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In the sixties and early seventies, there was a resolute obsession in the wine world with French wines, varietals, and techniques to the detriment of native varietals and some languishing styles in a multitude of different regions across the world. France was esteemed as the global hub of fine wine, a reputation that requires a hell of a lot of maintenance, and a lack of complacency that producers at the time, just didn’t have. It wasn’t long before France was humbled from its pedestal in the Judgment of Paris and other such competitions.
Despite this minor setback for the French wine industry, they were still the envy of the global stage for thirty or so years before grows began to develop an affinity for their old neglected local varietals. In the run-up to our present age of micro-climates and talk of ancient seedlings seemingly everyone wanted to plant Cabernet and Chardonnay. Jancis Robinson famously signed off her BBC varietal-focused special with, “I have seen the future, and art is Cabernet and Chardonnay.” She wasn’t wrong. Nearly everyone was ripping up indigenous varietals to plant these conquistadors.
Regions that seemingly lacked any indigenous varietals, such as California, had made such a name for themselves copying French wine styles, and often replicating them better, that seemingly even old-world wineries in Italy and Spain desired to to the same, chasing some of that consumer cash. Who knows how many indigenous varietals, especially in Italy, began to be dredged up from the ground at that time.
Regardless, this infatuation with French wine spanned not just throughout Europe, but of course, California, Oregon, and Washington State as well. These burgeoning younger wine regions in the mid-eighties had begun to exhaust the varietals of Bordeaux and Burgundy such to the extent that some producers began looking for climate-compatible varietals from less established regions, especially those in the up-and-coming region of Paso Robles, which up until this point had lent its Mediterranean climate, and cooling sea breezes mostly to the likes of green beans, and leeks. A shame.
To coin a term for the way-paving, bull-headed winemaker and regional celebrity like Randall Grahm is difficult. With a beaming, excitable aura, charming wit, hippie-like convictions; and, the pioneering spirit of a true California cowboy, it’s challenging really to amalgamate him into the fold of any perceivable archetype. Wine Spectator Magazine tried their best in 1989 when they termed him and several other wine aficionados the, Rhône Rangers; a term coined out of favor for the grower’s enthusiastic adoption of the newly-fashionable native Rhône varietals: Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre.
But Grahm’s obsession with fine wine began not under the auspices of Syrah, but Pinot Noir; specifically those of Burgundy. His initial entry into wine culture is marked by a period of sweeping floors in his youth at a local wine shop. He tasted the best that France had to offer, and began to desire a, vineyard of his own, to make a Pinot that would compete with the Grands Grus of Morey-St.-Denis. In his own description, this experience sipping wines at work, tuned him into, “A complete and insufferable wine fanatic.”
It was in his early twenties that he began a semester at the famous viticulture establishment UC Davis, a university at that time graduating thousands of Pinot-obsessed fanatics bound for the lower hills and sweeping landscapes of southern Oregon, not California. A creative culture that I’m sure aided in the burgeoning spirit of entrepreneurship that helped Randall found what would be christened Bonny Doon winery in Bonny Doon California.
After receiving some funds from his family, Grahm initially was intent on fabricating what he would call, the, “Great American Pinot Noir.” In Santa Cruz, where Grahm set down his vineyard, the Mediterranean climate is more ideal for, well, thicker-skinned, later ripening grapes. Pinot Noir from these dusty, loess soils with their interspersed granite and gravel, are poorly suited to this finicky grape. Pinot seems to show much better results in the moist but mild slopes of the Willamette valley south of Portland, as pioneer winemaker and UC Davis graduate, David Lett would establish.
After a few poor attempts at Pinot Noir from his Santa Cruz mountain perch in the early eighties, Grahm finally abandoned the project and began to seek out varietals that better suit his terroir. His adoration for the concept of terroir and the French spirit of winemaking eventually led him to the up and coming Rhône valley varietals, which would be far more suitable for plantings in the central coast.
