Randall Grahm On Harvest
The cult-wine icon talks about the season's trials, tribulations, squirrels...and Twitter.

When someone utters the phrase "cult winemaker," it should bring to mind few names other than that of Randall Grahm, winemaker and owner of Bonny Doon Vineyard. Grahm's long enjoyed a reputation for embracing the contrarian (from growing strange grape varieties to bottling them under even stranger labels), and has quite the loyal following; 385,000 people receive every one of his public thoughts on Twitter.

But being the posterchild for the movement demanding more interesting, expressive wines doesn't separate Grahm from the unglamorous, dirty and often discouraging work that is growing grapes and making wine--especially not at this time of year, the peak of the harvest season.

For weeks now, Grahm's been living out of a suitcase as he zigzags up and down the west coast to vineyards he owns or buys fruit from, all to make sure every little vineyard-management and picking decision is close to perfect. Or as much as that's possible--plenty of things can go wrong. We know because he took some time out--in the middle of the night, after an extremely long day, it should be noted--to share with us some of the challenges he faces on a daily basis (squirrels and bugs), not to mention some of the monumental ones ahead (the new vineyard he's growing entirely from seedlings).

Read on for our full interview, and go inside the mind of one of the most interesting icons in the world of wine. Oh, and did we mention the squirrels? If there are any reading this, you wouldn't want to be caught in one of Grahm's vineyards. Click here to find out why.

Bottlenotes: With all the vineyards you work with in different places, how do you stay on top of the ripeness levels and, ultimately, get your picking decisions right?
Grahm: This is definitely a work in progress, and while I sincerely think that [we're] getting better at it, we still don't always get it quite right--witness the fact that we recently harvested some Mourvèdre at 26+ Brix, largely negating the significance of my many pious rants against over-ripe grapes and blustery wines. Some of the issue is really one of logistics--the growers we work with can't get the fruit picked soon enough, [there are] not enough pickers, vineyards [are] too spread out, pickers walking off the job, etc. In a very warm climate without irrigation, sugars can jump very, very quickly, and you're sometimes faced with the uncomfortable choice of either picking too early or too late--the theoretical moment of perfect ripeness is one that may just be an imaginary construct. I have been living out of my suitcase for the last three weeks, heading back and forth between vineyards in the north and vineyards in the south, with occasional (ill-timed) breaks for the odd trade event that I had (ill-advisedly) committed to months prior. The essential structural problems are: (A) We are still purchasing fruit from vineyards that we don't own and hence can't totally control; and (B) there are limitations of the harvesting ability of our growers in some of these warmer areas; (C) we haven't had the bandwidth nor the financial robustness to take on some of the prophylactic steps we might have to master some of the issues of over-ripeness (we might have invested in shade-cloth, for example, experimentally sprayed a range of different biodynamic preps that had efficacy against drought, etc.). All of these things one might theoretically do, but when you are already paying a lot of money for the grapes to begin with, it sometimes seems hard to justify these incremental quality steps from a financial perspective, i.e., customers don't pay more for your virtue.

Are you the type of winemaker who relies on his gut and experience to determine when to pick the grapes, or do you go with lab measurements of acid and sugar?
Both. Go with the gut and then check in the lab. As I believe President Reagan used to say, "Trust but verify."

Which of the vineyards/varieties you work in has had the best growing season this year?
It's still a little early to tell what will do best, but I am very excited by the Bien Nacido Syrah we're picking, as well as by the Grenache at Alta Loma Vineyard. In both instances, these are very small crops and it has been very cool in both spots. (Cool years in California tend to produce wines with the greatest amount of elegance.) If we are not inundated a week before harvest, these wines will be amazing.

Which of your wines is the most challenging to make every year, and why?
I have to say that of all of the grapes that we work with, the Mourvèdre has consistently been the most challenging. We buy these grapes from the Oakley/Antioch area, a very odd place, indeed. The vines are exceptionally old--more than 100 years, ungrafted and unirrigated. But they are also grown on beach sand, which has essentially no water-holding capacity. We've been playing a bit of a game of musical chairs and musical vineyards with our growers there, trying to work out who is actually the most cooperative, which sections of which vineyards give us the best results. The vineyards themselves are a bit of an organizational nightmare. Antioch grape growers 100 years [ago] were very much into the idea of a "mixed plantation," or "field blend," so the vineyard is all mixed up with different varieties--well and good if you are making a table wine blend like "Contra," but very problematic if you're really trying to focus on a single variety. Every so often we can avoid the scourge of Oakley/Antioch: The real scorching days. I thought we had it made this year with the cool year, but a couple of very warm days and the grapes just ran out of water, shutting down, sending sugars skyrocketing. Thank God we purchased a sorting table a few years ago--we'd be totally hosed had we not. But, as I mentioned before, we really need to get out far ahead of the problem, biting the bullet and buying the damn shade cloth (or doing whatever else seems to work.)

