No one wants to be a pioneer. Whether being the first person to restore a craftsman house in a dodgy ‘hood, or being a winemaker placing all his or her (oak) chips on the next big grape variety to spark a consumer frenzy, it’s downright scary to be first in line leading with your chin.
That’s why it’s so hard to remember that, once upon a time, the notion of introducing the North American wine-drinking public to such exotic varietal grapes as Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre would have been met by a Frankensteinian reaction along the lines of, “You haff toiled mit sings zat man vass meant to leef alone!”
And one of the first winemakers to raise the lightning rod and jolt American imbibers’ neck-bolts was Randall Grahm, the erudite, passionate, mercurial honcho of Bonny Doon Vineyard. There’s been a lot of grape juice under the bridge in the intervening decades since Grahm was deemed the de facto leader of a spirited pack of west coast vintners dubbed “The Rhône Rangers” for their zeal for all grapes Southern France, and the moniker does seem inseparable from the man, to his mild dismay. Truth is, dude has reinvented his Santa Cruz-based Bonny Doon winery repeatedly, and the alterations and expansions show no signs of letting up. I had a chance for a telephone chinwag with Randall Grahm to get some insight into wine in general, and Oakley fruit, with which he has a longstanding familiarity, in particular.
Cardinal Zin, Big House Red, Old Telegram, Cigare Volante, Pacific Rim: Homes has created (and often sold off) more branded product than Outback Steakhouse. And RG’s tasting notes and D.E.W.N wine club newsletter are packed with perspicacious, alliterative prose so dense that it sometimes makes James Joyce’s “Ulysses” read like a “Garfield” strip. And yet, the man knows where the bodies are buried when it comes to sourcing fruit up and down the West Coast.
Kath and I had first encountered the Doon when we’d moved to Seattle (the first time) from Los Angeles in 1991. We were both partial to big red wines, but were intrigued by Cigare Volant (its “flying cigar” nomenclature giving props to a report of a Rhône UFO sighting a long time ago), a lighter-style red available at the Pike Place Market Cost Plus for a then-budget-busting-for-us $18.99.
And, it turns out, a lot of the Cigare grapes were grown right beside the Oakley post office, a few miles from our current house. It also turns out that Randall Grahm has long had an on-again/off-again affair with CoCo growers. They’re all farmers here, much to my chagrin; I’d love to see some old-viners get in the winemaking game, either directly or via hired consultants. One might think that at 100+-years old, the vine is gonna do what that vine is gonna do. Apparently, RG got into a whole pile of steaming when he pruned entire clusters of grapes off of these already-stingy gnarls. The growers, paid by the yield, were not happy.
Oakley has “wacky soil,” he says. And, through pruning and some irrigation, “I’d just like growers to step it up.” His Twitter account unabashedly and no doubt apocryphally limns the McDonald’s at which he and British wine writer Jancis Robinson allegedly dined in Oakley.
He stopped making his Rhône -style “Vieux Télégraphe” homage, a Mourvèdre-based “Old Telegram” from Tom Del Barba’s Oakley grapes, years ago. As his original estate succumbed to blight, plans for a Central Cali Valley estate foundered, and his WA state Riesling project seems sometimes to be a mere distraction for him.
Randall Grahm wants to continue to create “interesting, kick-ass wines.” There’s no reason to think that this terroirist can not continue to innovate and be energized; he’s currently planning a totally biodynamic spinoff operation. This pioneer certainly doesn’t need any blogger from Oakley to validate his eonophilic ambition.
Of the many Rhône varietals Grahm has championed, Carignane is the one he’s most resolute about being criminally undervalued, and that its potential for true elegance is too often ignored. Bonny Doon puts out a red blend titled “Contra,” the 2009 of which holds a majority interest invested in Carignane, and the rest a veritable dog’s breakfast of Grenache, Mourvèdre, and single-digit percentages of Petite, Zin and Syrah. The fruit is sourced from both the Bien Nacido Vineyard way south in the Santa Maria Valley, and a property owned by the Gonsalves family and located just north of us on the other side of the driving range. I wrote about this site a couple of months ago, after I had dropped by the vineyard to discover harvesting about to begin. This is the property located on a dead-end beside an empty new business park, and which frequently serves as a dumping ground for unwanted items. The harvest crew chief told me that they once found a derelict sofa among the old vines, and that Randall decided to feature it on the “Contra” label.
Well, recently, Kathy was able to rustle up a bottle of Bonny Doon 2009 “Contra,” and there it is: a white (-ish) loveseat, front and off-center against a background of gnarly, neatly pruned old vines. In the glass it’s a bright translucent Bing cherry color with deep reflections of blue around the edges. At the nose its Beaujolais-like perfume emits whiffs of cherry cola and red currants. It’s nimble across the tongue, too: spicy blueberry notes with hints of tannic “fur” on the sides and roof of the mouth, and balanced by nice acidity on the lengthy finish.
Randall Grahm calls his Contra bottling “a field blend that contravenes contraindicated conventions.” Much like the man himself: a winemaker often contradistinguished by his very contradistinction.
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