Biodynamic winemakers preach minimal interference so their wines can be purely redolent of terroir. Grahm wants to communicate this transparency to the consumer. Against the wishes of most winemakers, he has introduced ingredient labels on some bottles. That in turn has opened a metaphysical debate at Bonny Doon about what constitutes an ingredient. Some executives at the winery think that if a substance is added during the process but has disappeared by the end, it needn't be listed. Grahm leans the other way, toward comprehensive itemization. But even from that vantage point, the specific choices can be perplexing. "Is an oak barrel an ingredient?" he asks rhetorically. "Is an oak chip an ingredient? Why is an oak chip an ingredient if an oak barrel isn't? Is a stainless steel tank an ingredient? Is yeast an ingredient? Theoretically, the yeast does its thing and dies. In some sense, we're letting it all hang out. I don't think people will freak out that there's tartaric acid in the wine. We are moving toward minimal intervention, and we're proud of it and want to flaunt it."
From the outset, Bonny Doon has been renowned for its quirky labels. Bonny Doon's new packaging, though still odd, is less droll. Seeking a way to demonstrate the winery's commitment to terroir, Grahm dreamed up a label for his single-estate wines that uses a biodynamic technique called sensitive crystallization. A splash of wine is combined with copper chloride and evaporated in a petri dish, leaving behind a crystal pattern that is said to be unique to the vineyard. The circular image of the test result, with a drawing of a string trailing from it so that the crystal pattern appears to be a balloon, appears on the label of several of Bonny Doon's recent offerings. Alex Krause, the sales director, explains the labels to customers as "a fingerprint for each wine." Their response? "The feedback from the market has been neither positive nor negative," general manager Brady says. "They haven't said, 'That's a fantastic label.' What it does do is give you a conversation point, because almost everyone asks, 'What is it?' And when they find out, they say, 'Oh, that's Randall being Randall.' "
For both the company and Grahm, the matter of whether Randall being Randall should continue to define Bonny Doon is complicated. In the past, Grahm has relied on charismatic leadership to herd his customers along. For instance, when he decided that he wanted to convert from cork to screw-top closures, his executives urged him to proceed slowly and test the reaction to screw tops in a couple of markets. "I said, 'We can, but don't you think the Mondavis have already tested it?' " he recounted to me. " 'We have to change the perception. The first company to do it nationally will be noticed and get a lot of attention.' " So Grahm switched over his entire line, and to commemorate the change, held a mock funeral in 2002 at New York City's Grand Central Terminal for a "Monsieur Thierry Bouchon" (tire-bouchon is French for corkscrew), with a cork corpse in a coffin and the English wine expert Jancis Robinson delivering a eulogy. "The amount of ink we received on this was incredible," Grahm says. "We changed perceptions of screw tops completely."
But now Grahm, like Prospero in The Tempest, says he wants to renounce his magical powers. "In the Old World, it's all about the terroir; here it's all about the brand," he tells me. "I'm trying to transform us from essentially a brand to something substantive -- of substance, immanence." He recognizes the challenge. "I have to rebrand Bonny Doon to be not about me but about the wines, and for most Americans, it's a lot easier for the wines to be about a person or a story than about the wines themselves. We're an immature wine culture. It will be a trick to do it." He says the new packaging is meant to convey that "this time it's about the wine; it's about transparency." The peculiarity of the new labels is therefore a form of communication, not an eye-catching attention grabber. "I am trying to signal that it's not so much about the marketing, and it's not easy, because I feel like the boy who cried everything," he says. "It would be great to have a wine called No, This Time I'm Serious."
When a veteran marketer says his new marketing is intended to proclaim that the marketing is now secondary, is he no longer marketing? "A cynic would say, once a marketer, always a marketer," Grahm acknowledges. "But if you're in the land of mirrors of marketing, how do you get out of it?" That may sound like a Zen koan. However, in Grahm's idiosyncratic career, it is simply the latest -- and, he hopes, the ultimate -- business model that will lead him to personal fulfillment.
Arthur Lubow is a writer based in New York. He wrote for the October 2006 issue about a specialty vegetable farm in Ohio.
