Maker's Table

Transitive Relations

Wine is food. Food is life. Wine is life.

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Cooling it on the Rocks

Las Rocas de San Alejandro
Viñas Viejas Garnacha
2003

We bought quite a bit of this wine a while ago for twelve or thirteen dollars a bottle. When it was new it was all elbows and knees, but it had plenty of stuffing, so we thought it could age. We laid this bottle down, and now, five or six years later, it's really terrific: deep red in color, with a spicy, peppery nose and a mouth full of earthy, joyful fruit. There's something like licorice and something like mint, here, and though it's still a bit astringent, its tannins have calmed down, giving way to meaty layers of fruit and spice and earth. It makes me think of the Rhône, a bit. I wish we'd bought lots more.

The lesson? Trust your instincts. If you find a bottle that you think will age, buy three, or six, or twelve, and lay them down. You'll thank yourself later.

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Giving Thanks for Wine

Tomorrow we'll celebrate Thanksgiving with friends, and—no surprise, really—they asked us to provide the wine. Our goal was to offer variety to suit many palates and dishes. But we also wanted to keep it light; no heavy, look-at-me wines that would steal the attention from the meal and the camaraderie of the table.

We cast through the cellar for likely candidates, and even acquired a bottle or two. These are our picks. The Beaujolais has been a favorite this fall, and the Windy Oaks Pinots always win admiration. The Treana is a real lush, and the Ca' del Solo Albariño is such a new favorite I haven't even written about it yet. The others are wild guesses, but all seem to offer the same sensibility: floral, somewhat feminine, but with poise and gravitas. We'll let you know how it goes.

From left to right:

• Georges DuBoeuf Moulin-à-Vent "Prestige" 2003
• Windy Oaks Estate Estate Cuvée Pinot Noir 2007
• Windy Oaks Estate Henry's Block Pinot Noir 2006
• Porter Creek Old Vine Carignane 2007
• Don David Torrontes Reserve 2007
• Ca' del Solo Estate Vineyard Albariño 2008
• Wolfberger Gewurtztraminer 2007
• Treana Central Coast Viognier Marsanne 2007

 

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The Moon in a Glass

Ca' del Solo Estate Vineyard
Muscat
2008
Price: $18

This wine is a pale, translucent gold, a warm moonbeam in a glass. It offers a nose of apple petals and pear, with hints of orange blossom. On the palate it's broad and full, lush with melon, peach, and more pear, but it has enough acidity to keep it bright.

Here's how the winemaker describes it, on the verso label:

Our Muscat is a musky, melodious, melon-like meditation on minerality. Powerfully aromatic, with a bracingly clean acidity, the wine is just slightly off-dry. Absolutely brilliant as an aperitif, it is also a super complement to charcuterie and Asian food.

The photo illustration on the [front label] displays a sensitive crystallization of our Muscat. Sensitive crystallizations create a visual representation of a wine's organizing and growth forces—a snapshot of its internal harmony. By featuring this representation as well as enumerating the ingredients used in processing, we hope to demonstrate our commitment to natural, vital wines and to the great virtual of transparency.

Demeter-certified biodynamic, like all Ca' del Solo wines from Bonny Doon's vineyard on the outskirts of Soledad, California.

Grounded but vibrant. It would be delightful as a Thanksgiving aperitif. This wine's the moon.

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The Rhône Rabbit

Bonny Doon Vineyard
Cigare Alternative C
2004

Brilliant red-purple, like the queen's velvet. The nose is floral; I get violets, the breath of spring. I get warm roses. I get a memory of wet grass, of rosemary just picked, of fennel and spice. It's velvety across the tongue, too. It seems a shame to sully it with food, it has such purity. Clear, like a glass bell struck. Relaxed and easy, like water over moss. Feminine and restrained. Fruit and earth. Exquisite.

46% Mourvedre, 24% Grenache, 24% Syrah, 6% Cinsault. A true Rhône rabbit.

Price: $24 to wine club members when first released; possibly no longer available.
Puis donc... enfin? Buy all you can find.

