THE WOODY ALLEN OF WINE MAKING

Take Woody Allen. Make him taller and huskier, and lose the glasses and the Angst . You wouldn’t have Woody Allen any more, of course. You’d have a Californian who quotes Beckett, Heidegger and Perelman a lot.

Turn him into a wine maker and you’d pretty much have Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards. The wines Grahm produces in a wooded hamlet about 75 miles south of San Francisco, like Allen’s films, are idiosyncratic statements in an ever more standardized industry, serious works with hyper-literate comic trappings.

In fact, the comic labels on some of his wines may be better known than the wines themselves. Le Cigare Volant bears a parody of a French wine label, an antique-style engraving of a wine chateau with a flying saucer (called a “flying cigar” in French) lurking behind a tree and sending down an ominous beam of reddish light. Then there’s Old Telegram, the name referring to the venerable Chateauneuf-du-Pape vineyard Domaine du Vieux Telegraphe, with a label like a creased old telegram, complete with raised strips bearing the text.

There are jokes within the jokes, too. The flying-cigar business has to do both with a tobacco-leaf flavor some tasters find in the wine and the fact that in 1954 the village of Chateauneuf-du-Pape passed a law forbidding flying saucers to land in its vineyards. Vin Gris de Cigare, Grahm’s rose wine, has the same flying saucer label plus a text that reads as if badly translated from French (“Is there something not entirely self-evident about a wine that proclaims itself a gray wine of cigar?”). However, this label is glued on the bottle backward; you have to read it (if you can) through the wine. In other words, if you want to know anything about this wine, you may have to drink it first. It’s Grahm’s baroque way of saying this rose is for current consumption, not for aging.

The wine behind these convoluted labels is unusual in its own right, most of it made from Rhone Valley grapes rather than the familiar Burgundy or Bordeaux varieties. Grahm has already taken out all his Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon and half of his Chardonnay, that mainstay of California vineyards. On Bonny Doon labels you mostly see unfamiliar names such asGrenache and Syrah and virtually unknown ones such as Viognier, Mourvedre, Marsanne, Roussanne and Cinsault.

They’re idiosyncratic wines, reflecting Grahm’s personal theories about wine making, and wine writers have sometimes cast aspersions on them. One problem is that most of them are designed to be aged, and nobody yet knows whether they will. The public likes them, though. The 300 cases of Le Cigare Volant sell out in about a month, and 600 cases of Old Telegram have disappeared in as little as a week.

One secret ingredient in Grahm’s success is his sales rep in the Los Angeles market: his 65-year-old mother, who carries around her sample bottles in a wicker basket trimmed with ribbon and lace (earlier she used a plastic Gucci bag). One day she was working on Rafael Nazario, 72 Market St.’s wine buyer at the time, using a battery of sales techniques that included joshing, flirting and even pinching his cheeks. He turned to an observer and commented: “You see how it is. If you have a hard time telling a guy you don’t want to buy his wine, try telling his mother.” Ruth Grahm laughed and blushed violently.

“I’ll tell you what she really does,” Nazario continued. “She goes around telling everybody there are only a couple of cases of the wine, or a couple of bottles. She makes it sound as if there’s hardly any to be had.”

“Well, I never know how much there really is,” she protested, looking around for reassurance. “I’ve just always been paranoid about selling people on a wine I couldn’t give them.”

“But that’s her secret,” said Nazario. “Immediately it’s an in-group thing to stock the wines. In L.A., nobody wants to be left out of the club.”

She’s a songwriter by profession, not a saleswoman. In the beginning, as she admits, she didn’t even know anything about wine--not even how to use a corkscrew. But she’s not only a charmer, she’s exceptionally persistent. “You could set your watch by her,” says another restaurant wine buyer. “If every winery had a Ruth Grahm representing it,” says Steve Wallace of Wally’s, “wine sales in this country would double.”

Running a winery was not Randall Grahm’s original scheme, if indeed he had a scheme. In a meandering seven-year undergraduate career he majored mostly in philosophy but also completed a premed curriculum and transferred to MIT for a while. Premed was his parents’ idea. “It was a dark day,” says Ruth Grahm forebearingly, “when he told his father he wasn’t going to be a doctor.”

But what exactly did his parents expect? They’d sent him to UC Santa Cruz, known throughout the state as Pepperland-by-the-Sea. With his T-shirts and long, curly hair, Grahm still looks deceptively like a ‘60s- or ‘70s-vintage student/seeker.

The turning point came in 1976, when Grahm got bogged down on a thesis on Heidegger’s concept of Dasein , dropped out of school for a while and happened to take a job in a wine shop in Los Angeles. “I got to drink just tremendous bottles of wine virtually every night,” he recalls, beaming. “I got enchanted with the aesthetic of wine.”

