By Kelly Garrett
This story first appeared in Vine Times magazine.

Winemakers aren’t rock stars. They’re not even television chefs. Whatever celebrity status a chosen few scratch out is pretty much confined to the sniff-and-swirl set. Honestly, how many everyday people can name the owner of any winery?

According to an informal survey undertaken in the city of Santa Cruz--the spiritual seat of the Santa Cruz Mountains Appellation--the answer is . . . not many. Of course, "informal" is probably a generous term for this particular poll, since it consisted of just the following question put forth to those within earshot of the bar at the wine-savvy Clouds restaurant on Church Street: "Who owns Thomas Fogarty Winery and Vineyards?"

Even with the giveaway of eponymity, the answer eluded about half of those interested enough to hazard a guess. That’s roughly the same percentage of American high school students who can’t name the occupant of Grant’s Tomb. And not a few of those who did guess right insisted that the winemaker’s first name was John--not a highly regarded heart surgeon but a chooglin’ crooner once stuck in Lodi.

Ah, but ask about the owner of the local Bonny Doon Vineyard and the glow of name recognition will warm any room from the redwoods to the bay. Randall Grahm’s reputation precedes him.

Just what that reputation may be remains a point of contention, though all agree that whatever it is, he’s earned it. To Grahm is attached any number of mutually contradicting personas--the oenological iconoclast and the rescuer of time-honored varietals; the precociously brainy baby boomer and the Old World traditionalist; the Rhone Ranger and the Riesling Revivalist; the shrewd marketeer and the self-promoting eccentric; the hardworking perfectionist on a constant quest for quality and the intrepid ironist who thumbs his nose at the wine establishment just to see who gets ticked off.

It’s all more or less accurate. And it’s worth mentioning that much of his offbeat image originates in Grahm’s allusion-filled and coinage-drenched essayistic excursions in and out of Bonny Doon Vineyard newsletters. Not since Subcomandante Marcos has a charismatic rebel compiled so compelling a body of written work. Where most entrepreneurs are content to spoonfeed winespeak to their customer/subscribers in the interest of soft sell, Grahm will use his pages to tell the story of, say, his sacking from an exclusive French domaine, and do it in the guise of a spot-on takeoff of the "Kacher in the Rye, by J.D. Salignac."

True, Grahm’s quirky literary ouput is born of a certain privilege. After all, the readers are captive, the newsletter is his to do with as he pleases, and his editor (i.e. himself) lets him digress and free associate at will. But, like his wine, his writing is also the issue of a prodigious mind at work. How many winemakers could even conceive of producing a lengthy parody of Allen Ginsburg’s "Howl" ("I saw the best palates of my generation deranged by the short-chain tannins, recoiling embittered in astingent rictus . . ."), let alone do it, as Grahm has? And have something to say in the process? Some of us customers appreciate this kind of bonus offering more than a free corkscrew.

To dwell on Randall Grahm’s cursive flair, however, is to miss the bigger picture. Bonny Doon Vineyards is the brightest star in the Santa Cruz Mountains Appellation, and it didn’t get there because its owner writes offbeat tasting notes. It got there because of the way it goes about creating wine.

"Our approach has to do with pushing frontiers," Grahm says. "Taking chances, playing, always having fun."

That approach dovetails with the Bonny Doon philosophy that there’s no ideal standard of excellence to strive for, no Platonic conception of perfection. Instead, it’s all about constantly discovering better pleasures, creating other possibilities, solving new mysteries. "Everything we do is a work in progress," Grahm says.

Bonny Doon Vineyard started in 1983 as, logically enough, a vineyard in Bonny Doon, which is a semi-remote state of mind between the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California and the cement-plant coastal hamlet of Davenport. Pierce’s disease and the space demands of success eventually created a Bonny Doon diaspora, with the wineworks now filling a spacious building in the light-industry section of Santa Cruz, some offerings like the muscat getting produced in Livermore, the new vineyard spreading over 160 acres in Monterey County near Soledad, and the tasting room staying put in Bonny Doon.

Like most winemakers these days, Grahm buys grapes from up and down the coast. But what’s going on at his own vineyard underscores another operating principal at Bonny Doon, which is to further the cause of California’s nascent liberation from what Grahm calls (in true Grahmian style) "the dominant Cabo-and Chardocentric paradigms."

"We don’t work with typical grape varieties," he says. "We work with grape varieties that have been misunderstood, underappreciated."

The roll call of misunderstood and underappreciated grapes growing in Soledad includes orange muscat, pinot gris, cinsault, barbera, syrah, grenache, dolcetto and moscato greco. "The usual," deadpans Grahm.

You’ll notice that descendants of the southern Rhone and Italy are well-represented on that esoteric list. It’s not by accident. "We’re not doing this to be perverse," Grahm says. "We’re learning what grapes are most appropriate throughout California. That’s ironic enough, since "appropriateness" isn’t what you’d call our rallying cry. But I do have this idea that Mediterranean varieties are more suitable here than are the more clasic continental varieties."

Another of Bonny Doon’s ideological motivations is to bring two hemispheres a little closer together. Grahm is convinced that Old World and New World wine drinkers have different palates, with the Europeans preferring less tannin and less alcohol while their American counterparts go for what Grahm caricatures as "jammy fruit bombs."

"Bonny Doon seems to be at this very odd nexus where these two sensibilities meet," he says. "The Bonny Doon wine drinker can move seamlessly from a Euorpean wine to a Bonny Doon wine. We’re pulling from both ends."

