Randall Grahm tells Anthony Rose about his quest to make a true wine of place at Popelouchum estate in San Benito County and his ambitious Language of Yes project with Gallo.
“I expect that on my deathbed, as I gather my last breath, my protestation that ‘this time I’m serious’ will be perfunctorily dismissed as a mere attention-getting device.”
From Doon to Earth, by Randall Grahm
Grahm, Randall (1953– ), California wine grower arguably more famous for his words than for his wines.” The first lines of his entry in The Oxford Companion to Wine may ring true to readers of his “vinthology,” Been Doon So Long, or his cohort of social media followers. Grahm himself might prefer to argue with the “arguably,” even if Hugh Johnson once said of him, “I can think of only one person who has conceived the wine and made it, then given us both barrels: his reasons and opinions. Randall Grahm stands alone.” As a gifted parodist, Grahm’s quixotic daydreaming has made him a hugely effective communicator of his wines—or his whines, as he might put it—but since selling his Big House and Cardinal Zin brands in 2010 and Bonny Doon in 2020, he has decided, “It was time to grow up and attempt to make a wine of place. Forever, I have wanted to make my own proper ‘European’ wines—that is to say, wines of place—but I was always too chicken-shit to try. I was too afraid of failing, and while I may still fail, it still seems like a supremely worthy enterprise. This is of course much easier said than doon.” (You can take the man out of Bonny Doon, but you can’t take the Doon out of the man.)
Keen to stay within a reasonable range of his beloved Santa Cruz, Grahm searched up and down the coast, eventually alighting on a property in San Benito County. He called it Popelouchum (pronounced pope-loh-SHOOM, he informs us), the Mutsun Indian name for the settlement around the historical town of San Juan Bautista, an alternative translation of which is “paradise.” “Forgive me, this may sound a bit new agey, and I’m not a new agey kind of guy [author’s note: some mistake, surely], but I remembered that I had seen it once before in my dreams, which seemed a very propitious sign indeed.”
Popelouchum is “a very interesting place from a terroir standpoint, with multiple distinctive soil types and aspects,” says Grahm. He defines terroir in wine as “a wine’s unique attributes associated with the physical attributes of a site,” while at the same time, “terroir cannot exist without the perception and participation of a human being.” The property is adjacent to the San Andreas Fault, “which is a little unsettling,” says Grahm. As a result of a huge amount of seismic activity, there are multiple distinctive soil types juxtaposed with one another. When soil microbiologists Claude and Lydia Bourguignon visited California, they carried out a study for him, digging pits and taking soil samples. They said that while they had not as yet seen a place in California that expressed a strong terroir, if such a place were to exist, Popelouchum could well be that place.
How to go about a vin de terroir
Echoing the “raging obsession” with Pinot Noir that he had when he planted the Bonny Doon Vineyard in 1980, Grahm was still keen to make a wine from the heartbreak grape when he first started on the project—“the Great American Pinot Noir, if you will.” Then he started to think about how to achieve his terroir goal. “If you were going to make a vin de terroir, what would it look like? How would you go about doing that? Where would you begin?” This led to the idea of creating a complex set of genotypically distinctive biotypes in a single plantation, taking the tack of suppressing varietal expression to allow a greater degree of soil expression. “It was a gestalt problem, conceiving of the grapes as carriers of a message rather than the message itself. It’s a very ambitious, wild, and perhaps insane idea—but it’s my insane idea.”
Realizing that it would be too ambitious, expensive, “and perhaps a bit foolhardy” to plant the whole vineyard to a heterodox mix of biotypes, Grahm is trialing it on just a discrete portion of the vineyard in pursuit of his ongoing concern to preserve and encourage a diversity of wine styles and rare and unusual grape varieties. He is crossing Ciliegiolo and Picolit and then plans a mixed plantation in a single block, 2 acres (just under 1ha) of each, to three distinctive soil types: limestone, granite, and volcanic. “Picolit is a female grape and thus easy to cross, while a hermaphrodite vine (which needs to be tediously transformed into a female for the crossing) is a royal pain in the butt.” Compared to Tuscany, Ciliegiolo behaves somewhat differently in California. “Ciliegiolo is quite early, vigorous, seemingly drought-tolerant, and somewhat Zorba the Greek-ish in its aspects, the vitaceous equivalent of dancing on tables, an elemental life force.” He is hoping to have several hundred of the new crossings to observe this year, possibly not quite yet dancing on tables.