Grahm then turned his attention to the aforementioned Rhône varietals: thin-skinned, cherry-flavored Grenache, deeply-colored, peppery Syrah, and the animalistic, racy Mourvèdre. The premier vintage of Randall’s concoction would reference an obscure French law enacted in 1945 by the tiny French town synonymous with these varietals, Châteauneuf-du-pape. The law in question prohibits the use of Flying Cigars (saucers) around the town’s numerous vineyards. It debuted in 1986 to an excited audience of wine aficionados, and a market teaming for something new: heralded, Bonny Doon’s Le Cigare Volant, the flying cigar. By 1989, Grahm was being called in to field the cover of Wine Spectator, cementing his reputation as a Rhône Ranger.
This wine in particular is a decidedly well-rounded character profile for the rest of the vineyard’s inexorable number of offerings. The wine plays on its Grenache driven red fruit, but provides a nice under palette bite of oak that is subsumed by flavors of anise and vanilla - nothing over-the-top or distracting, which is a departure from some of their more offensive blends. There’s a tinge of cola flavor, that is lingering in this wine as well as a nice peppery retronasal character to be expected in a blend containing traces of Syrah. Some leather and granite dust can be observed by the keenest of noses.
It was not, unfortunately smooth sailing through the nineties for Grahm. While the young winemaker had selected his clones and rootstock correctly, in term, avoiding the scourge of Phylloxera that struck California’s poorly chosen AXR-1 rootstock which caused a major flare-up of the pest. Grahm, on the other hand, just five years after his epic Wine Spectator cover, lost his vineyards to Pierce’s Disease, the vine-rotting fatal disease wrought by xylella fastidiosa bacteria carried within the bowels of the sharpshooter: a locust-like bug with a venomous vial. The disease clogs the nutrient passageways of the vine halting virility and eventually killing it.
With the wildfire scourge of this bacteria destroying his principal vineyard on the Santa Cruz mountains in 1994, Grahm chose to buy grapes from elsewhere, abandoning his dedication to abject terroir and instead mass-producing wines of major grapes popular in the early 00’s; from this experimentation was born Pacific Rim Riesling of Washington State, Cardinal Zinfandel, and Big House, among others commonly found at major grocery stores across the US. Eventually, Graham had had enough of making these mass-market smash hits, and wanted to return to the philosophies which had led him to winemaking in the first place.
Having replanted his vineyard ensuring not another repeat of the past, Grahm turned his attention to his terroir. This vast expanse of fertile sandstone marl and clay with its northerly aspect at the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains began once again to produce wine of particular quality. The vineyards had been replanted here with Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre, enough so that these unique Rhône varietals could positively express the dense soils, rich in calcareous sea critters, that they had nearly twenty years earlier. Graham calls this renewed chapter in the winery’s history, the boutique vintages, likening the return to terroir-driven wine a congruency with his prose, and philosophy.
The Wine Spectator article that cemented Grahm’s legacy as a terroir-driven madman referred to him one of the Rhône Rangers: being that there were a number of quality-minded Syrah aficionados transporting these newfangled vines to the US in droves. Another such wide-eyed visionary was Fred Cline and his wife Nancy, owners of Cline Cellars in Oakley, California, on the to the north of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Despite the newness of their winemaking provenance at the time of the Wine Spectator Article, their vines were anything but. The couple had purchased the vineyard with money from the Jacuzzi estate - Fred’s grandfather was in fact the inventor of the whirlpool bathtub. The land in question is covered in ancient Zinfandel Mourvèdre and Carignan vines, some of which are centenarians. These vines are some of the oldest vines in California used for commercial wine production.
The winery is known for their dedication to these vines and the expression of terroir which they create in their world-adored blend called, Ancient Vines. Today, despite the older vineyards being located in the Oakley suburbs, the winery and production area has moved to another estate in the cooler Carneros subzone of Sonoma County, so that the couple can more adeptly begin to produce a wider array of wines, some intended for larger scale production, and some utilizing older-vines of more widely recognized varietals Cabernet, Merlot, and this being Carneros, Pinot Noir.
The Ancient Vines Mourvèdre is a particularly nice single-varietal bottling at a very affordable price. The wine is structured nicely, but with forthright blue fruit, showing references to some of the red wines of Bandol and southern Provence. There is some nice minerality to the palette, particularly flavors of roasted clay and mineral water, perhaps even an earthiness of button mushroom. The oaky, wood-stained notes of shoe-varnish, baked brioche and cinnamon play nicely with the roasted blueberry, and sour huckleberry aromas.
