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This past week Randall Grahm, founder and president for life of Bonny Doon Vineyards in Santa Cruz, Calf., hosted an epic vertical tasting covering the lifespan of his flagship red wine, Cigare Volant, to gathered journalists, sommeliers and guests at the Los Gatos restaurant Manresa. He presented 25 vintages of Cigare, most in large format bottles, from 1984 to 2008 inclusive. It was an unprecedented opportunity to take measure on one of the most influential, controversial and peripatetic winemakers to have worked in California in the last quarter century.
A vertical of Cigare Volant is an entirely different experience than your average vertical. In the Old World, such tastings are frequently used to show the consistency of a given domaine; a typical French producer, for example, prides himself on his adherence to tradition, and a vertical tasting of wines is often a testament to his own steadfastness, as well the consistency of expression from his particular patch of earth.
In California, of course, tradition comes in a more liquid form. A robust vertical of California wine will certainly capture consistencies of place if they exist, as well as variations in vintage. But just as often a vertical will reveal whatever was en mode in a given winemaking or viticultural epoch, the trends and fashions that held sway, and not least, the emerging tastes of the consumer.
In California, that means the austere ’80s, for example, when red wines were built to age, rendering them fairly ungiving upon release. These give way to the Parker era and the inexorable escalation of ripeness levels in the middle '90s, which in turn spawns the era of the Frankenwine, where wines exhibited the effects of remedial manipulation, additives, enzymes, coloring agents, tannin, removing alcohol -- all excesses corrected, all blemishes smoothed over.
But this applies only peripherally to the wines of Bonny Doon, especially Cigare Volant. Cigare is Grahm’s homage to Chateauneuf du Pape, a southern Rhone wine made with as many as a dozen varieties (Grahm’s blend was primarily composed of grenache, syrah and mourvedre ). Over the years fruit sources have come and gone, which has led Grahm to call Cigare his "vin d’effort," a "composed" wine rather than a vin de terroir. For Grahm, Cigare has always been aspirational, serving the passions, curiosities and occasionally the obsessions of a man who believes in terroir but who has rarely been able to possess it.
For this reason, perhaps more than any other wine in California, a bottle of Cigare Volant amounts to an epistemological snapshot of its winemaker. That's because no one is as intellectually restless, more willing to try new methods, approaches, viticultural and cultural practices, no one is more willing to swap out one closure for another, or employ wholesale changes to wine-making from one vintage to the next, whether it's the use of new barrels or quartz crystals or organoleptic tannin. In his pursuit of the unique in his flagship wine, Grahm is guilty of a sustained, willful inconsistency, and like a palimpsest, each wine allows a glimpse the peripatetic nature of its maker.
The unfettered '80s
In this sense, the earliest wines were the most pristine, the most "innocent," the least impinged upon by Grahm's coercions, and I'm happy to report they were among the most beautiful. In fact, the entire table marveled at the life coursing through the oldest wine, the '84, Grahm's first vintage of Cigare (it was also the winery's last bottle). And I thought the'’85 was even better: probably from a riper vintage, it had retained more sensuality and seductive power, and revealed, to me at least, the work of a winemaker who'd made the best wine of his life the year before and who had discovered what he was capable of.
The Cigares of the '80s also reflected Grahm’s discovery of Mourvedre, a Rhone variety also found in Spain and known in California as Mataro, which he found with the help of Darrell Corti in old vineyards planted in the delta flats of Antioch and Oakley. Its longevity and earthy, gripping flavor gave these early efforts some real Rhone bona fides, and a character that was easily discernible, 20 years later.
The anxiety of expansion
On April 15, 1989, Grahm appeared on the cover of Wine Spectator in a powder blue rodeo costume, a harlequin's diamond across the bridge of his nose, his long curls stuffed into a white ten-gallon hat. With a broad smile and packing bottles of wine in his holster, he personified the Rhone Ranger; from that moment his 15 minutes of fame began, as did a notoriety which he has sustained ever since.
Like any good entrepreneur, Grahm increased his production of Cigare, going from 3,200 cases in 1989 to 7,300 cases in 1996. Such a dramatic increase, of scarce Rhone varieties from contracted sources, certainly compromised quality in certain years, as Grahm was forced to take what he could get. The wines from the first half of the '90s reflected these inconsistencies; however, the '90 and the '94 both showed beautiful, demonstrative grenache character (composing about 40 percent of the blend in each) with fruit of dried cherries and a sleek, integrated set of savory flavors that were deeply reminiscent of the southern Rhone palette.
Tinkering his way into the present
In the latter half of the '90s, Grahm’s wines received an exceptional level of tinkering, with blends, sources, closures and additives changed out from one vintage to the next. That degree of insistent mucking about resulted in the least-consistent flight of the evening; the '97 and '98 seemed muted and graceless, the '99 showing an unpleasant astringency.
Despite their failings, I credit Grahm for keeping them in the lineup. They reflected an age where technological innovations -- some promising, some manipulative, some disastrous -- were inevitably changing the winemaker's craft; it makes sense that such an inquisitive winemaker should attempt a few, if only to learn from his mistakes.
Thus instructed, Grahm brought us home with wines from the last decade, a distinctly Burgundian phase of wine-making in which he experimented with extended lees contact, stem inclusion, indigenous yeasts, reductive environments and other French techniques. These were what Grahm called his "dark wines," wines where fruit elements shared the stage with a palette of umami flavors, notes of earth, tree bark, truffle and mushroom, for a distinctly savory impression. In a sense these were very un-Californian wines: they were "fruit backward" almost, flying in the face of the most obvious advantage given to grape growing in California: sunshine. These latter-era wines in certain vintages can suffer from what I'd call a faintness of expression, and this trait, among others, has led to some critical indifference, adding to a tendency among critics to write Grahm off as frivolous, unserious, inconsequential. But the wines simply don’t conform to normative critical discourse, or what passes for it, in the modern age. And all the while Grahm has been on his game, even as he’s been changing the rules on himself, sometimes radically, for more than a quarter century.
Patrick Comiskey is a senior contributor for Wine & Spirits Magazine, where he serves as chief critic for non-California domestic wines and contributes articles on the wines of California, Oregon and Washington.
Photo: Randall Grahm Credit: Chris Fager
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