Randall Grahm must be doing pirouettes of disbelief

In 1985-86, we happened to be geographically linked with a winemaker who worked with a newcomer in the wine world named Randall Grahm, who had bought land a few minutes up the coast, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, in Bonny Doon. Grahm had planted a lot of French Rhone-style wines and in 1984 released the first Le Cigare Volant. We knew about none of this until our neighbor*, Daniel, the assistant winemaker at Grahm's new winery, Bonny Doon Vineyard, started bringing home wines for us to try. The chardonnays had none of that stingy sugar nor over-oakiness that had made us dubious about the few chardonnays we had tried in our heretofore brief drinking lives. These filled our mouths with butter and sunlight and honey and flowers and pears and herbs.

One day Daniel brought home some Le Cigare Volant, the flying cigar wine, a blend of Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre. Daniel had shown us by then how to breathe as we tasted, about the different mouthfeel of every wine. Our newly awakened palates and vocabularies discovered plums, berries, cherries, leather, tobacco, smoke, wood, earth. We scraped together some extra money for a case while Daniel worked there, a stretch for us poor college students but worth it.

Our neighbor soon became disillusioned with "working for snobs," as he put it, and in rapid succession he got a degree and a job as a professor of environmental sciences. Meanwhile, Grahm's fame as a winemaker grew, based on the reputation he had built with his "flying cigar wine," as it was affectionately known. Our knowledge of wine varieties also grew as we continued living in the sleepy town of Santa Cruz, near our little gem of a market a few blocks away, Shopper's Corner. The wine buyer at "Shopper's" had a special passion for finding inexpensive gems, and we're talking not Three-Buck Chuck here but three-dollar bottles of Cotes du Rhone, Burgundy, Chardonnay. Pinot Noirs from France and yet another world of Pinots from California. You could get bottles of Ridge Zinfandel for six or seven dollars -- what an education those wines were in how the stresses of heat and time and locale could affect a single variety.

Giving his wines irreverent names was one of the methods Grahm, the driven director of Bonny Doon Vineyard, used to stoke the buzz about himself and his new wine blends. The coinage "Rhone Ranger" told of Grahm's quest to bring Rhone varietals to California's north-central coast. Le Cigare Volant was the first of these, and now having had a case of a 1980s vintage of that wine into the early oughts seems like something worth remembering. The wine called Big House Red was an early and successful attempt at cracking the mass market and has allowed Grahm more time and money for his pursuit of his own synthesis of growing grapes and blending them in new ways.

This morning I scanned the Wednesday liquor-store ad, and no, Le Cigare Volant is not on sale (you can buy a few-year-old vintage for about $35 at our local mart), but wacky names from the list of sale wines were popping out all over the page. I've gotten used to Big Ass Cabernet and Red Bicyclette and Goats do Roam, but here is an import called Mommy's Time Out and a sparkling shiraz (a wine I have been wanting to try very much since I learned of it from an Aussie mate) called Naked on Roller Skates. Methinks the cute-name trend may have exhausted itself. Randall, what do you think?

*We have awfully good luck with neighbors, don't we?!