Maker's Table

Stepping Stone by Cornerstone

Cornerstone Cellars stakes its reputation on high-end California Cabernet Sauvignon and Oregon Pinot Noir. The winery recently released several new wines under its second label, Stepping Stone, including a Napa Valley Cabernet and two North Coast blends called “Rocks!”

Unlike Cornerstone’s main line wines, these new releases are vins de plaisir, made for early drinking and everyday enjoyment. It’s a somewhat risky strategy, since second labels can dilute a brand, and blends are often confusing to customers who associate a house with a particular grape.

These wines, though, display a grace and balance concomitant with the winery’s reputation. There’s evidence of a light hand in the cellar, and oak is modest. All three wines have a clarity and juiciness that keeps them lively. Pricing is modest, too, but good fruit and expert handling don’t come cheap. Both Rocks! blends sell for $18, grazing the ceiling of table wine affordability, and the Cab, at $35, remains a splurge for most consumers.

For the white blend, winemaker Jeff Keene drew inspiration from the light-bodied, aromatic wines of Friuli. It’s a curious blend of chardonnay and gewürztraminer, but for all its aromatics it manages to retain freshness and vibrancy.

For the red blend he looked to the earthy, chewy wines of Languedoc-Roussillon; this wine is a blend of zinfandel, syrah, and merlot. The Napa Cab draws its inspiration from, well, Napa—but old-school Napa. Its fruit derives from the same vineyards that furnish the winery’s top Cabernet.

Producing blended wines afforded Keene the freedom to select the best fruit and finished wines available. Blending does make the wines less about terroir than about the winemaker’s stylistic imprint, but fortunately, that style is about refreshment, food-friendliness, and approachability.

I spoke recently with Keene about his winemaking sensibility, and what he is striving to achieve with these wines.

 

Tell me about your winemaking style.

My winemaking philosophy is about acid and balance. We purchase all of our fruit. I’m not a fan of estate fruit, because I don’t like being tied in. I like selection.

I’m lucky enough to be sourcing fruit for reds up and down the length of Napa Valley, from some of the best vineyards. I don’t deviate from the great growers, because I don’t have to tell them how to grow grapes. We just have to be on the same page about what I’m trying to achieve.

There’s a lot I can control in the winery and cellar, but I can’t control the weather—I have to wait for Mother Nature and see what she throws at me. That’s the great thing about working at Cornerstone: it does have a style people recognize, but I can still let the vintage dictate the style we’re making.

 

What was your goal for the Rocks! wines?

We were talking about having an everyday drinking wine—something that you can come home to, it’s in the fridge all the time, you can pour it out and have a glass while you’re relaxing with dinner. I want it to show off its aromatics and fragrance, a touch of sweetness, but mainly some acid on the finish that gets you wanting more.

I’d love for serious wine consumers to enjoy the wine for what it is, and not over-analyze it. Just drink it!

 

What was it like putting together these blends?

Cornerstone is connected to Howell Mountain, but with the blends, I have the freedom to experiment with other varieties. We sourced finished wine from the North Coast appellation. We started with Napa, but my hands were tied. It limited what was available to me, and the cost.

They’ve actually been hard blends to put together, because the wines hadn’t come from my cellar, and I hadn’t followed them throughout their lives. I knew what I wanted to do in my head, and I was just waiting for the wine to show up.

 

Chardonnay and gewürz are somewhat odd bedfellows. What was your thinking behind the white?

The chardonnay is a blank canvas, and I add something to it to make it pop. In 2012, chardonnay is going to be a major component of the wine as well, plus white muscat. Again, I want those aromatics.

 

And the red?

I wanted to use varieties to give a little bit of perceived sweetness from the fruit flavors. The majority of the wine was stainless fermented, and the syrah and merlot had a little bit of oak. I don’t want perceived oak tannins coming through. I use it more like a spice rack, just a touch of seasoning. I’m choosing barrels because it adds to the mid-palate and length. There are only a few barrels I use to “add oak.”

 

I know it’s not a vin de garde, but do you think the red Rocks! has aging potential?

