The Do Over

Grapes are ripening in California in late October. At least, they should be ripening. On a sunny afternoon, about a week before Halloween, Randall Grahm, the owner of Bonny Doon Vineyard, walks up and down the rows of a 12-acre planting in the Santa Clara Valley, popping grapes off the vines and into his mouth to assess their progress. "The flavor's good, but it's not that intense, and the acid's dropping out and the sugar's not there," he says gloomily. Grahm has been buying these Grenache grapes from the Besson Vineyard in Gilroy ever since he launched the maiden 1984 vintage of his signature red wine, Le Cigare Volant. He has driven to the vineyard, a little under an hour from his winery in Santa Cruz, to determine if the grapes should be granted a week's reprieve, on the chance they might ripen enough for the Cigare Volant, or if instead they should be harvested immediately to go into a lesser wine. There is always the risk that if the grapes are left too long, an unexpected rain shower will dilute the fruit, or even worse, that the grapes will shrivel into raisins.

Scrutinizing a vineyard to schedule the harvest is just the kind of thing you would expect a winery proprietor to do. Until recently, however, Grahm rarely had the time to visit vines. To his surprise, Bonny Doon had mushroomed from a small winery with a countercultural edge to a midsize brand that required his full-time marketing attention. He was a success, but not by his own criteria. "I woke up one morning and said, 'This is not what I want to be doing; it's not what I set out to do; it's not making the world any better; it's not satisfying,' " he says. "I turned 50. I had my midlife crisis. I had a daughter. I had a serious medical condition, which gave me a whiff of mortality. I said, 'Randall, what do you need to get more meaning in your life?' If I died anytime soon, they would say, 'What a great marketer he was.' Which is not satisfactory."

A 50-year-old's epiphany that his dreams have been mortgaged to middle-aged realities is nothing unusual, but doing something about it -- especially when by all conventional criteria he is a great success -- that's something else. "I'm trying to make the very painful transition between public approval and internal approval," Grahm says. "Much of my career has been intended to produce acclaim. Maybe that's why Bonny Doon was composed on such a huge canvas. It just seems more appropriate at this point to work on a smaller scale. Scarier, too, because you're under more scrutiny to get it right." Having triumphed with unconventional varietals and an irreverent attitude that thumbed its nose at stuffy wine-world snobbery, Grahm in 2006 staged by far his brashest deviation from the norm and jettisoned his three biggest brands -- selling two and spinning off the third. Suddenly, Bonny Doon was selling 35,000 cases a year, not 450,000, and gross revenue plummeted from a high of $29 million in 2005 to $7 million in 2007. Half the staff members were dismissed, their exits cushioned by severance payments derived from the brand sales.

Bonny Doon also seemed to be shedding much of its flamboyant plumage. Along with disposing of its most commercial brands, the winery has scaled back its program of releasing specialty wines. The wines are often made of obscure varietals, such as Pigato and Charbono, and they sport wacky, colorful labels, informed by the same anti-Establishment, inside-jokester sensibility that graced Grateful Dead album covers. These days, Bonny Doon's leader is trying to play less and focus more. "We've had a lot of fun, but ultimately it's just marketing and theater," Grahm says. "It's time to put aside childish things and move on a bit." He is eyeing his customers anxiously. He doesn't yet know if they are ready to age with him.

Sporting a bushy gray ponytail and a puckish smile, Grahm, who is 55, doesn't give the impression of someone who has overripened into raisinhood. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of his newfound maturity is that it represents a return to the ideals that attracted him to winemaking in his youth. A self-described child of privilege, Grahm, who went to high school in Beverly Hills, studied philosophy and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which in the early '70s enjoyed a national reputation for its do-your-own-thing vibe. "There's a lot of adolescence in Santa Cruz," Grahm says. "We have a lot of problems with authority. There are bumper stickers, 'Keep Santa Cruz weird.' I don't know whether I chose Santa Cruz because I was already that way or whether Santa Cruz has made me that way or reinforced it." Although drinking wine might have been on the Santa Cruz program, winemaking wasn't. To explain how he was drawn into it, Grahm points to two early experiences: spending time with a woman in rural Denmark who concocted elderflower wine in her bathroom ("there was something alchemical about it," he says) and working in a Beverly Hills wine shop, where the owner let his staff sample such legendary elixirs as the 1964 Cheval Blanc and the 1959 Lafite-Rothschild.

After a stint at Santa Cruz, Grahm studied at the University of California, Davis, which is the leading American education center for viticulturists and winemakers. To the Davis orthodoxy, which exalted Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon as the optimal varietals for California, Grahm applied a Santa Cruz skepticism. His irreverence was strengthened by knowledge he gleaned from conversations with Kermit Lynch, a wine importer who, in a small shop near Berkeley, was selling French wines not easily found in this country. Lynch recalls that Grahm "stood out even then -- the big hair -- and he was passionate and curious about everything." From Lynch, Grahm acquired a love of the Rhone varietals that eventually became Bonny Doon's calling card.

With his family's assistance, Grahm bought a vineyard in the hills of Bonny Doon, just outside Santa Cruz, and planted it -- not with Cabernet or Chardonnay (he wasn't about to cave to convention) but with a French grape that was much harder to nurture: Pinot Noir, the varietal of red Burgundy wines. "I was fairly young, and I had no idea of how difficult it is to do that," Grahm says. "Sure enough, the Pinot Noir I produced was prosaic. The Pinot Noir I was buying" -- from independent farmers, through contracts -- "was a little more interesting than what I was producing, for a lower cost." Inspired by Lynch's example and his own reading, Grahm went on to plant numerous Rhone varietals up and down the Bonny Doon vineyard, experimenting to discover what would do best. Because the area had little history with these varietals, he had to proceed by trial and error. He was finally beginning to get the hang of it when, in a catastrophe right out of the Book of Exodus, the vineyard was devastated by insect-borne Pierce's disease, one of the many plagues that wine grapes are heir to. He sold the ravaged acreage. What he took away from the disaster was the importance of his contracts with growers, which laid the foundation for his future wines at Bonny Doon.