenache that they know and love.  Grenache from a more continental climate at high altitude, such as we tasted from Calatayud, as well as Grenache from grapes grown in places with an ultra-long growing season, such as in parts of California, for example, represent a different style that I believe can compete successfully with more “classical” expressions of the grape.

I come from California, where we are perhaps a little “sensitive” or overly sensitive, but I would like to suggest to my colleagues that the issue of high alcohol in Grenache is not something that one may easily will away by simply stating that the “wine is balanced” and that one doesn’t necessarily feel the higher alcohol. There is a certain social peril of presenting wines with higher alcohol, and we need to continue to stress the importance of enjoying grenache-based wines with food, and also perhaps become more proactive with blending options with other grapes in the interest of bringing alcohol levels down to more acceptable levels. Note: this is simply my opinion, and you were foolish enough to entrust me to speak on your collective behalf.

Let me conclude with some of the take-away action items that we discussed. Again, grenache-based wines should be promoted for their gastronomic brilliance, and some education as far as the proper service of Grenache—serving it at a cooler temperature to temper some of the alcoholic impression, for example—may also be useful. Developing a descriptive language to capture Grenache’s special qualities: its extraordinary silky texture, its powerful aromatics—which can be ethereal, floral or just plain spicy, with licorice, menthol, strawberry and cherry—would also be helpful. But at the end of the day, showing is far more useful than telling. I think the most powerful idea we derived yesterday was the notion of presenting Grenache in the global forum, as a sort of touring road-show, with examples of very great Grenache from diverse regions made in diverse styles, wines that might rival any other category. Obviously there would need to be a bit of logistical organization to make this work, and some sort of organizing body. But certainly, the time is right for the worldwide discovery of Grenache.

1. These remarks were delivered at the conclusion of the first international Grenache Symposium, held June 5 and 6, 2010, in Crestet, Rhône Valley, France.

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.