With the varieties like zin and syrah, and the merlot to keep that nice mid-palate juiciness, there are opportunities to develop some interesting bottle age. Sometimes we open it up and let it sit, and the zin flies away but the syrah pops up. It may have three to five years. It’d be interesting to try it. I’m hoping it doesn’t sit around that long! We have other wines for that.

 

Tell me about the 2010 Stepping Stone Napa Valley Cabernet.

Two thousand and ten was a difficult vintage, cool and wet. The vineyard management teams had to shine. Fortunately, I don’t have to hit case numbers, so I can make the best wine possible from the fruit I get.

This is the first 2010 red we’ve released, and a Cab as well, so in putting together the blend, I wanted it to deliver early. I wanted to make sure it was in the Stepping Stone style, but showed off what Napa Valley Cab can do.

One thing that’s great about this wine is that the alcohol content is 13.9%—truly 13.9%. It’s been great to make a wine like that but with the palate presence of a bigger wine.

With this wine at $35, if you put it on a wine list, you’re getting close to $100 in a restaurant. I wanted to make sure that I’ve put all my effort, my best grapes and barrels, into what wine, so people will get their money’s worth. That’s very important to me. 

 

Anything else?

I am very proud of what I’ve done. It’s wonderful to have been given a free rein to express myself in the top Cornerstone Cabs—Napa and Howell Mountain. I’d love to do 100% Cabernet, or Cab Franc, but I’d want to make sure I’m putting my best foot forward every vintage. So, while my aim is 100% varietal wine, if there are noticeable gaps, to my palate, I’ll fill those in.

We want to over-deliver. People are putting up good money to buy these wines. I want to make sure they really enjoy them.

 

 

T A S T I N G   N O T E S

Stepping Stone “Rocks!” White Blend North Coast
2011
13.5% abv | about $18 (media sample)

A blend of chardonnay and gewürztraminer. Pale clear yellow with aromas of green melon, tropical flowers, ripe citrus, lemon peel, and jasmine. This wine feels fresh and clean, with good acidity offset by lavish floral fruit flavors, like star fruit and melon. It makes a good aperitif, and has sufficient aromatic oomph to be poured outdoors for patio or picnic gatherings. Pair it with spicy Asian cuisine, sushi, young cheeses, or salads with a citrus dressing.

Stepping Stone “Rocks!” Red Blend North Coast
2010
14.5% abv | about $18 (media sample)

This blend of zinfandel, syrah, and merlot is deep violet-red with notes of black pepper and rustic herbs. It delivers a mouthful of black pepper, too, plus dark fruits. The oak is restrained, and the wine has good texture—chewy with a velvety mid-palate and a slow, earthy finish. A balanced and intelligent red blend. While it isn’t meant as a vin de garde, it’d probably relax after a couple of years of cellaring. Pair it now with earthy, robust meats, including pepper-rubbed steak, venison, or stew.

Stepping Stone Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley
2010
13.9% abv | about $35 (media sample)

The wine is 93% cabernet sauvignon from Howell Mountain, Rutherford, and Oak Knoll Districts, and 7% merlot from Carneros and Oakville, aged for eighteen months in 50% new French oak. It weighs in just shy of 14% alcohol, a rare distinction in Napa Cab. Deep velvet red with dark blueberry aromas top-noted by green herbs, it has a base note of smoky black berry fruits on the palate, with juniper berry and cedar. This is not a plush wine, and not showy; it’s a wine that knows its place at the table. It’s somewhat reminiscent of cool-climate reds from Austria and Germany, and was even more integrated on Days Two and Three. Pair it with red meats, mushrooms, and aged cheeses.

Palate Shepherd

I met William Allen about three years ago, online. At that point, he was tech exec by day, garage winemaker by night (and weekend), and advocate for Sonoma winemaking on his website, Simple Hedonisms. He seemed sociable and spirited, if slightly tinged by the Weltschmerz of one who must toil in the corporate world to finance an avocation.

We met in person a year later. By then his winemaking side gig had taken a more ambitious turn. He’d moved operations from his garage to a friend’s winery in Fulton, California, and started a new label, Two Shepherds Vineyards.