The soils in the original vineyard are acid-washed delicate blend of sand, sandstone, clay and interspersed limestone with some minor clay deposits, which act to retain moisture in the hot sun of the California plains. This lack of fertility and water-retention means that the soil is notably phylloxera resistant due to its uninhabitability. In recent years, Fred and Nancy have opted for a Green String Certification, which is similar to organic winery certification, except a bit more stringent. They use cover crops like lavender and oregano to ward off pests, and compostable materials to protect against mold and rot. No petroleum products are used in the vineyard at all.
Bob Lindquist founded his initial winery venture, Qupé, in 1982. The name was chosen from the language of the Native American tribe, the Chumash from the respective area where the vineyard is planted. The word means, poppy, a nod to the crop nearly exclusively grown in Santa Maria before wine became all of the fuss, of course.
Just south of Paso Robles, this vineyard was planted in an area where the Maritime Pacific breeze flows right beyond the vineyard northbound into the central Valley. Though the region sees a lot of sun, the combination of the alpine temperature-regulating Sisquoc River and altitude at the foothills of the heat hogging Los Padres national forest is a benefit to the cool-climate varietals grown in this limestone, and sand- based vineyard. The cold damp air puled in towards the mountains creates a fog-vacuum protecting the morning ripening of the grapes and cooling the area down in the evenings.
Qupé’s signature wine is currently not a blend - a bit of a departure from their initial foundation. Their Central-Coast Syrah is a tooth-staining black nectar of affable complexity. The wine opens as dramatic as a Syrah would, with tinges of blackberry jam, nettles and cassis. Leather and vanilla are soon to follow as well as some tobacco. Notable pepperiness occurs later in the palette as a lingering trace of peagravel widdles away as the fruit dominates the finish. This wine is a lovely food-wine for heartier dishes.
Bob Lindquist began to seek soils northward in the late 2000’s, desiring to turn his attention to Chardonnay, and Rhône blends in smaller quantities, while staying on at Qupé initially as a wine consultant. Though bob Lindquist has since departed this operation, both he, his new venture, Lindquist Family Winery, and Qupé are all dedicated to the appreciation and protection of Rhône Valley varietals in California and were pioneers of their plantings throughout the US.
By the nineties, a new and patient group of Rangers were moving into the Paso Robles area, after having watched the first wave of Rhône Rangers scoop up the success of this incredible terroir. With much a different, yet experienced view of these new Syrah enthusiasts were none other than the French themselves. The entrepreneurial and successful Perrin Family of Château de Beaucastel dispatched Jean-Pierre and François Perrin in 1985 to stake a foothold of French know-how on the soils of Paso Robles.
In 1985, the team of French ecologists set out around the plains of California to seek out the finest wine-growing soils, ones that would create wines of decadent compliment to their French counterparts. They settled on a terroir by 1989 in an up-and-coming area outside of San Luis Obisbo on the Central Coast called Paso Robles. The area itself was an alfalfa farm and agricultural wasteland with a highly acetic soils of limestone, well-draining sand and gravels, and marl not dissimilar to those found on their Châteauneuf property.
The family began importing vines from their French estate in 1990, including some varietals that were totally new to California, like Counoise, Grenache Blanc, and of course Syrah from their own estates. These would need to wait several years for quarantining by the department of Agriculture. By 1997, the state had begun releasing its first vintages of wine made from its own French vines.
The signature wine is called Espirit de Beaucastel, or Spirit of Beaucastel. It is a blend of French vine-yield wine with a Châteauneuf-like cépage of Mourvèdre, Granache, Syrah, Counoise and Carignan. It really captures the sprit of a glossy, mineralic, and aggressive Châteauneuf, with some rustic charm and a nice, notable acidity and a firm sense of fruit - a very French wine with genuinely American appeal. The white version is a blend of Grenache blanc, Marsanne, Rousanne, and Picpoul, barrel aged, which is seemingly contrary to the French stylistic approach, but retains its acidity nicely.
That's all,
~K