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The First of Many

I start the day with granola,
I end the day with tea.
In between's a host of calamities,
sins, omissions,
indiscretions, luxuries,
and raw sustenance.

A Little Trip to the South of France

Château de Flaugergues
La Mejanelle "Cuveé Sommelière"
2006

Ruby red, this Coteaux du Languedoc opens with a nose of washed linen, cherry, and fresh Provençal herbs (okay, maybe Languedoc herbs). On the palate it's lightweight and slightly tannic, with red fruits and licorice and a smoky little undertow. It gives itself up with open femininity. Sanguine.

There's not a whole lot happening, but it's nice, and a great complement to our beef braised in porcini and rosemary.

Price: about $19
The rub: Pair it with dishes from the south of France (naturellement).

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Pain de Terroir

Shopping for groceries this evening, I noticed that one of my favorite local bakers, Red Hen Baking Company of Middlesex, Vermont, now offers a loaf made of Vermont-grown wheat. They call the bread "Cyrus Pringle" after the Charlotte, Vermont, botanist and wheat breeder who believed "Horticulture to be one of the most innocent and ennobling avocations of man."¹ The wheat in this bread hails from Aurora Farms and Gleason Grains, both of the Champlain Valley. (Read more about Red Hen's efforts here.)

It's terrific; a little sour, a little sweet, with a nutty, chewy crumb and a gnarled crust. The perfect loaf from my terroir.

Mama Lorette's Rice Pudding

I inherited two things from my maternal grandmother: my red hair, and her rice pudding recipe.

Her name was Lorette Picher, but everyone—from the customers at her hair salon to the scores of relatives who lived nearby—called her Mama Lorette. She mostly spoke French, or more precisely, the dialect of French spoken by all second-generation French-Canadian immigrants to her New England mill town.

I never knew her, because she died when I was six months old, but by all accounts she was a pistol: funny, hard living, hard loving; a wife, mother, sister, aunt, and grandmother. She raised her family through the Depression, and though they were poor, there was always the right kind of abundance.

When Mama Lorette got older, her hair turned from red to strawberry gold to platinum blonde. "Lorette," her customers would say, "I want whatever color you're using." But years of working with harsh dyes had given her a sensitivity, and she couldn't use them on herself. Nobody ever believed it was natural. I guess I have something to look forward to.

Mama Lorette's Rice Pudding
Six servings

Ingredients
1 quart milk
1/3 cup white rice
3/4 cup sugar
2 Tbs butter
freshly grated nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Mix milk, rice, and sugar in a 9" x 13" baking pan. Dot with butter and a sprinkle of nutmeg. Bake about two hours, stirring once after 15 minutes.

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The Upside of Doon

Randall Grahm, celebrated winemaker of Bonny Doon Vineyard, is betting the farm on one big, beautiful idea: terroir. In his new book, Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, he shares his witty, irreverent, and thoroughly refreshing take on the making of truly great wine.

Photo: Alex Krause

Grahm is the original Rhône Ranger, the Santa Cruz maverick who introduced Rhône varietals to Central Coast viticulture in the 1980s and proceeded to produce quirky, funky wines with huge personality and distinctive, arty labels. Cardinal Zin and Big House were his high-volume hits, but his signature red, Le Cigare Volant, evinced his true Rhônish passion, as did a palette of other wines, including Syrahs, rosés, and Châteauneuf-du-Papish whites.

A technical magus, scientific and intuitive, Grahm experimented with oddball varieties and winemaking techniques. He put Muscat grapes in the freezer to create a pseudo ice-wine he called Vin de Glacière (literally “wine of the icebox”). He tinkered with cryoextraction and microoxygenation. He championed the Stelvin closure, even holding a mock-funeral proclaiming The Death of the Cork.

A playful marketeer, Grahm consigned the wine’s front labels to well-known artists, and recently bucked industry tradition by listing actual ingredients used in the winemaking process on the back labels. By 2004, Bonny Doon was the twenty-eighth largest winery in the United States.

Through it all, Grahm was writing. A self-described vinous enfant terrible, he focused a gimlet eye on pretentiousness and inauthenticity in the wine industry. His commentary made it into his winery newsletters and speeches to industry groups and UC Davis grads.