Although he’d made many styles of wine in the past, he had decided to focus his efforts on Rhône grapes, sourcing fruit from cool-climate vineyards in Russian River and Santa Ynez Valley. His approach was minimalist, picking on the shy side of ripe, fermenting on native yeasts, and using only tiny amounts of sulfur.

Two Shepherds’ first harvest was 2010, but the wines weren’t released until November 2011, after the obligatory struggle with the labyrinthine arcana of TTB approval. He now offers red and white blends, varietal Viognier and Grenache Blanc, and a marsanne-roussanne orange wine he calls “Centime.”

Critic Jon Bonné of the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote admiringly of his Grenache Blanc. So did Virginie Boone. Mutual friends had effused about his wines, too. I hadn’t tasted any of them until this fall.

Accolades notwithstanding, my expectations were modest. This is where an affinity for narrative can work against a wine writer. Knowing a wine’s story doesn’t change its flavor, but it does change its significance. To me, William was the scrappy, underdog garagiste, a part-timer trying to get traction. I didn’t expect serious wines.

But these are serious wines. They have great finesse and gravity, plus a kind of ringing clarity. They have a delicious texture that makes them seem both earthy and polished. They love food. They also like air and warmth to open up, and change in the glass throughout an evening. They’re a bit mercurial, which is a good litmus test for interestingness. Many are just as alive, if not more alive, the next day. 

These wines seemed to speak a language I didn’t know William spoke. By doing so, they told me something new about him, and about my own preconceptions.

After the tasting, I talked with William about his work.

Why make wine?

It was just something I was compelled to do. I’d been making wine for years, but really got serious when I first moved to wine country. It was kind of hard not to. I’d been blogging a lot, and my focus in talking with winemakers was always technical. I started to test out those things myself. People were like, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re just a garage winemaker.

How did Two Shepherds get started?

I had all these things I wanted to try, but there were so few people who knew about Rhône grapes. Nobody up here knew about working with grenache blanc. Anyway, you ask ten winemakers about anything and you’ll get seven different answers.

So I didn’t know I was going to start Two Shepherds. I just knew I was going to make wine in bond with Darek Trowbridge at Old World Winery. Because Rhônes are best as blends, but how the hell was I going to make seven barrels of wine myself, in my garage?

Why Rhône grapes?

When I was a garage winemaker I was all over the board. I’d done Sangio, Chardonnay. The Grenache Blanc motivated me to do this. Anthony Yount of Denner was an inspiration, one of the first to combine the brightness of Grenache Blanc with more complexity in the aromatics and mouthfeel. Grenache Blanc can be frankly a boring varietal. You have to look for the nuances, but they’re there.

One of the aesthetics of the brand is taking traditionally hot-climate varieties like marsanne and roussanne, ripening them in a cool climate, still getting phenolic ripeness, and bringing them into balance. I used to say “low alcohol,” but what’s important is balance. If I can also bring out wine with lower alcohol, that’s great.

Say more about your aesthetic.

Everyone uses “sense of place.” But sense of place is not only terroir and cool climate, it’s also the vintage. My wines will never be the same year to year, because the vintage won’t be the same.

I’m never going to call myself a natural winemaker. I’ve tried that route, and twenty parts per million of sulfur after malolactic will save your ass. There’s nothing wrong with a little sulfur. It’s been used for thousands of years, and will continue to be. But adding tartaric acid, water, tannins—that’s not winemaking.

Why “Two Shepherds?”

It’s a combination figurative and literal: “Shepherd of the palate, shepherd of the grape.” I make wine for consumers. I’m trying to get them to try something besides what they’d get at Safeway every day. So the “grape shepherd” watches the vineyard, then brings it into the winery and guides it into the bottle.

What’s in your way right now?

Money. I need to expand. I should do a more formal business plan and go out for funding. I need a passionate business partner, someone who has the same passion for Rhônes that I do, but has branding, marketing, accounting—all the stuff I hate.

What’s next?

I have a million ideas and want to do things that are new and innovative. I do massive experimentation and segmentation of lots. I’m not afraid to tinker, and if it’s bad, it goes down the drain.

I solve some of my problems by sticking to my core philosophy, which is to go simple. The second I start moving toward massive, stainless steel fermenting, I’d strip away everything that makes the brand what it is. In the Rhône, nobody buys new barrels anymore. You just wait until the old ones fall apart. In California, we talk about that like it’s an epiphany.