Eventually he decided he wanted to be a wine maker and went back to school again, this time to the School of Enology and Viticulture at UC Davis. His dream was to produce a wine from the Pinot Noir grape that would rival the great red Burgundies, a goal that has proved tantalizingly elusive in California.

It is “not a complete coincidence,” he admits, that the vineyard property he ended up choosing was just 11 miles from his old college campus in the rustic hamlet known as Bonny Doon. “I was looking for the place to grow the perfect Pinot Noir,” he says, “that was the whole raison d’etre. And I looked really up and down the state, I looked in Oregon and Washington. But frankly it was tempered by a desire to live an enjoyable life.” Again, a casual observer could easily be deceived into seeing another UC Santa Cruz stereotype here: the hobbit-student yearning to live in the wildwood just a short drive from the pleasures of his old college town.

With a loan from his father, who conveniently happens to be a bank chairman, he bought land to put his vineyard and a house on, and then a winery and tasting room property about four miles away. However, rough times lay ahead for the would-be Pinot Noir king.

For one thing, there was a lot of employee turnover in the early days. “I must say his style works against him,” says Paul Hostetter, a longtime neighbor. “He talks down to people. And lots of people get repelled because he’s so difficult. He just says, ‘We will do this,’ and if they object, he just tosses people aside.”

“He happens to be an intense man who thinks about nothing else but wine and food,” says Deirdre Hill, who has catered parties at the winery and was to have been the chef of a restaurant Grahm planned at one time. “He’s from L.A., and he has those high-speed ideals, though he tries to be a country boy with torn jeans and rubber boots. Being from a wealthy family is a disadvantage in relating to those of us who have to work.

“I know some of the employees who left were critical of the pay scale. Of course, that’s always a problem here in Santa Cruz. Wages are always low.”

Grahm had also wandered into a complex social world. To someone casually driving up Bonny Doon Road the area looks like empty forest, but it’s actually honeycombed with residential properties, spaced just far enough apart so that one need never see a neighbor’s house. A lot of creative people have enjoyed the tranquillity of Bonny Doon, such as the science fiction author Robert Heinlein. A characteristic local tradition has it that Grahm’s tasting room, which used to be a bar called the Lost Weekend, was once owned by the inventor of the Pet Rock.

One longtime resident estimates the population has at least quadrupled in the last 20 years, many of the newcomers being computer people from “over the hill” in Silicon Valley. An isolated, rural place where people commonly traded services among themselves has become surprisingly populous, with a bus running to Santa Cruz five times a day. To many residents hidden among the trees, the wilderness quality they had moved to Bonny Doon for was already in danger before Grahm came, even though there was still not a single shop, not even a gas station.

Then Grahm moved in with bulldozers to carve a vineyard out of the redwoods. “The original vineyard project was well received,” says Paul Hostetter. “People liked the way it looked, they liked to see the property used again. But he bought the only remotely commercial building, right in the middle of a well-settled area of two-acre lots, and turned it into his wine-tasting room. He got a permit to build a winery, but he built about eight times what the permit said. Then he had big wine tastings on weekends.”

Grahm’s nemesis has been the Rural Bonny Doon Assn. “We have a problem with commercial growth in Bonny Doon,” says Bruce Bratton, a member of the board of directors of the RBDA. “We don’t want any. We want to stop any business. We just turned down a general store.” The organization, which fears Bonny Doon will become “another Napa,” has been facing off with Grahm in local courts for years.

“The opposition (to Grahm) has been in two stages,” says Bratton. “First Randall Grahm opened a tasting room and a winery on a little half-acre lot, and two or three people who lived on both sides of him led the fight against him. They didn’t like the increased traffic because of the tasting, the cars parked up and down the road and the noise of the working of the winery in crushing season. They wanted him to abide by the ordinances, about where to dump his sludge (crushed grape skins)--not in the stream--and operating hours and so on. . . .

“We were trying to get him to do it legally. The problem was that he went further than they expected, he misrepresented what he was going to do. He had outdoor concerts like a mini-Paul Masson, he was serving commercial dinners a couple of nights a month.

“The second phase came about because now he wants to increase operations. He’s bought more vineyard property. We worry about pesticides and herbicides. Water is a big problem around here--we’re dependent on ground water and it is very scarce.”

A quaint, and very Santa Cruz, aspect is that a lot of Grahm’s neighbors think they are defending the forest primeval against encroaching civilization. Actually, Bonny Doon was logged clear in the 19th Century and turned into farmland, mostly vineyards that later disappeared during Prohibition and the Depression. Trees have come back in this century--much of the area was a Christmas tree farm in the ‘40s--but there’s only one original stand of redwoods in the whole area.