He was particularly unflinching in his castigation of the false specificity of numeric ranking systems advocated by Robert Parker and Wine Spectator, openly deploring the ratings scramble that drove winemakers to produce blockbuster fruit-bombs lacking character and nuance. This sniping didn’t win him many friends among critics, but no matter; to Grahm, the integrity of the ideas, no less than that of the wine, needed to be expressed.

But if he was hard on the industry, he was equally hard on himself. Throughout Bonny Doon’s fun, wild run, he’d been nursing an idea that there was maybe something deeper, more meaningful, to be found in wine and winemaking. “I was giving speeches and writing about terroir as essentially wine’s best idea, perhaps the only thing that was truly worthwhile and enduring,” he told me. “Yet there was nothing in my practice that supported this idea.”

He had been making what he calls “vins d’effort”—wines that bear the imprint of the winemaker, relying on technical interventions like use of designer yeasts, organoleptic tannins, dealcoholization, even wood chips. A true vin de terroir, meanwhile, relies on something more elemental and balanced: healthy vineyards, ripe (but not overripe) grapes, wild yeasts—and human restraint.

“What a French vigneron strives for is typicity—to make a wine that transparently is what it is,” he writes. Here, the winemaker steps aside, letting earth and sun and water and grape speak. The resulting wine becomes a distillation of place; place in a bottle.

The dissonance between Grahm’s output and his insights produced, quite naturally, tension: “your ordinary, garden-variety existential crisis,” he calls it. “I had recently turned fifty, fathered a child, and survived a serious health crisis. The universe was trying to tell me something: it was time to change my ways.”

He sold Big House and Cardinal Zin in 2006 and shrunk the company to focus on trying to produce true vin de terroir—from scratch. He recently closed on a 280-acre parcel in San Juan Bautista, California, about 45 minutes south-east of Santa Cruz, and has begun preparing the land for a biodynamic vineyard.

It was also time, finally, to air the produce of his fertile mind—his essays, fiction, poetry, speeches, and meta-commentary. The result, Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, was released this October.

Like a true vin de terroir, the book reveals a man who transparently is who he is: literary, clever and erudite, lavishly satirical, and enormously fond of double-entendres and raucous word play (Grahm can pun in at least four languages). It’s a dense, chewy feast for anyone who’s ever made even glancing contact with the wine industry, whether winemaker, wine salesman, wine writer, passionate blogger, or occasional consumer. It’s the kind of book you can read casually, dipping in anywhere and coming up wet from its funny, irreverent take on all things Wine.

But it’s also a book to take seriously. Reading it cover to cover, you’ll notice its structure describes an arc from ironic satire to more sober essays grappling with Grahm’s life purpose and his quest for terroir. Irony requires detachment, while terroir requires engagement. I asked him if the book’s arc followed his own. “That’s very much to the point,” he said. “I did want the progression of pieces to follow my progression: a personal journey.”

The book reveals a man who is deeply in tune with—and smitten by—the improbability, sometimes folly, and exquisite rapture of coaxing an elixir from rocky soil. His commitment to terroir is not just a commitment to an idea, it’s a commitment to a feeling.

“When you experience vin de terroir,” he says, “there’s a deep emotional connection with the wine, a feeling of wonder and deep delight and deep connectedness. And you don’t get that in tricked-up wines. You don’t get that in wines that are flashy. For me, it’s really a limbic, emotional sensation. It’s an aesthetic, or beyond aesthetic. It’s a recognition of deep order.”

And it takes time. New World winemakers are really just feeling their way, he says, and must be careful about making grand claims about producing a wine that truly expresses terroir.

“Wine is infinitely mysterious,” he says. “It can’t be reduced to point scores, or reduced to anything. It is so totally weird and surprising. The best thing we can do is protect our sense of wonder and awe.”

With Been Doon So Long, we can share that wonder, too.

Order a signed first-edition copy of Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology.

This article originally appeared in Palate Press on 9 September 2009 and is reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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