After locating vineyards to supply him with Rhone varietals, Grahm set about making a blend of Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre, sometimes with an additional soupçon of more arcane grapes. He thought he would name his Rhone-style wine Old Telegram (a wine-geek play on the venerable Châteauneuf-du-Pape called Le Vieux Télégraphe) and use the blocky, all-caps typography of a telegram on the label. He changed his mind after reading in a history book a compellingly goofy story: In 1954, troubled by reports of flying saucers, the wine producers of Châteauneuf-du-Pape passed an ordinance that forbade extraterrestrials from landing in their vineyards. It was a better, more accessible joke, so he went with it. He developed a composite of old-fashioned Bordeaux labels, with castle and trees, to which he added an unearthly beam descending from the sky; on the back of the bottle, he recounted the stranger-than-fiction story of the decree. "It's a little gimmicky, but what I like is, I was trying to get the right tone between the Old World and the New World," he explains. "I wanted there to be a connection, but not just a copycat of the New World trying to pass itself off as French, which would come off as pretentious or me-too. It's an homage, but it's also poking fun at them in a way." He named his Rhone blend Le Cigare Volant, or "flying cigar," an offbeat phrase for a UFO. Under the sobriquet of the Rhone Ranger, he appeared within a few years on the cover of Wine Spectator in a too-small cowboy suit, the foremost of an expanding group of California winemakers turning to the varietals of the Rhone valley.
The wines in the Cigare family (there are now four: a white, a rosé, a dessert wine, and the original red) can unite the rarely intersecting circles of devotees of Old and New World wines. "These are definitely New World wines -- the fruitiness, the softness -- but there is an Old World edge to them at the same time," Grahm says. "The acidity tends to be a little higher, there is a little more tannic bite, and there is a definite mineral quality, an earthiness, a stony, slatey aspect to them. They are also lower in alcohol." For Grahm, though, an unavoidable deficiency in Le Cigare Volant has always been its lack of what the French refer to as terroir -- the taste, often associated with minerality, that is expressed in the wine from a specific place. Because he was always supplementing the grapes from his own vineyard with fruit he bought from many far-flung growers, the taste of one terroir wasn't something he could achieve. Instead of a sense of place, he was retailing the Santa Cruz state of mind. "For a while, we had various M.B.A. class studies of Bonny Doon," he says. "One class report said, 'You guys don't realize it, but the image you project resonates 100 percent with young, Internet-savvy experimenters who don't trust authority, are irreverent of everything, don't want to be marketed to.' We accidentally ran into 25 million people."
In 1992, when the Bonny Doon vineyard started to succumb to Pierce's disease, Grahm bought 150 acres in Soledad, a town best known as the site of a large state prison. On the 125 acres that he eventually planted, he intended to grow some of the varietals that he knew from traveling through Italy. In practice, he repeated the same pattern he had followed with Le Cigare Volant. "I ended up buying grapes that were better than the ones I was growing, and which cost less, too," he says. The wine took off, with much of the customer approval probably attributable to what Grahm terms the "funny label." Even though the grapes came from many places, he assigned the wine a virtual terroir. And what a terroir. Wryly saluting Soledad's most famous feature, he branded it Big House and commissioned a label picturing a penitentiary. "My broker in Northern California said, 'Who is going to buy wine with the name of a prison on it and a picture of a prison on the label?' " he recalls. "She had also said, 'Who is going to buy a bottle of wine with a flying saucer on it?' I think if you are chasing your audience, you're chasing yourself around in circles. You're much better off with an aesthetic and vision -- following it and explaining to people what it is you're doing." In 2005, the year before Grahm sold the brand, Bonny Doon sold 175,000 cases of Big House blends.
Creative labeling also boosted the appeal of another Bonny Doon winner, which Grahm called Cardinal Zin. He enlisted artist Ralph Steadman, celebrated for his spidery illustrations accompanying the self-styled gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, to design the label, which shows a deranged-looking cardinal. On the back of the bottle Grahm added some parodically over-the-top ad copy, freckled with groan-inducing literary puns. ("It is a Cardinal Zin to be inordinately proud of this wildly spicy, full bodied paean to little red fruit, the envy of those who try, and fail.") In his writing, especially in the newsletters he sends out, Grahm favors a style that is curlicued and highly wrought. When it comes to wine, though, he prefers something leaner and more straightforward. The lush, jammy, highly alcoholic Zinfandel is a New World varietal that he has never appreciated. He started making the wine only because growers who were selling him Mourvèdre insisted that he buy their Zinfandel grapes, too. "Then, to my amazement, we were able to sell the Zinfandel at a fairly high price to make a load of money off it," he says. "The wine wasn't all that brilliant, but the label was brilliant." At the end, he was selling 25,000 cases a year. Even more successful was Pacific Rim Riesling, begun in 1992. Unlike Zinfandel, Riesling is a varietal that Grahm enjoys personally. "I strongly believe that Riesling is the grape of the 21st century," he says. Sales of 75,000 cases in 2005 bolster that statement, as does the fact that he held on to Pacific Rim when he sold his other two stars.