Each year I’m uncovering things that work well, and don’t work well. That’s a good reason to grow in increments. I’m not operating from a master plan. This thing happens organically every year.

 

 

T A S T I N G   N O T E S

Two Shepherds Vineyards Viognier Russian River Valley
2011
13.8% abv | $24 (media sample)
One hundred percent viognier from Saralee’s Vineyard in Windsor, California, harvested at 23° Brix and barrel-fermented in neutral oak with native yeast. The wine went through full malolactic. It was aged for four months in neutral oak on gross lees, then racked into stainless and aged an additional four months before being bottled, unfined and unfiltered.

Restrained stone fruit aromas open with air to yellow apple, laurel leaf, and wet stone. Lovely, creamy brioche notes mingle with flavors of yellow peach, stone fruits, and salty herbs. Restrained, with great minerality and acidity. It shows best between 55°F and 60°F. Although the winemaker maintains this vintage is less Condrieu-like than his 2010 (which I didn’t taste), it still evokes the Northern Rhône to me. Californian Viognier can be plush and syrupy, and I prefer the stony quality of true Condrieu, which this wine manifests. Serve it with crab cakes, lobster, seafood risotto, or a cheese course with a scattering of roasted nuts. 

Two Shepherds Vineyards “Pastoral Blanc” Russian River Valley
2011
13.8% abv | $24 (media sample)
A white Rhône-style blend of 45% roussanne, 20% marsanne, 20% viognier, and 15% grenache blanc. The fruit derives from Saralee’s Vineyard, with Brix at harvest from 22° to 23.5°. The grapes were fermented separately in neutral oak with native yeasts, and all went through malolactic.

Brilliant yellow gold color, with herbaceous aromas and a kind of savory silkiness on the palate. The roussanne gives the wine backbone and weight, but the blend feels lucid and beautifully balanced. It’s not a fruit-driven wine, and it’s not a showy wine, either. It seems meant as a versatile partner for food. I’d pour it with anything from roasted poultry rubbed with garrigue herbs, to butternut squash ravioli with browned butter and crisped sage, to pan-seared scallops with celery-root purée.

Two Shepherds Vineyards Grenache Blanc Santa Ynez Valley
2011
13.8% abv | $24 (media sample)
One hundred percent grenache blanc from Saarloos Vineyards in Los Olivos, California. The fruit was harvested at 22.9° Brix. The wine was fermented on native yeasts, then aged on the lees in neutral French oak.

Aromas of lime leaf, laurel, sage, and salt yield to a plush texture that’s balanced by great acidity. The wine feels spirited, almost nervy, but with a kind of lacy elegance that keeps it demure. Grenache Blanc shouldn’t be served too cold, and this one rewards languorous enjoyment, changing in the glass with air and warmth and time. Pair it with grilled fish drizzled with citrus butter, roasted chicken, or aged cheeses, especially old Gruyère.

Two Shepherds Vineyards GSM Russian River Valley
2010
13.8% abv | $32 (media sample)
A blend of 50% grenache, 25% syrah, and 25% mourvèdre. Grenache and syrah derived from Saralee’s Vineyard; the mourvèdre was from Livermore. All fruit was harvested under 24° Brix. The wine was fermented in neutral oak with native yeast, then aged ten months in neutral oak. The winemaker says this grenache was particularly pretty, very like Pinot Noir, requiring a deft hand in blending to let it express its charms.

Garnet red with aromas of beach rose, spice, white pepper, and rosemary, the wine is both wildly floral and tightly wound. It needed at least thirty minutes of air to open up, and was actually better the next day, relaxed and smiling. To me, grenache is about black pepper, berries, and wild herbs, and this grenache-heavy blend expresses this character well. It would be great with Provençal cuisine, particularly pissaladière, the aïoli platter, or black olive tapenade on grilled meats. Fittingly, it would also be great with lamb.

Deirdre Heekin's Bitter Alchemy

“I am une garagiste, a woman who makes wine in her garage, and I am maître liquoriste. I am the would-be parfumeur. I am mistress of alchemy.”

