Over lunch in London, Randall Grahm told me he was ripping up his vines. He wanted to start again and breed a new kind of vine altogether, one made for California instead of borrowed from France. For a man who had spent decades making some of America’s best-known Rhône-style wines, it was a striking thing to say between courses.
It took me a while to write about the lunch, which Field, Morris & Verdin hosted. Partly this was because my notes, scribbled while sitting next to him, looked like a mind map from a Steiner school: volcanoes, root depth, new clones, aesthetics, saline water, acacia barrels, and his question about where the lime note in Australian Riesling comes from.
The other reason is that so much has already been written about him, and it’s easy to get caught up in the Californian mythology. From a European point of view he does look exotic, with the long hair, the John Lennon glasses and the gonzo drawings by Ralph Steadman, the artist behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, on some of his labels. I couldn’t help feeling there was something deeper going on.
The wines themselves are elegant. If you hadn’t seen the packaging or read his essays, you might be surprised to learn they come from California, since the style leans towards the Old World, with restrained fruit and restrained oak. They are a good deal calmer than the labels suggest.
The conversation that opened things up began with a photograph we had both seen of some unusual old vines in Rioja. He had just come back from the Grenache Symposium in the south of France, and we talked about old Grenache vines and whether what mattered was their age or how deep their roots reached into the soil. That was when he told me about starting again with a new breed of vine.
A new vine would need a new name, and Randall Grahm is very good at renaming the world. In his book Been Doon So Long: A Randall Grahm Vinthology, he makes no secret of being a Francophile, and only a true admirer of Châteauneuf-du-Pape would call his flagship red Le Cigare Volant. The name is a joke about a 1954 decree in Châteauneuf that banned flying saucers from landing in its vineyards.
His names do more than tease his idols. Ca’ del Solo, his Italian-sounding label, plays on the idea of being home alone and on the town of Soledad, with its prison, near where the grapes for his Albariño were grown. By borrowing the look of European wine, he questions our assumptions about where good wine comes from, and by breeding a new vine he wants to go further and change what a noble variety can be in California. Look past the packaging and you find a depth in the wines that recalls the small number of European growers who know every corner and slope of their vineyards intimately, an idea he returns to in his book.
The change in his winemaking showed in the glass. Over the previous five years he had moved to a more hands-off approach, and the difference between the 2005 and 2007 vintages of his Syrah, Le Pousseur, was clear: the 2007 had lower alcohol, more savoury character and more charm, as if it had something to say. He looked tired from his travels, and when I asked about all that flying, we ended up talking about the volcano.
Eyjafjallajökull had erupted in Iceland that spring and grounded flights across Europe, and for a little while plenty of people imagined a future without instant travel. The novelist Paulo Coelho joked on Twitter that the planet didn’t need saving, since it would be fine, and it was us who should worry. The environmentalist Bill McKibben went further, arguing in his book Eaarth that the planet has changed so much it deserves a new name, with an extra “a” to mark the difference. It’s the ultimate rebranding exercise.
Working where the environment meets culture, Randall Grahm was already well ahead of that game. His renaming, and his play on the great names of wine, acknowledges that we are heading for a very different world, and he is planting new vines for it. With luck, it will be somewhere the wines are very, very good.
Thank you to Field, Morris & Verdin for hosting the lunch, and to Randall for the copy of his book.
Archive note: This post dates from 2010. In 2020 Randall Grahm sold the Bonny Doon Vineyard brand to WarRoom Ventures, staying on at first as winemaker and partner, and he has since concentrated on Popelouchum, his vineyard near San Juan Bautista in San Benito County, where he is breeding new grape varieties. The new vines he described over lunch now have a home.
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