I can’t think of a more concise summary than Randall Grahm’s self-description as Don Quixote. But I think his wine windmills are a moving target, in more ways than one.
Bruce
Not the easiest articles to read - that’s for sure. Randall is, at his core, a dreamer, and that is made perfectly clear in this article. He dreams of another place, another time, another variety - while still trying to make and create wines like the rest of us.
He has the balls to take chances that other winemakers would not, and when this happens, sometimes you’ll have success, and many times you won’t.
I agree with him about the ‘mystery’ of wine being his driving force - I continue to tell folks that I simply do not understand ‘wine’ any more now than I did a decade ago. Yes, I understand the fermentation process, and yes, I understand the growing process - but I do not understand how a wine in barrel and then in bottle ‘evolves’ and ‘changes’ for these are not predictable at all . . . and that’s one of the things that continues to drive me forward.
Thanks for sharing, Tom.
Some of the early wines and some of the one-off experiments were really good. I was in DEWN for awhile. If you went to the old tasting room, there’d always be a gem or two amongst the weird stuff. But, if you noticed his “metholated” comment, that’s a joke to himself. A lot of the DEWN reds were strongly mentholated, which I found strange and offputting. He finally acknowledged that in a newsletter, knowing they were polarizing.
A few things to note:
His Vin Gris de Cigare is what opened the market to good dry rose.
The old Clos de Gilroy was from very old vines, from the Besson Vyd. That was an all-time qpr wine. John Locke’s grenache os from those vines.
The old Vin de Glaciere were mighty impressive, with different ones from different varieties. Scaled up as a consistent grocery store wine, they were still quite good. I’ve seen he’s gone back to some playing around, and would expect some of those to be great.
I agree that the Bonny Doon “Vin de Glaciere” was yummy. The “Le Pousseur” Syrah was very good, and reasonably priced, back ~15 years ago.
The Bonny Doon “Old Telegram” was one of my first Californian Mourvèdre wines. I must have enjoyed it, or my collection wouldn’t be what it is. 
After many a year I again subscribed to the New Yorker (I am from the East Coast). Does Adam Gopnik know anything at all about wine? This was one of those long, long pieces, so I admit I did not get beyond the following (and by the way I love French wine)~
Pinot Noir just cannot be grown in California…a couple of paragraphs later he states Burgundy cannot be grown here.
He is driving (in a pretentious 72 Citroën) in the Santa Cruz Mtns: (mind you, no wineries are cited)…chocolate over there (Cabernet), vanilla over there, (Chardonnay). So this would apply to Mount Eden,
Rhys, Varner, Arnout Roberts, Kutch, Ceritas, etc, etc.
He does not like Parker (really old news)…I have not forgotten when Parker dissed Zinfandel for not being a “noble” grape. Grahm goes one further comparing it to cranberry sauce. Clearly
about Thanksgiving which I think is the right occasion for Beaujolais.
He could not grow great Pinot Noir (quite a disaster) so he settled on the Southern Rhone; one must admit, much easier. He has had a measure of success.
Woo Woo, and something else are “Santa Cruz”; having lived through those years, I cannot speak for Southern California, but it was widespread in Northern California. In fact it has become a part of the vernacular.
He dreams of producing a classic past vintage of Cheval Blanc; even though our California exports are up, they are “monotone”. Yes, much like mass produced French wine.
Pompous ass in my book; he reminds me of Quentin Tarantino (net worth 100 million).
I was a DEWN member for several years but stopped because I didn’t want to continue paying for his experiments. I love the Syrahs and Grenache blends and the Proper Claret is one of my daily drinkers. I stopped paying attention to his ramblings long ago.
Enjoyable read.
I found it odd that Grahm chose “auto-tune” to describe his work on varieties. A term that, in the music world, epitomizes the sort of manipulation that would be called spoofulation in the wine world.
Maybe he just auto-tunes the marketing.
The eternal rip at Randall is that he is a so so winemaker but a genius at marketing.
Like that’s bad. I wish I were a marketing genius.
One of the best Grahm creations I’ve ever had wasn’t a wine. It was an eau de vie, made from stone fruits, called “Prunus” if I recall correctly.