At any rate, the Santa Cruz Board of Supervisors has listened to the neighbors’ complaints and restricted the amount of wine he can make at the winery to 20,000 gallons, and consequently he has to make about 40% of his wine outside Bonny Doon, renting facilities at other wineries. This has not discouraged Grahm, though. He recently bought land for a second vineyard in Bonny Doon, as well as a third in Monterey. He’s cleared the second vineyard and plans to start planting it next spring.

Ironically, the property he bought in 1979 to make the perfect Pinot Noir turned out to be mediocre for the purpose. When his own grapes didn’t meet his standards, Grahm put out a Pinot Noir wine anyway, only made from Oregon grapes. Many California wine experts now admit Oregon and Washington will be the states to produce great Pinot Noir wines, not California, and other California wineries have gone to Oregon for their grapes since Grahm. Nevertheless, the failure of his Pinot Noir project was a philosophical defeat.

However, it was a defeat he turned into victory. From the start he had been planning to make wine from Rhone grapes as well; now he made Bonny Doon the principal winery in California concentrating on Rhone grapes. He began searching for old California vineyards planted with Rhone varieties such as Grenache, and found surprising quantities of Mourvedre, which was once common under its Spanish name, Mataro. The first grapes crushed at his own winery were of the noble Rhone variety Syrah (not to be confused with the usually pedestrian grape known in California as Petite Sirah) from 150 miles down the coast.

When he put the Syrah wine on the market, it showed not only the future direction of his wines but a taste of the whimsical labels to come, a back label that began with the words, “Que syrah?”

“It was a way of keeping myself amused,” says Grahm. “The presumption was that most people don’t read the back label anyway, so I probably wouldn’t offend anyone too beautifully.”

Grahm shambles through his 28-acre vineyard in the midst of a forest of coastal redwood trees, the grape-laden vines protected from deer by what looks like a very expensive fence and covered with netting against grape-loving birds. He’s brimming over with ideas, usually ideas that contradict the received wisdom of his fellow Davis-educated wine makers.

His best-known heretical theory is that California should not be growing Cabernet and Chardonnay, because those grapes should have a cooler climate and because they make wines so subtle they work only with the generous foil of classic French cuisine.

For instance, in his opinion, Chardonnay really goes only with cream sauces. “Rhone or Italian varieties”--he has a theory that they are closely related--”work with a lot more things. Food that’s spicy or salty or aggressively flavored with herbs, or garlic, or Oriental or Indian spices--anything persistent on the palate--needs a wine of comparable power to serve with it.” Given their food tastes, he says, Californians should “just say no to Chardonnay.”

The new 40-acre property in Monterey will actually specialize in Italian grapes. “We’re putting in Barbera,” Grahm says, “and Sangiovese--it reminds me of Mourvedre. Actually, I prefer Sangiovese to Mourvedre. It has the bass notes of Mourvedre plus the tenor voices, the fruity esters.

“We’re also experimenting with 25 other varieties. We’re trying to figure out which grapes will do best there in the property, rather than deciding this is what we’re going to grow. I’d be happy to grow Dolcetto, or Nebbiolo, or Arneis, whatever.”

The first wines from his Monterey vineyards will be on the market next year: a Malvasia Bianca and a fizzy Moscato d’Asti. Needless to say, they’ll get the Bonny Doon label treatment. All the Monterey wines will be marketed under the brand name Ca del Solo. “It means ‘house of the solitary man,’ ” Grahm explains; the vineyard is about one mile from Soledad Prison. “Sooner or later,” he adds, “we’ll have some big house wines.”

Big House wines, that is. But Grahm insists Bonny Doon is not simply going to become Ca del Solo: “We’ll go where the grapes are. The grapes should dictate what the winery is about. I’m not leaving Bonny Doon, though. And I’m not giving up on Rhone. If anything, I’m expanding it.”

For 50 yards of the vineyard path, he talks about experimenting with European devigorating rootstocks, which deprive the vine of water and make it put all its energy into the fruit. “Like anything else,” he says (by “anything,” as usual, meaning “anything having to do with wine”), “we’re still about 20 years behind Europe in the States.”

He is referring to his views about how grapes should be grown. Most California wine makers are either enologist-viticulturalists, meaning they went to UC Davis, or “grape farmers” who grew up in the wine country. Grape farmers have the traditional California fruit grower’s preoccupation with getting fruit to maximum market ripeness. The college-educated wine makers may have learned a vast body of technique for tweaking the best from the grapes they get, but they think in roughly similar terms about ripeness. At Davis, everyone studies a map that divides the state into “degree-day zones” based on the average number of days of the year a certain temperature is reached.