The second project involves growing more or less conventional grape varieties—Grenache Gris, Grenache Blanc, Ruchè, Tibouren, and Cinsaut—in another part of the vineyard. The vines are head-trained, with minimal irrigation and restrictive yield. “I am trying to make more soulful expressions of these varieties,” Grahm says, “with a strong emphasis on soil health, using organic farming, biochar, and other techniques to enhance the biotic potential of the soil.” Biochar, which is activated charcoal mixed with compost, enhances the water-holding capacity at the same time as creating a substrate for beneficial soil microbes. “Biochar is just brilliant,” says Grahm. He believes it might work in a similar way to limestone, with a lot of interior surface area for the retention of moisture, enhancing the homeostatic potential of the plant, resulting in wines of greater finesse and elegance. “Yes, it’s a sort of distortion of the terroir, but everything you do is a kind of deformation. When you cultivate soil, it’s an even greater deformation. This method is quite benign.”
Grahm’s third initiative (“We ended up lurching toward this somewhat”) is working with self-crosses, specifically with Sérine, Tibouren, and Pignolo. While the Ciliegiolo and Picolit are proper crosses, these are self-pollinated plants, grown from seeds. He explains, “Vitis vinifera vines can pollinate themselves, but you typically get the expression of genetic flaws from the recessive genes and quite a number of examples (sterile biotypes, for example) that are not at all useful. However, out of many ugly ducklings, some interesting biotypes emerge. You take the seeds, dry and germinate them, and there you go.” At first, almost everyone told him it was a bad idea. Wine Grapes coauthor José Vouillamoz initially strongly counseled against doing it but later changed his mind. He referred to an initiative in Calabria by Librandi of self-crossings of Gaglioppo and Magliocco in search of more interesting biotypes and the reinvigoration of an old variety that has historically had issues such as virus and poor clonal selection.
Either very powerful or utterly stupid
This creates an interesting opportunity. “There are two ways of thinking about this,” says Grahm. “When I first started, I thought I might find one uniquely stellar example perhaps better suited to San Juan Bautista conditions than its parent. For instance, Syrah was originally discovered/created in the Northern Rhône and adapted to conditions there, so there’s no reason to imagine that it should be a particularly brilliant grape for San Juan Bautista or even anywhere else. But maybe by recombining its genetic patrimony, forcing a significant number of variants, I might perhaps find one better suited to our climes.” He has since more or less abandoned the idea of discovering the one genius biotype in the collection—or is “at least coming to believe that I likely do not have the wit to discern it if presented to me.” However it’s brought him to another idea “that’s either very powerful or utterly stupid, I don’t yet know.”
Instead of, or in addition to, looking for the “best biotype” or clone, Grahm feels that maybe there is no “best clone” but that, rather, the best clone is perhaps a composite of a significant number of different biotypes. So, for example, he started with Sérine, did the self-crosses, came up with about 1,200 vines and planted out little 2in (5cm) seedlings about five years ago. Sérine (or Syrah) is the offspring of Dureza (a red grape) and Mondeuse Blanche (a white grape), and when allowed to self-cross, 25% of the offspring were white grapes and 75% red. Why seedlings? “The rooting characteristics of vines grown from seeds [as distinct from cuttings] allow one to render a much more amplified and perhaps distinctive expression of terroir. To my astonishment, the whites are just out-of-sight fantastic, just delicious.” Grahm identified 65 of the most interesting white biotypes, totally randomized, each one different from the other, made cuttings, took them to a nursery, had bench grafts produced, and planted almost 2 acres of “Sérine Blanche.” Strictly speaking, he says, it’s not exactly Sérine Blanche, because it’s genetically different. “I’m thinking that this white wine will be a wine that’s never existed before. Birds willing, the first vintage micro-fermentation could be this year.”
Grahm plans to do the same with the red Sérine variants, “although they’re more weird, anomalous looking, all over the place,” and he’s doing the same thing with Tibouren, but that’s still early days. He believes in a real possibility of finding some interesting Tibouren variants. “The variety seems to go somewhat mental in California in terms of the size of the cluster, so not surprisingly I’m looking for small-cluster variants, as well as those that are more aromatically charged.” He can’t say for sure exactly why he’s precisely settled on these varieties; suffice to say, “I love the wines from Tibouren (aka Rossese di Dolceacqua) and Sérine. There’s something like a coolness (in multiple senses) to both of them.”
How to rationalize creating something so very different from mainstream viticulture? “In the New World, without a road map, it is really a conundrum to know with any confidence how a new variety (or complex set of variants) will fare,” says Grahm. “I’m working in no small part from intuition and instinct, but until you’ve planted the vineyard and harvested the grapes for a few years, you really don’t know what you’re going to get.” Sometimes the solution is self-evident; so, in the weaker, shallower soils, he’s planting the more drought-tolerant varieties like Grenache Noir and Cinsaut. The Bourguignons suggested he consider planting Palomino in the chalkier soil, but that was just a bridge too far.
