I'll admit to a blatant bit of blind consumerism right off the bat. The first time I tasted a wine from Bonny Doon I was cruising the aisles of Astor Place Wines. It must have been in the early nineties and I was feeling flush that day with a big freelance writing check stuffed into my pocket. In the California section, I spied a wine with a curious label. It showed a vineyard with an alien spaceship hoving over it. On the back label, I read that in 1954 in the Chateneuf du Pape, vineyard workers reported seeing a UFO shaped like a huge flying cigar. Thus, the name of the wine, was Le Cigare Volant. I thought to myself, 'Finally, a winemaker with a sense of humor. I bought two on the spot, not even bothering to ask the opinion of one of the shop's wine experts ... so sure was I that even if the wine tasted like it was grape juice fermented in a bathtub, I'd enjoy the experience of drinking a wine from someone with a clearly demented joie de vivre.
So, it was with considerable surprise and delight that I discovered what a great winemaker was Randall Grahm, Bonny Doon's founder and chief evil scientist. The Cigare was light, but complex, with lots of great berry and fruit. I went out and got a case.
In the years since, I've continued to buy Bonny Doon on a regular basis ... perhaps not always able to afford a case of Le Cigare every year ... but always some to dig up enough scratch when I came across one of Grahm's (usually) wackily named wines.
A couple years ago, I even had a chance to finally meet him and shake his hand at the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Festival. He was very pleasant and normal looking. Admittedly I was hoping for someone who looked like a cross between R. Crumb and Bigfoot. But, hey, true dementia is an inner beauty.
Now comes clear proof. "Been Doon So Long—A Randall Grahm Vinthology" (University of California Press www.beendoonsolong.com), a collection of "Doonian ephemera", prose, poetry, scatology, rants and ramblings is one of the most exceptional examples of the new literary form, the Vinoir. In fact, it may be the only example.
You know you're in trouble when an author quotes the late French semiologist (no, it has nothing to do with semillon grapes) Roland Barthes in his forward. However, it is nice when a forward is not just a pep talk, but a serious warning on what is to follow.
And what follows is alot of fun. For those of us who eagerly grabbed bottles with lables like Muscat vin de glaciere, Cardinal Zin, Syrah Le Pousseur, Ca' del Solo, Big House Red, Old Telegram or Clos de Gilroy as much for their contents as for the entertainment on the exterior of the bottle, "Been Doon So Long" is proof positive that there was indeed madness behind Grahm's method.
Grahm writes that his original plan was to produce a "brilliant pinot noir". In 1980 he planted a thirty acre vineyard in the tiny hamlet of Bonny Doon in 1980 with the idea of producing this fabled pinot. However, he soon found that the climate conditions favored the grape varieties of the northern Rhone valley. Unfortunately, his first venture was cut short by a disease that killed his vines. Nevertheless, he kept at it—driven by what he calls "My genuine love and esteem of terroir, the Old World notion that a wine might reveal the eternal characteristics of the place from whence it arises."
Some time after I tasted my first Cigare Volant (which was followed by purchases of Old Telegram, and Vin de Glaciere), Bonny Doon and Grahm began to pop up in conversations—someone had read this about, or someone else had talked to someone in a wine shop about him—and one theme kept cropping up again and again. This winemaker--and his infernal allegiance to terroir--was attempting to match grape varieties to soil, climate and other mysteriously natural conditions. Outrageous. A few years after Grahm started his first vineyard, I fled academia (I have heard he is also a Cal alum...Go Bears!) and was fortunate enough to find employment as a carpenter on an estate in the Napa Valley. It was a great year of education, as I probably knew less about carpentry when I started then I even knew about wine. Nevertheless, one of the things that seemed strange to me was that quite a few reputable winemakers in the valley were seemingly more obsessed with marketability than suitability. Chardonnay is popular? Ok, let's plant forty acres! What? Sauvignon Blanc is on the rise? Rip out those grenache vines!
What struck me in learning bits and pieces about Grahm a few years later, was that this obsession with terroir was not the result of lunacy, but was in fact indicative of the fact that he might have been the only truly sane person in the entire California wine industry. He actually wanted to fit the grape to conditions as similar as possible to its origins ... the crazy idea that this might produce a superior wine.
As Grahm makes clear throughout this amazing and entertaining vinoir, is that he has not backed off his quest one iota. In fact, he admits to being sidetracked, making some mistakes (artificial closures) and just losing his way at times. But he has re-dedicated himself to terrior ... and we can all assume we'll be tasting many more amazing (and zanily labeled) wines for years to come.
As for the contents of the book only indirectly concerned with winemaking, I would be doing Grahm a disservice to reveal too much ... other than it is the closest thing to carnival ride on psychedlic mushrooms you can have in a book (other than Alice in Wonderland). However, one of my favorite sections concerned the rock opera, Born to Rhone, performed in San Francisco (where else?) in 2004. As Grahm writes, "the lyrics, set to the tunes of various rock songs, treated some of the traditional Doonian themes...."
For example, 'Big House Rock', set to the tune of 'Jail House Rock'...
Spider Mite Murphy detected alot of estery tones/Little St Joseph scented the spicy nose of a Cotes du Rhone/The leader of the crips gota lot of gout de terroir/They ain't got this sort of limestone down in Chualar/Get rock, everybody get rock/Everybody in the whole cell block/Dug the structure of the Big House Rock.
And that, my friends, is just a little taste.
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