Grahm, however, points out that to a European wine maker, the ideal climate for a grape is not where it ripens easily but where it struggles to ripen at all. Devigorating root stocks can add to the struggle.

This leads to the subject of the new mutant strain of the phylloxera vine louse, which might destroy most of California’s vineyards in a matter of years, and then to his lucky find of an old vineyard of Mourvedre grapes in the Sacramento River Delta, lucky not only because they’re old vines that produce flavorful wine but because they grow in sandy soil that the vine louse can’t tolerate.

Then for 50 yards the path goes between rows of Marsanne and Roussanne grapes. Marsanne produces big, dense clusters of berries (wine makers confusingly call grapes, in the sense of the individual small fruits of a vine, “berries”; in their professional jargon “a grape” means a grape variety ); consequently, Marsanne suffers from mildew and bunch rot on the vine. His inspiration here has been to cut the bottom half of each bunch off with scissors to see whether this prevents rot and possibly forces more flavor into the remaining berries.

Finally he arrives at his Chardonnay vines. The bunches are laughably tiny, often only four or six berries. He gives them a grave, speculative look that might have crossed his own father’s face once or twice during the long years of his perpetual studenthood.

“The Chardonnay is so pathetically unyielding,” he says in a tone of affectionate exasperation. “Out of our Chardonnay acreage we should be getting 40 tons, and last year we got six.” It will have to go the way of his Pinot and his Cabernet; half the vines have now been grafted so that from now on they will produce Marsanne and Roussanne, and the rest will be grafted soon.

But when it comes to low production, the Viognier grape might be even worse. Its berries are very sweet and attract yellow jackets, and they also ripen unevenly, causing bunch rot. Several other California wine makers also produce wine from Viognier, but only in very small quantity (Ritchie Creek has produced as much as 10 barrels in one year). Grahm made one barrel in 1989, two in 1990. Even in France, where it is grown in a small area around the village of Condrieu, Viognier is considered a problem grape.

But it produces a most appealing wine, with a heady aroma like very ripe peaches and a taste that is paradoxically rich but clean. Somehow it tastes the way the stream water in a Disney cartoon would probably taste.

Grahm has been experimenting with maceration a froid, an oddball new fermenting technique devised by French-Lebanese wine consultant Guy Akkad. In this method, only enough grapes are crushed to fill the fermenting tanks two feet deep, and once fermentation is under way the rest of the grapes are thrown whole, in bunches, and left for a week or more. Fermentation actually begins within the uncrushed berries, and Grahm believes the resulting flavors are more intense. It requires a massive dose of sulfur dioxide to prevent the whole thing turning to vinegar, but sulfur dioxide also dissolves elements in the grape skins that add to the flavor.

He also makes what he calls fruit infusions to keep his winery busy during the off season. For these he fills a fermenting tank with, say, raspberries, ferments them for a while, adds sugar and stops the fermentation with alcohol. The result is not a wine but a fruit syrup something like a French creme de cassis, as much a cooking ingredient as a beverage.

Lately he has been interested in distilling brandies. He has made European-style eaux de vie from the juice of pears, apples and apricots, and grape brandies in the Italian grappa style. For one of them he uses Muscat grapes, but he has also made a grappa d’Isabella from one of the native American grape varieties belonging to the species Vitis labrusca-- the Concord-type grapes that are traditionally despised by wine makers in Europe and California.

Grahm despises them too--for wine. “I believe their telos (destiny) is grappa ,” he says. “We’re also looking at Niagara and Delaware grapes. Have you ever had fragolino ? It’s Italian grappa made from Labruscas. It falls into a gray area about legality, because you’re not allowed to make wine from Labrusca grapes in the European Community.”

He clearly identifies with the Italian distillers’ legal uncertainty because of his situation with his own quasi-ice wines. Connoisseurs of German wine know that when grapes are left on the vine past the end of the season and then picked after a freeze, the ice in the grapes withdraws water from the juice and effectively concentrates its flavor. The resulting “ice wines” resemble the famous Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese wines, whose juice is concentrated by the agency of a particular mold, although ice wines lack the particular honey-like quality that the latter wines get from the mold itself.

Grahm makes an equivalent by a straightforward Yankee method of picking grapes and storing them in a commercial freezer. Then, when the regular wine-making season is over, he can make small batches of dessert wine at his leisure. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms definition of “ice wine” requires freezing weather rather than a mechanical freezer, so Grahm was refused permission to call his product either ice wine or vin de glace.

They couldn’t deny him his compromise term, vin de glaciere, however. It’s the purest truth in advertising, since glaciere means “refrigerator.” It was one case where the overeducated jester of wine had the last laugh.