The Roussillon in the south of France is the closest place that Grahm’s been able to find that’s comparable to San Juan Bautista in climate, which is windy, dry, and fairly moderate in temperature. “I believe it’s significantly colder in the Roussillon in winter. The varieties that do well in Roussillon do exceptionally well here. The wind would drive someone mad in Roussillon. It’s typically windy here, maybe less maddening, and as a result of the wind, we end up with a very late season and preternaturally high acidity in our wines.” Popelouchum lies in the San Benito County AVA, and Grahm says that at some point he would like to create a new AVA, maybe a monopole, for it.
Grahm’s perennial quest for terroir
Trying to make it all work economically is another story. “It’s a very different model from most vineyards in California. Quixotic? Ambitious? Perhaps.” Grahm feels the only way it’s going to work is to bring people to the property and show them the site. “When they see for themselves why the wine is as expensive as it needs to be, they’ll grok the whole gestalt. In a similar way, when you go to Burgundy in winter, you’ve never been that cold in your entire life, and you apprehend with your body why Burgundies are the way they are, and you get it in a way that you can’t get without visiting the site, and I think it’s the same way here. It’s not like a Napa vineyard—it looks different, it feels different, it tastes different.”
The entire property is over 400 acres (160ha), with about 55 acres (22ha) available for planting. Currently, around 15% of the vineyard is in production, with another 15% coming into production. Cropping at around 2 tons per acre, yielding around 30hl/ha (12hl/acre), Grahm hopes to be able to produce some 100 tons. This year he will make about 1,000 cases of wine; last year he produced 650 cases. For the time being, he is making the wine at a local winery and hopes that a cellar door will be next, recognizing that selling the wines exclusively through wholesale won’t add up financially. With 1.5 million potential customers within an hour from Popelouchum, direct sales make a lot of sense.
Grahm is particularly bullish about Grenache in Popelouchum. If the whole vineyard were planted out, with more Grenache, Cinsaut, and Sérine—an aim over the next four years—his production target would be some 5,000–6,000 cases, which would work financially. He has also been successful recently in tracking down the elusive Nebbiolo Rosé, a somewhat controversial variety grown in the Langhe and Valtellina, now understood not to be Nebbiolo per se but “Nebbiolo crossed with something vaguely Muscat-ish.” He has taken multiple samples to UC Davis to run a DNA for confirmation, “and flunked,” but this time he thinks he has it, and he plans to plant a few acres of Nebbiolo Rosé in the strong limestone block.
On the subject of distinct soil types, “We have some strong volcanic, granitic, calcareous blocks, along with more prosaic sandstone and some very bizarre, aliphatic clay. I’m saving the interesting soil types for the new crossings.” Grahm doesn’t think that, in general, California possesses a huge number of distinctive terroirs, or that the way the industry grows grapes and makes wine is conducive to expressing terroir. “We will of course try, but the irony is that perhaps the typical New World wine drinker, even connoisseur, likely remains perfectly happy at the moment with an overripe fruit-bomb.” This challenge of how to make wines with a European accent that will appeal to the New World wine drinker is inextricably bound up with Grahm’s perennial quest for terroir. There’s no doubting the ambition and the aspiration to find the elusive holy grail. The final say is in the hands of the terroir gods.
Tasting the wines of Randall Grahm
The Popelouchum Wines
2017 Popelouchum Estate Blanc San Benito County
(13.5% ABV)
Roughly half and half Grenache Gris and Blanc, this blend—made at a friend’s winery in a single concrete egg—is pale gold and fine, showing developed Grenache aromatics, fragrant and floral, true varietal, sumptuous fruit richness, nicely textured and balanced by a savory, saline character for elegant dryness. | 90
2021 Popelouchum Estate Blanc San Benito County
(13.5% ABV)
Made at Gallo in Edna Valley using whole-bunch direct pressing with no skin contact, this Grenache Gris/Blanc blend is fresh and Roussillon-like in style; vivid, intense, and super-aromatic. There’s a garrigue-like note, with a kind of subtle oak and cardamom-like spiciness. Light on its feet, with plenty of energy and elegance, thanks to an elegantly zesty, citrusy acidity. This shows good aging potential. | 91
2022 Popelouchum Estate Blanc San Benito County
(14.5% ABV)
Picked a little riper than the 2021 vintage and with roughly two hours’ skin contact, this barrel-fermented blend of Grenache Gris and Blanc is an appealing golden color, showing subtle smoky oak aromas. Then, on tasting, it’s rich and full-bodied, almost plump and juicy in texture, with well-defined flavors supported by a fine blade of refreshing, almost saline acidity. Very much a food wine. | 92