—Deirdre Heekin, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy

Deirdre Heekin smiles a welcome as she hands us each a glass of sparkling Nebbiolo. It’s a glittering Vermont evening in high summer. The sun’s still shining, so the day’s full moon hasn’t yet risen over the rolling fields to our east. We raise a genial toast to her, then carry our glasses from the shelter of this open barn to greet the other guests in the garden.

There’s a group already gathered by the tasting station, lined with the evening’s wines from Tuscany and Campania. Other guests stroll the fledgling vineyard or drape languorously on lawn furniture, savoring this bright moment of our fleeting northern summer.

Deirdre’s husband, Caleb Barber, is at the cooking station, stoking the hardwood fire, furiously toasting bread and grilling eggplant and radicchio for crostini. A slate chalkboard displays the evening’s menu of simple, elegant appetizers contrived to pair with the wines. It’s really just finger food, but no one will leave hungry.

The guests gathered here at Deirdre and Caleb’s home are writers and restaurateurs, publishers and professors, software execs and Aikido sensei. Each has come to enjoy the party in the barn and vineyard the hosts call La Garagista. 

The couple runs a tiny, flawlessly authentic Italian restaurant and wine bar in Woodstock, Vermont, Osteria Pane e Salute. Now in its thirteenth year, the restaurant has won acclaim from such publications as Food and Wine, Bon Appétit, and Travel and Leisure. Its Italian “revivalist” menu of traditional regional dishes is complemented by an extensive wine list.

Caleb commands the restaurant’s kitchen. A master chef who trained in Italy, he emphasizes what’s in season, sourcing provisions locally—even from the couple’s own organic gardens—to craft Italian dishes infused with the flavors of Vermont’s landscape.

Deirdre, meanwhile, runs the front of house, graciously serving as host, maître d’, and sommelier. There is only one seating, so your table is yours for the evening, and Deirdre is your spirit guide through the meal, suggesting wines matched to the menu’s regional cuisines.

She has made it her mission to assemble an archive of rare indigenous Italian wines. “When I choose wines for the restaurant,” she says, “I look for regional varietals, so that when we make an heirloom recipe from that region, I can reach for the wine that traditionally complements that dish.”

The meal, then, becomes a kind of re-enactment, a revitalization of a culinary experience: this way, she says, “we can have a sense of what people have historically tasted three hundred, five hundred, even a thousand years ago. This is what I like about making something that has existed for hundreds of years: I taste history.”

Deirdre is also an exquisite writer. Her food writing has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Gastronomica and Best Food Writing. With Caleb, she has authored a cookbook and, more recently, In Late Winter We Ate Pears, a memoir with recipes of their first year of marriage.

In her latest book, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy, Deirdre recounts her experiences developing her vinous palate, deepening her knowledge, and trying her own hand at the making of wines and spirits. She is driven to understand the role these play in the fabric of culture, and to document her own quest to insert herself, as producer, into the narrative begun centuries ago by old world winemakers and liquoristes.

Deirdre’s exploration has landed her in remote Italian hill villages, country cafés, vineyards tended by nuns, and even dusty bookstores, like the one in the Spaccanapoli neighborhood in Naples where, in the yellowing pages of an old cookbook, she once discovered a recipe for rosolio. That particular formula for the southern Italian liqueur was made from rose petals, using techniques easily mastered by home cooks. Back home in Vermont, Deirdre used roses from her garden to make her own batch of this sweet liqueur.

The hook was set. Cooking with their own produce, making their own liqueur—it seemed the leap to making their own wine was nearly inevitable. “To be fed by wine or food from our location is the best possible way we can live on our land,” she told me recently.

But a vineyard in Vermont? Yes, it is possible. Cold-hardy, short-season varietals like Frontenac, Frontenac Gris, St. Croix, and Marquette yield reasonably and can survive the -30 degree Fahrenheit winters. So two years ago, Deirdre, with Caleb’s ample help, planted 50 of these vines in their dense clay soil. This year they planted 250 more. Next year she’ll plant another 300, and by 2011 she’ll enjoy the first small harvest. Production will be in full swing by 2013.

