Randall Grahm and the magic of grenache
As I am sure you are aware, it’s Grenache Day today, 15 September, so I’m celebrating my favourite grape with a look at one of its great champions.
The wines of Randall Grahm were as much part of the ‘90s Oddbins experience as illustrations of Ralph Steadman or the haphazardly charming service from hungover staff. So much so that Patrick Matthews wrote: “If he hadn’t existed, you feel, Oddbins would have to have invented him.”1
Grahm studied philosophy at UC Santa Cruz and picked up a love for wine - not so unusual in 1970s California. The odd spelling of his name to British eyes makes sense when you hear an American pronouncing ‘Graham’ - it’s all one syllable. Burgundy was Grahm’s first love. He planted chardonnay and pinot noir and set about making wine, without a huge amount of success. But what did work was a parcel of wines he made with some bought-in grenache in the early ‘80s.
The success of this small batch put Grahm on a path which he has been on more or less since then. While the rest of California went cabernet and chardonnay crazy, for Grahm the state’s real forte are Mediterranean varieties like grenache, cinsault, barbera and mourvèdre which he thought were much more suited to the climate. His company Bonny Doon was based on hunting out parcels of old vines to go into his Rhone-inspired wines. There was a small group of like-minded enthusiasts who were dubbed the ‘Rhone rangers’. Other rangers included Bob Lindquist at Qupé (another word that seems to have a missing vowel), Bob Haas, co-founder of Tablas Creek who died in 2018, and the fiercely individual Sean Thackrey, who died in 2022.
As well as making wines that tasted different from the Californian norm, Grahm’s attitude was a world away from the regard and pomposity of an industry that made Bordeaux its model. British novelist and drink writer Lawrence Osborne2 said this about him: “Randall Grahm is perhaps the single most easily identifiable figure in American wine. Over the years, he has created his own persona: the enfant terrible of a staid business, the flagellator of lax minds, the Puck of the American branch Vinimundo.”
Take his most famous wine Le Cigare Volante, for example. Largely made from grenache, it’s a tribute to Châteauneuf-du-Pape that he’s been making since 1986. The name comes from the French word for a UFO - a flying cigar - and refers to when in 1954 the mayor of Châteauneuf-du-Pape passed a law banning the flying of alien spacecraft over the vineyards of the region. Le Cigare Volante is also the name of the Crane brothers’ favourite restaurant in Frasier, I’ve often wondered whether this was a Grahm reference3.
The fortunes of Bonny Doon have waxed and waned since the 1980s. At one point, Grahm was making dozens of wines. The shelves of Oddbins groaned with Bonny Doon wines like Cardinal Zin, a zinfandel naturally, the Ugly Duckling Carignan, or Ca del Solo Big House Red, as well as some wines made in the Languedoc. Many had labels by Ralph Steadman for the ultimate Oddbins experience.
But after the collapse of Seagram, Oddbins’ parent company, Grahm’s wines became harder to obtain over here. Eventually he retreated somewhat to concentrate on a smaller range of wines like Le Cigare Volante. Then in 2019, Grahm sold Bonny Doon though he stayed on as chief winemaker. Now, however, he’s back with a new venture and there’s definitely an air of putting the band back together about it because the wines are being distributed by Hallgarten & Novum wines headed up by Steve Daniel who was head wine buyer at Oddbins during the glory years.
The wines are called The Language of Yes, a typically Grahm-esque homage to the Languedoc - the word means just this, ‘the language of yes’, oc being the word for yes in the local language4. France used to be divided into the Northern part that said ‘oui’ and the Southern that said ‘oc’. These new wines are a collaboration with California’s biggest producer EJ Gallo. I asked Grahm on email how this came about and he replied:
A short while after I sold Bonny Doon Vyd, I was approached by Joe C. Gallo, who proposed that we collaborate on some sort of venture in the Central Coast, primarily featuring Rhone varieties from their vineyards, a sort of re-examination of the possibilities of these grapes in the Central Coast of California. I am generally always up for a new challenge, so I said, "Yes!." (I am needless to say, extremely proud of the wines, but also very pleased to have come up with such a clever name for a wine that focuses on varieties of the south.)
There are two wines, a grenache and a syrah, the grapes come mainly from Gallo vineyards, though there is bought-in fruit, from the cool Santa Maria Valley valley. This is midway between the great centres of California Rhonephilia: Paso Robles where the Perrin family of Château de Beaucastel fame founded Tablas Creek with the late Bob Haas, and Santa Barbara where Qupé is based. The latter produces syrah with a peppery, floral quality that is reminiscent of the Northern Rhone.
The Language of Yes Syrah is in just this style, made with a little viognier, it’s vibrant and spicy, but it’s the grenache I’m most interested in because it seems like the quintessential Grahm grape. He told me:
I've been working with grenache for more than 40 years now (since 1981) and honestly, it is really only in the last 10 years that I think I have truly learned to appreciate its potential for great complexity and nuance, especially when grown on the coolest sites. As you may know, I am a full-blown Burgundophile, and I've been trying most of my adult life to figure out how to make Burgundian wines in California. The problem may have been that I was, ahem, using the wrong grape, and it really was grenache all along that would enable me to replicate this kind of style.
The Language of Yes has that magical grenache mixture of delicacy and power. There’s something of the high altitude Spanish garnacha with flavours of orange peel and strawberry about it but the a sweetness about it which seems typically Californian. It’s a great wine but sadly it’s a bit out of my price range at about £40 a bottle (the syrah is a similar price). That is always the problem with Californian wines over here, they always seem to cost roughly the dollar amount but in pounds. Still if that isn’t a lot for you, then I highly recommend it and the syrah too.
This new venture might come as a surprise to some who see Grahm as the ultimate wine rebel. Though Gallo are a comparative minnow compared with Seagram, he admitted that it had not been without its difficulties.
It's different, that is for sure, and definitely has entailed a bit of a learning curve. Obviously, decisions are not made as quickly as they might have been in the past. And while, this at times is frustrating, at other times, it has also spared me from the potential outcome of decisions not thoroughly considered. The further upside is of course the fact that Gallo has certain resources that I would not otherwise be able to access.
The comment about “decisions not thoroughly considered” is telling as in the past, Grahm has been accused of trying to do too much. Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards said this about him5: “He’s done almost anything that’s of interest and does it every year differently. Never doing the same thing twice.” So perhaps working with a behemoth like Gallo is a good fit.
But this dip into corporate wine making, in the best sense of the word, hasn’t tamed Grahm’s restless creativity. Far from it, he told that there’s some fascinating stuff in the pipeline from his own estate, Popelouchum, up near Santa Fe. He’s doing ‘a bunch of interesting experiments at Popelouchum with both self-crossing varieties (sérine, tibouren, pignolo) as well as making proper crosses (ciliegiolo x picolit).’ And he hasn’t forgotten about grenache, there’s grenache gris on the way, if he can get the authorities to approve the use the name of the grape on the label. And most excitingly for lovers of perfumed grenache noir: ‘We hope to produce our first commercial red grenache this vintage (maybe a barrel or two?) from Popelouchum from a very special proprietary clone that seems to produce a particularly heady, fragrant expression of grenache’. Let’s hope a bottle of two makes it over here.
The Language of Oc wines are available from Hic Wine Merchants. On Sunday, I’ll be recommending some more affordable grenache-based wines.
According to Grahm, it is! He wrote: “Absolutely yes. One of the producers of the show was a fan of the wine. I'm sure that like Frasier, I too would be unable to secure a reservation.”