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‘Maverick’ vintner makes the trek north to Oregon

Wine news — Eclectic winemaker Randall Grahm releases humorous wine anthology, ‘Been Doon So Long’ and signs book at Dundee event

• By: David Sale  
• Published: 11/17/2009 12:40:42 PM

Photo By: David SaleWhimsical prose
Randall Grahm signs copies of his first book, ‘Been Doon So Long,’ during a stop Tuesday at Dundee Bistro.

   DUNDEE — Loath as some in Oregon are to admit it, they make good wine in California too and one of that state’s leading figures was hosted Tuesday by Dick and Nancy Ponzi in a winemaker’s dinner and book signing.
   Randall Grahm, founder and proprietor of Bonny Doon winery near Santa Cruz, Calif., glories in his reputation as a winemaking maverick, known for championing “misunderstood” grapes from Southern France and Italy, advertised with unique and eye-popping labels and brand names. (His flagship wine, “Le Cigare Volant,” is a grenache-syrah blend named in homage to an 18th-century French UFO sighting).
   “Basically, I got into the business with the assumption that I would make good pinot noir and be done with it,” he said of his career. “In fact, my efforts in that direction were systematically thwarted — the best pinot I ever made was with grapes grown at Bethel Heights, just up the road. Coming here, it was hard to shake the feeling that there’s a doppelganger here, a version of myself that did move to Oregon 25 years ago.”
   Rather than regret the road not taken, though, Grahm has striven to capture in his wines the same sense of place — “terroir,” in French — as Oregon’s winemakers do. “That was what I always admired about European wines,” he said. “A wine that’s controlled and consistent is also limited by the winemaker’s imagination. It’s better to step to the side and let the place speak for itself.”
   However, few would accuse Grahm of being short of imagination, with the publication of his first book, “Been Doon So Long,” a collection of essays on wine making and the state of the industry, along with wine-themed parodies and pastiches of famous writers from Kafka and T.S. Eliot to The Eagles and “The Bridges of Madison County.”
   The bulk of the entries were originally written to supplement the Bonny Doon wine club newsletter. “(It was) to amuse people and get them to buy the wine,” he admitted, and was as the legacy of another road not taken, that of a career in academia. “I was not a disciplined grad student.”
   Grahm is, however, an inveterate punster, beginning with the title (a riff on ‘60’s cult novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me,”) and averaging about one per line for the remainder of the 315-page book, including the copious, and equally humorous, footnotes.
   It seems clear that the craft of winemaking, for Grahm, is so important he has to joke about it to keep his perspective, as in “The Vinferno,” a parody of Dante where such offenders as point-scoring wine critics, airheaded marketers and makers of oaky chardonnay are each consigned to a fiery doom. Or “doon,” as Grahm would have it.
   Lavishly illustrated by numerous artists (the bulk of them formerly commissioned to illustrate Bonny Doon’s labels), “Been Doon So Long” is the perfect coffee-table book for the literary wine aficionado and is available for purchase on-line at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or direct from the winery at bonnydoonvineyard.com.

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