What are some of the biggest frustrations--but biggest payoffs--that come with biodynamics?
The only real great frustration with biodynamics is that it hasn't really offered any great solutions to particularly insidious, chronic pests--ground squirrels, for example. (We attempted a biodynamic solution: Killing the squirrels, skinning them and ashing the skins, but it didn't seem to work well for us). The thing to remember about biodynamics is that it is not a miracle cure for your farm--you still need to be a good farmer and have the wit to select an appropriate site. What can be very dramatic is to observe the change in the tilth of the soil--a greater profusion of plant species, softer texture of the soil itself, and a greater degree of drought tolerance for your plants.

How hands-on do you still get during the harvest season? After all these years, are you still doing plenty of the dirty work yourself?
I haven't been doing too much cellar work this year (yet), but have been doing my share of vineyard work and getting plenty dirty--out for most of the picks, sorting grapes first in the field (growers love it when you throw their fruit on the ground), then on the sorting table. It is good that I don't mind the exhilaration of a long day's work, as there have been plenty of long days. (Today, in fact was ridiculous.)

What's the craziest or worst thing that you've ever seen happen during the harvest?
I haven't seen any profoundly crazy things happen for a while. In the old days when we made Big House, we were working with a greater number of growers and the possibility of A Great Screw-Up was far greater. I've seen, of course, the wrong fields harvested--once the wrong variety. In the days when we received grapes that were mechanically harvested, we would occasionally see a diverse array of critters--mice, snakes, lizards, black widow spiders, etc.--arriving with the grapes. There are many people who are keen on the romance of harvest, but I'll tell you that there is nothing like shaking out on the order of 100 (yes, this is not a typo, one hundred!) earwigs from your person after working an evening on the sorting table.

Tell us a little bit about your new San Juan Bautista project, where you're creating new grape varieties and farming basically from scratch. How hard is this going to be in comparison to what normally goes into planting and developing a vineyard nowadays?
I am totally jazzed on the project, just a little bit frustrated that it is not proceeding faster than I would like. There are a couple of unique features to this project. The largest part of the planting will be, in essence, the creation of a very old-fangled vineyard--head-trained vines (no wire, no trellis), that are not irrigated past the first two years. Some of these will be planted on ungrafted wood; in others, we will plant the rootstock first and then field-bud when the rootstock is well established. This technique is essentially state-of-the-art viticulture from the late 19th century and very different from modern practice (order grafted vines from the nursery and baby them along with drip irrigation.) The very radical part of the project will be to plant a certain number of vines from seed. I had thought initially that I would attempt to hybridize vines, but this is truly an impossibly tedious work. I now believe that I will be able to achieve enough variation simply in the genetic diversity of fruit that comes from seed. Why are plants grown from seeds interesting? (1) They offer a grower the possibility of discovering new varieties that might be more robust and better suited to the particular site; (2) the vineyard would be truly diverse genetically, potentially offering a degree of complexity not otherwise achievable; (3) the rooting habit of seedlings is rather different from that of vines grown from vegetative cutting. The vines exhibit a far greater degree of geotropism, i.e., the tendency to root vertically, down to China. This is particularly interesting if one is a seeker of the character of the site itself--with deeper-rooting vines, there is potentially a greater expression of the terroir of the site, and possibly a greater degree of drought tolerance. Very interesting if one is dry-farming in California.

Is the idea in San Juan Bautista to make a great wine, bring new ideas and intelligence to the wine world as a whole, or both? And when do you think we'll see your vision in the bottle?
The idea is to create something startlingly unique, and capable of inspiring the consumer of the product, as well as its producer. My feeling is that when you experience a vin de terroir, you achieve a very special aesthetic frisson, something like a real connection with nature itself. These wines are just unspeakably beautiful to me. I want to feel that I've made at least a sincere effort to produce something like a real soulful wine. I honestly don't know how long it will be until we see something from San Juan, but my guess is that we are at least 7 to 8 years out. (Deep, soulful sigh.)

What is it about that you love so much about Twitter?
Darn good question. I'm not sure that I entirely love Twitter, but I may well have a substance-abuse issue with it. It is certainly a deep human need to be seen and acknowledged (which can of course border on the pathological). On Twitter, one is being publicly seen (and sometimes acknowledged). It was recently--just last night, in fact--pointed out to me, that virtually no one is a diarist any more. Having a Twitter record is actually the closest thing many of us will possess as a diary. Certainly the pithier Tweets are capable of summoning up a memory as efficaciously as a Proustian madeleine.