Monday, April 27 2009
Blame It On Randall
On the outside looking in?
I have curious, if somewhat tenuous connection to Randall Grahm (above), proprietor of Bonny Doon Vineyards and all-around wildly inventive marketer and polymathic winester. Bonny Doon used to sponsor a writing contest, 'A Gutwrenching Parody of Staggering Silliness'. On a whim I entered one year and to my surprise I took 5th place (of ten) in the Laureate's category for my silly little parody of Gravity's Rainbow (link: it's about halfway down the page).
I like his wine a lot. While I've never tasted anything that made me want to be a better person or dedicate my life to cherishing grapevines, it's all good solid workmanlike wine at very good value--completely suitable to the criteria of my value system. In particular I have a soft spot for his Vin Gris de Cigare, a Grenache rosé much like a Rhône pink wine. It's more his winemaking philosophy that I like--devotion to Riesling, my favorite white grape, and his work with Rhône varietals and his rejection of the typical California winemaking styles and his generally goofy and irreverent attitude towards wine itself. Too many people are to serious about wine, and he helps balance that out.
So when he was featured in the online NYT last week I read the article quite eagerly. As usual, he was doing something new: selling off the bulk of his winemaking operation, going from 450,000 cases per year to a mere 35, 000 and concentrating on dry-farmed grapes to become a dedicated terroir-ist. Some of you will recall my rather cranky column on terroir. I'm a firm fan of letting the soil, sun, and presence of place do the talking through the vines, rather than having some chemist stomp out individuality in the lab. Good on Randall for putting his terroirist leanings where his mouth is.
But lo! I read the second page of the article and came across an amazing picture.
Photo by Sara Remington. New York Times
Now anybody who works in the consumer winemaking industry or who has tried to buy a glass carboy recently has been frustrated: the supply of carboys from Mexico has dried up completely and Italian versions are either very expensive or unavailable as well. Now it turns out that the reason for scarcity has a darker side: Randall got them all. According to the article,
In the other cellar, dozens of glass carboys line one wall. Inspired by Emidio Pepe, a producer in Abruzzo who ages his wines in glass for years, Mr. Grahm is using the carboys to age a portion of his 2008 Cigare Volant, his southern Rhone blend, to be compared with a similar lot aging in wood.
"This is either going to revolutionize everything we do, or not," he said. "But I think it will."
Dude is bulk-ageing his wine in carboys. Winemakers who have heard me do troubleshooting and Q&A sessions over the last fifteen years have found me distinctly cool to the idea of bulk-ageing in carboys. I've always followed the old French maxim that ageing wine only began after the invention of the glass bottle and the cork, so when a wine had finished processing the very best place for it is in a bottle, under a good cork, tucked into a proper cellar.
Hmmph! I guess I'm just going to have to see how it turns out. Meanwhile, we're lucky enough to have a superb alternative to the missing glass carboys, the Better Bottle PTFE version.
I always said, 'You'd better bottle'.
They're working well for me, but I have to admit a small nostalgia for my old glass carboys. Of course, that goes away when I think about lifting them, and my back cramps up.
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