Grahm, a Californian born in Los Angeles in 1953, makes no secret that his tastes fall on the Old World side of the chasm, even as he makes wine for New World consumers. An unreconstructed Europhile, he’s brought into the Bonny Doon line-up a syrah from grapes grown in southern France. "What we do over there is sort of turn on its head the idea of blending together different varieties," Grahm says. "We instead take a single cepage--syrah--but we blend together syrahs from different parts of sourthern France. In so doing, we’re creating a far more complex wine than you’d get from a single area in that warm Mediterranean climate."

If Bonny Doon’s boldly going where no winery has gone before, that’s as it should be, in Grahm’s view. "Ultimately, all winemakers need to ask themselves why they’re doing what they’re doing," he says. "What unique qualities do their wines possess that others don’t?"

In Bonny Doon’s case, a wag might answer, "Unusual labels!" The wag would have a point. Graphically speaking, Bonny Doon labels don’t exactly reflect the traditional heraldic imagery or bucolic scenery. (Exceptions are the pastoral sketches on the Vin Gris de Cigare, a pink wine, and the signature red blend Cigare Volant--but then again, isn’t that a UFC--unidentified flying cigar--casting its beam on the farm?)

Nor is there shyness about jokey nomenclature or quirky label copy. To wit:

1999 Cardinal Zin In case the punny name is too low-key, this zinfindel from Sacramento Delta grapes is visibly sub-titled "Beastly Old VInes." What’s more, the artwork by renowned haute doodler Ralph Steadman was actually banned in Ohio, though it’s not apparent why.

2000 Clos de Gilroy This is Bonny Doon’s grenache, dedicated to (not made in) "the quaint, rustic town of Gilroy," as the label notes put it, perhaps the only time that sprawled mecca of garlic growers and car dealers has been referred to as such. The label art honors le gil de roi, also known as le roi de gil.

1999 Domaine des Blageurs Syrah/Sirrah Here Grahm’s wordplay turns to the mischievous. The now-popular syrah is still occasionally mistaken for the once-popular petite sirah, a different variety which for confusion’s sake is sometimes spelled petite syrah. So to keep us on our toes, Grahm throws in a third homonym--sirrah--a less-than-respectful Shakespearean term of address. The thematically consistant label copy is dutifully rich in bardisms. And perhaps for the unenlightened who equate French wine with snootiness, the depicted mascot is a two-headed joker, complete with cap and bells.

2000 The Heart Has Its Rieslings Grahm loves rieslings, dry and sweet, so he uses eastern Washington grapes to make two good ones. And it seems the further he roams from the Mediterranean, the punnier the names. Not convinced? Well, the other on offer is carries the Kantian moniker of 2000 Critique of Pure Riesling.

Let it never be said that there’s no rhyme or rieslign to Bonny Doon titles.

2000 Big House Red You gotta love a winery that uses slammer slang for its blend, and then goes right ahead and puts a prison on the label. This is in reality an exercise in accuracy, Soledad being better known for its correctional facility than Bonny Doon’s vinicultural facility. Under any name, Big House Red is a wildly popular rustic food wine, and represents something of a vindication for those of us who’ve long loved to mix it up, Grahm calls us "the recidivist partisans of the eclectic pan-Mediterranean blend." Big House Red, as well as Big House White (for lighter offenders?), are sold through Bonny Doon’s Ca’ del Solo line, which specializes in the Italianate varietals and blends thereof.

We could go on, but you get the idea. Note, however, that Grahm isn’t just having fun at dignity’s expense (though he’s probably doing that, too). Bonny Doon’s marketing personality may be entertaining and offbeat, but nothing about it is juvenile or dumbed-down. It’s more a matter of creativity trumping tradition at every stage of the process, from planting to label design. Besides, isn’t it more legitimate to use wit and humor to communicate what a good wine’s all about than it is to appropriate pretentious tropes or crusty visual cliches in the hopes of achieving some kind of gravitas via the bottle rather than its contents?

And that’s what it comes down to with Bonny Doon--the wine walks its talk. Some might question the labels, but few deny that Bonny Doon’s mix of quality and surprise is a pleasurable one. "I think our wines are taken seriously by most people," Grahm says. "It’s only the wine snobs who find it difficult to get past a preceived lack of sobriety on our part."

Grahm himself is, when push comes to shove, as serious as his wines. Proud though he may be of his anti-authority streak, his rise followed a rather typical four-step path for a winemaker-in-making of his generation: 1. Early exposure at the lower rungs (he swept the floors for a Beverly Hills wine merchant). 2. A degree in viticulture from the University of California at Davis. 3. A growing realization that he had something to contribute to winemaking. 4. The establishment of a vineyard and winery with his family’s help.

The fifth step, not as typical, was the achievement of success.

Bonny Doon’s boom has been a special blessing for Grahm’s hometown of Santa Cruz, since it involves producing a real product in an otherwise unreal economy of phantom high-tech paraphenalia, faux-native knick-knacks, and roller coasters.

The larger wine world also feels Grahm’s presence. He was the James Beard Foundation’s 1994 Wine and Spirits Professional of the Year, Bon Apetit magazine’s 1999 Wine & Spirits Professional of the Year and is listed in Cook’s Magazine’s "Who’s Who of Cooking in America" for "lifetime achievement and leadership in the improvement and development of American cuisine." A frequent lecturer and (as we’ve seen) prolific writer, Grahm talks about wine the way Gore VIdal talks about politics--intelligently, fearlessly, and always originally.

Does that sound like the curriculum vitae of a madman? "It’s actually a myth that I’m this wild and crazy guy," Grahm says. "I’m a little eccentric, but I don’t particularly want to outrage people."

He makes it sound like a confession.

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