ON THE SANTA CRUZ TRAIL

It was an unusually swank event for the Santa Cruz Mountains. Of the 28 guests at the first Saturday Night Dinner at Bonny Doon Vineyard, only a few wore jeans; a number of ties were in evidence, and probably the first white dinner jacket to be spotted in this rough-and-ready corner of the redwoods in several years.

When winemaker Randall Grahm, owner of Bonny Doon Vineyard, decided to plan a summer series of wine dinners with caterer Michael Clark, he wasn’t sure that anyone would come. He wondered if Santa Cruzans would pay $55 per person for a six-course meal with wine; he worried that Bonny Doon, a hamlet about 10 winding miles north of Santa Cruz, was too far to attract a crowd.

But come they did, on a cool May evening, for a meal of food and wine in the style of southwest France. Fans of Grahm’s wines from as far away as the Livermore Valley and Los Angeles showed up, as did famed goat-cheese maker Laura Chenel from Santa Rosa and fellow Santa Cruz winemakers Ken Burnap of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard and David Graves of Saintsbury Vineyard.

The evening began with aperitifs and hors d’oeuvres in the winery’s tasting room. Don’t picture the oak-and-marble chateaux of the Napa Valley; the unpretentious Bonny Doon winery brings to mind the small, ramshackle wineries that dot the French countryside.

Grahm, a native of Los Angeles and graduate of the University of California, Davis, is frequently described as “eccentric,” “off-beat,” and sometimes even “crazy.” He delights in taking the least-traveled path. He worked in the Rhone Valley; among Americans he is almost alone in making wines from Rhone varietals. His obtusely intellectual sense of humor is part of his style; the winery’s newsletters are full of puns about philosophy and literature, and he has named his best-known wine, a blend similar to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Le Cigare Volante, which is French for a cigar-shaped UFO.

With the hors d’oeuvres we drank Champagne, a delicious infusion of Marionberry (one of several fruit infusions now made by Bonny Doon), and Vin Gris de Mourvedre. In color, the Vin Gris resembles one of the trendy new “blush” wines, but Grahm, who takes pride in staying aloof from trends, blushes at the thought; he explains that the mourvedre grape is a very old variety grown mostly for home winemakers in an obscure viticulture area of Contra Costa County.

The guests were then shooed into the dining room. The first course was a fine combination of bright green, crisp asparagus spears and a delicately sweet red pepper mousse made with creme fraiche and served with a warm vinaigrette flavored with balsamic vinegar and sesame oil.

A cassoulet, the trademark dish of southwest France, was the centerpiece of the meal. Chef Clark, who has worked at the Savoy and Connaught in London, Maxim’s in Paris and many first-class hotels in the Bay Area, called it the “truck-driver’s special.” It was stick-to-the-ribs hearty in a rich tomato base, with good homemade sausage and duck, and rather tough pieces of lamb.

With the cassoulet, Grahm served two Cabernet-Merlot blends he labelled claret, the English term for Bordeaux wines. We loved the smooth, berry-like taste of the clarets, but, unfortunately, Grahm doesn’t make them any more--the generic name put buyers off, he thinks, despite a marketing campaign he began with bumper-stickers reading, “You need not be a pompous twit to enjoy Bonny Doon claret.”

The salad course included local red-leaf lettuce and a potpourri of flowers. Then, on trays gloriously heaped with herbs, cherries and slices of fresh baguette, were cheeses, including a Morbier, perfectly ripe Roquefort and three of Chenel’s goat cheeses: one fresh and sharp, one dry and refined with a few months aging, and one that had been soaked in cognac, wrapped in grape leaves and aged for nine months, leaving it with an elegant taste and a lovely perfume.

For dessert Clark created a simple tart of light vanilla pastry cream topped with red and white Grahm-grown fraises de bois . Accompanying the tart was 1984 Muscat Canelli “Vin de Paille,” a golden dessert wine rich with the flavors of apricot and tropical fruits. Some guests sat, sated, as giant chocolate-dipped strawberries appeared; others headed for the “optional cigar course” on the patio. “The cigars are from the Canary Islands and Jamaica,” said Grahm. “We were hoping for a shipment of Havanas, but I guess they were seized.”

Some places remain for “Provence for Garlic Lovers” on July 25 and a salute to the Burgundy region, on Aug. 22. Contact Bonny Doon Vineyard, (408) 425-3625.