2020 Popelouchum Pinot Noir San Benito County
(13.5% ABV)
The first vintage after having to replant the vines following the destruction of the first plantings by “monster” tree rats, this displays a distinctive Pinot berry fragrance, with a light spicy element, a subtle touch of oak. Full and rich on tasting, this is ripe, textured Pinot fruit in the dark-cherry spectrum, with sturdy tannins and good acidity. A likable Pinot, with good varietal character, balancing acidity and freshness. | 90
2021 Popelouchum Pinot Noir San Benito County
(13.5% ABV)
Still shy on the nose, showing dark-berry fruit, albeit not as distinctively Pinot Noir in character as the 2020 vintage. There’s a subtle whiff of oak (from five- to six-year-old barriques), and it’s a tad heftily extracted and rustic in tannins, but there’s good supporting acidity—even if it comes across more as a dry red than a distinctive Pinot Noir. | 89
2022 Popelouchum Pinot Noir San Benito County
(13.5% ABV)
After a cold soak for five to six days, using the natural yeasts in Popelouchum, this is fermented in bins with gentle extraction, producing a lighter color. The aromas are fragrantly mulberryish, as yet still primary, and the flavorsome cherryish fruit is full-bodied and richly textured. Elegant and more integrated than the 2021 vintage and supported by energetic acidity. “We’re not quite in La Tâche territory yet,” comments Grahm drily. | 91
2022 Popelouchum Cinsaut San Benito County
(12.5% ABV)
In its first vintage, this is made from a bootleg clone from Château Routas in Provence. There is a single barrel of a red that’s fresh and spicy, with charming aromatics and delightfully primary red-cherry fruit, with a spicy, white peppery edge to it, supported by firmish tannins and refreshingly juicy, savory acidity. | 91
2017 Popelouchum Grenache San Benito County
(13.9% ABV)
Fermented in a 40-gallon plastic garbage can and aged in a 15-gallon barrel, this Grenache “from a special clone that somehow found its way into California from Château Rayas,” shows a sweetly raisined oxidation in aroma and flavor. The distinctive, rich raisin and cherry fruit shouldn’t work but, in its own idiosyncratic way, just about does. “This is an anomaly; the 75cl bottles are weird, semi-oxidized; the half-bottles are perfect,” comments Grahm. | 89
The Language of Yes Wines
2022 The Language of Yes Vin Rouge Cuvée Sinsó
(13.3% ABV)
A deep youthful ruby, this blend of 64% Cinsaut, 26% Syrah, 6% Grenache, 3% Tannat (from Sunnybrook Vineyard, Paso Robles) and 1% Viognier has a beguiling fragrance, freshness combining with notes of thyme and loganberries. On tasting, that thyme note infuses the richness of loganberry fruit with an intriguing herbal quality, while subtly juicy tannins lurk behind a refreshing flourish of acidity supporting the fruit. Very much a food wine, in a California-meets-Oc vein. | 92
2022 The Language of Yes Pink Wine Le Cerisier Central Coast AVA
(13% ABV)
More gris de gris than pink wine, this blend of 60% Tibouren, 26% Cinsaut, and 14% Grenache is attractively floral in aroma. It’s richly textured from concentrated ripe grapes, whose underlying berry-fruit flavors are supported by a lowish acidity commonly associated with a smooth vin gris, so it is fresh rather than crisp, thanks to a grippy hint of bitterness on the finish. Very much a food wine, for the likes of tiger prawns and lobster. | 89
2022 The Language of Yes Les Fruits Rouges
(13% ABV)
A coppery pink, the color of this Rhône-style blend of 72% Grenache, 26% Cinsaut, and 2% Tibouren betrays a Tavel-like character. Fresh, floral, and fragrant, it’s an attractively compact, grown-up rosé, showing a refreshingly dry berry-fruit character, framed by cleansing acidity and a light grip of tannin on the finish. Very much a rosé that would grace grilled chicken or salmon. | 90
2022 The Language of Yes Syrah En Passerillage Rancho Réal Vineyard Santa Maria Valley AVA
(14% ABV)
Aged for 12 months in used puncheons and stainless steel, this wine—
co-fermented à la Côte-Rôtie with 18% Viognier—feels coolish climate and aromatic in a Northern Rhône vein, with notes of blackcurrant, paprika, and tapenade. The dark berry fruit is voluptuously ripe, spicy, and juicily textured, not over-rich but ample, a succulent lip-smacker with just the right amount of fresh acidity for balance and moreish drinkability. | 92
2022 The Language of Yes Grenache En Passerillage Rancho Réal Vineyard Santa Maria Valley AVA
(13.5% ABV)
With a pale ruby color and the raspberryish fragrance reminiscent of a youthful Pinot Noir, this blend contains 4% Syrah, as might a corresponding Languedoc blend. Then there’s a supple-textured and spicy cherry and raspberry fruit quality, with its medium-bodied, juicy, fresh underpinning, and that instant hit of fruit sweetness turns savory, thanks to the acidity contributing an umami-like note to seductive, food-friendly effect. | 92