She has also begun studying the work of several organic and biodynamic winemakers, and has spent time in the vineyards of like-minded Italian producers. This spring, she hopes to travel to France, learning from some of the great biodynamic growers in the Loire valley. Her aim is to transpose these techniques to her own plot. “Vin de terroir tastes of a place,” she says. “I want to be as non-interventionist as possible. I want to use wild yeast, and to ‘make wine in the vineyard.’ Farming biodynamically is about the cycles of the earth, sky, the plant, and the weather. It’s about keeping the soil healthy, and your vines healthy. It’s about paying attention.”

She’s now in the process of having the property bonded as a winery, but in the meantime, she has been making wine with purchased grapes, her first rough experiments yielding passable results—but real wine—and lots of learning opportunities.

Libation is a kind of memoir of her learning process, and of her circuitous journey through the underworld of spirits. We follow her to Rome, where, on a sultry October evening, she tastes her first Campari. We read of her search to acquire a bottle of the scarlet-hued alkermes, a rare and storied liqueur flavored with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, coriander, and vanilla. We are with her in an artisanal perfumery in Paris, where she is suddenly struck by the similarities between the work of the master parfumeur and that of the sommelier, both of whom must learn to divine the infinite mysteries of these bright spirits, and to harness them in service of their craft.

Deirdre also weaves deep history into the narrative, recounting her experiences cultivating her sense of smell and taste while providing background on the elixirs we have contrived to beguile us or simply slake our thirst. It’s a book, Deirdre writes, “about soil, vines, fruit, history, scent, taste, chemistry, and memory.”

“Taste is connected to history,” she continues, “the history of the table, which is, after all, a narrative history, an oral history. The tongue experiences; the mouth tells a story.” Our experiences of the table and the glass help seal the memory of a place and its people in our minds. Taken together, these memories constitute a culture’s history.

This work is a kind of alchemy, but the winemaker and the liquoriste are searching for a different kind of gold. I asked her about the title. “Historically, a libation was shared at the altar or at a meal. You drank in remembrance of the dead, and you poured it on the ground to give something back to the earth. It was about the incorporation of food and drink into the routine of our lives. It still is. To me, the word also conjures something more. To make a wine from fruit, or a liqueur from herbs—that’s nothing short of magic.”

Magic aside, cultivating a vineyard means hard work ahead for Deirdre and Caleb. “This is the beginning of the journey,” she says. “There’s so much more to learn. And there’ll be, I hope, another book about where it all has gone.”

Some summer full moon evening, not too long hence, we’ll gather again on the lawn at La Garagista, and raise a toast to Deirdre with a glass of her own wine.

This article originally appeared in Palate Press on 25 October 2009 and is reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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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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Deirdre Heekin's Bitter Alchemy

 
Deirdre Heekin is a writer, restaurateur, and sommelier. Her new book, Libation: A Bitter Alchemy, is an exquisite chronicle of her journey through the underworld of spirits as she learned to become liquoriste and winemaker.

Read my article on Deirdre and her new book, published today at Palate Press.

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Windy Oaks Pinot

Windy Oaks Estate
Estate Cuvée Pinot Noir
2007

This wine is brilliant red-purple, ringing with clarity. Its nose reaches up with lovely red fruit plus a lush, round earthiness. On the palate, it's silky but bright, with currant and fresh raspberry. Juicy and tart—unctuous, too. Do I detect umami? The wine is grounded, but not subtle. There's a lot going on.

Jim Schultz, the winemaker in this vineyard overlooking Monterrey Bay, strives for a non-interventionist style, making Pinot with only estate-grown grapes, wild yeast, and dry-farming unless absolutely necessary. He likes to stay out of the way, to let the grapes make the wine. (Read a two-part interview with Jim on Reign of Terroir: Part I; Part II.)

It's terrific.

Price: $30 (regular price about $38)
Drinks like: $35
Bang for the buck: 117%

Randall Grahm: Been Doon So Long

Photo: Alex Krause

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.

Read my article on Randall and his new book at Palate Press, or order a signed first edition copy from the Been Doon So Long book site.

Update, 1 November 2009: Read the full article, now republished here on Maker's Table.

Follow Maker's Table on Twitter: @makerstable