He also made a fortified raspberry thing called “Framboise” which was delicious.
In the article RG says that his National Vinquirer newsletter was a big mistake, but at the time they printed extra copies. It made me laugh for weeks. I suppose you should remember the adage of living in a glass house. He has picks on people for years and then seems surprised that some feelings got hurt.
He published a book a few years ago, “Been Doon So Long.” It’s truly entertaining, chock full of some of his greates hits.
I’m not sure about ‘really great,’ but recent efforts of Clos de Gilroy Grenache have delivered a lot of value.
Grahm’s were definitely “go to” wines in the old days (80’s and early 90’s). Though I’m not sure, I ever had a great one, they were certainly good. His puns, however, were great.
I’ve like Gopnik less and less as a writer myself as time goes on. (More and more show-y, yet low hanging fruit.) One question I had for (fellow) geeks: Gopnik says “hang time” referred to length of the wine’s finish on the palate. I thought it always referred to when they were harvested. Did I miss the fad for the former?
You are correct on hang time.
I love Gopnik at his best, but he’s never been as good as when he was writing from Paris in the late 90s. Still, he has had some wonderful pieces in recent years. His essay last year on what America might have been like if we’d lost the War of Independence was hilarious (“We Could Have Been Canada”):
Holger Hoock, in his new book, “Scars of Independence” … shows [that the Revolution], was far more brutal than our usual memory of it allows… Page after page, the reader blanches while reading of massacres and counter-massacres, of floggings and rapes, of socket bayonets plunged into pitiful patriots and of competitive hangings and murders. The effect is made all the more hallucinatory by the fact that these horrors took place not in Poland or Algeria but in what are now, in effect, rest stops along I-95, in Connecticut and New Jersey, in a time we still think of as all three-cornered hats and the clip-clop of Hollywood equipages on cobblestoned streets.
If the article weren’t funny enough, it set off a barrage of nasty retorts in right-wing journals, whose authors plainly have no sense of Gopnik’s playfulness.
I also liked his essay on declinism (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”).
If only Randall had bought some grapes from the Eiseles his place in the pantheon would be assured.
Dang, that was a good read!
Thanks for the heads-up, John. 
Glad you liked it. It hit a lot of nails on the head. Among other things, it was nice to see someone challenge Niall Ferguson’s superficial takes.
annoying thing about Gopnik is his use of ‘varietal’ the adjective for ‘variety’ the noun
and his use of ‘complicated’ to describe a virtue of some wines, where most of us would most likely say ‘complex’
one non-sequitur about Randall
is his reluctance to take Zinfandel seriously,
despite his reverential admiration for Paul Draper,
whose Zin-based wines include some of the very best bottles ever produced in the Golden State.
This piece offers more words straight from the horse’s mouth. I think it provides good insight into the way RG’s eccentric mind operates:
Wild River Review
“The 5 Questions: Randall Grahm”
"For one thing, I appear to be dilletantish to the very core of my being, which is another way of saying that I’m very interested in almost everything, but have insufficient ability to focus on any one thing for a very protracted period of time. The fact that as a winery owner/winemaker/entrepreneur one has the opportunity, indeed the requirement to wear a very wide range of hats. This is incredibly cordial to my sort of personality/sensibility.
"Amazingly, my career in wine has acted like a very interesting sort of enzyme, which seems to have unlocked certain abilities in me that I never imagined I possessed – the ability to write creatively for one – which I ended up doing, initially in the Bonny Doon newsletters, essentially out of fear that I would not otherwise be able to hawk my wares.
"…I will most certainly never be a particularly gifted agriculturist – my head is too much in the clouds – and the essence of being a great farmer is the ability to be present with the land and the plants, to truly see (and feel) what is actually happening on one’s farm. But I think that somehow I am able to combine/synthesize a number of ideas and take them to a certain imaginative conclusion.
“…My family would celebrate Passover, so there was always the dreaded, archetypal Manischewitz Concord on the table – somehow I imagine this doesn’t really count as wine. (It’s more of a condiment, like cranberry sauce.)*”
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- Sound familiar?
Well, we can always argue about Randall’s wine making ability, but there is no question his take on the honey badger was fantastic.