Reviews

A book of change
Simple Wine News, May 2010

Winemaker Randall Grahm burst out with an eccentric, at times difficult to understand and seriously free thinking literary work that will be discussed as much as his wines.

The news about Randall Grahm’s book had appeared on Twitter long before it was released, followed by a lively discussion as if it was a Grisham bestseller. Burning from curiosity, I asked Randall for a copy of Been Doon So Long with an excuse to do a review of the book in Russian. The excuse worked.

Actually, Randall Grahm is a winemaker, not a writer, which makes his literary exercises even more curious to follow. In early eighties he far-sightedly abandoned the hope to produce best American Pinot Noir and successfully re-qualified as a Rhone Ranger. Le Cigare Volant a la Chateauneuf-du-Pape brought international acclaim, although the winemaker remains an avid defender of little known local varieties. In twenty years Grahm transformed his Californian Bonny Doon into a company of great centrifugal force, but eventually decided to turn to his roots. He now owns two estates — Ca del Solo in Monterey and a still nameless biodynamic vineyard near Santa Cruz.

This short resume still gives no clue to Grahm as a writer. Although the winemaker openly admits that he grabbed the pen in order promote his products, his writing talents quickly expanded beyond the genre of corporate mailouts. Two personalities co-exist in Grahm — a winemaker and a litterateur, and this is a rare case when one part of the combination benefits, rather than suffers, from the other.

In a nutshell, Been Doon So Long is a compilation of texts from winery bulletins written in the past 20 years. Before reading the book, I took Grahm a serious writer, thanks to his academic column in The World of Fine Wine where he ponders on the issues of terroir. Well, I had no idea about his other literary feats. It turns out that all these years Grahm walked his creative fantasies without a lead, making parodies on Kafka and Salinger, mastering his wine rhymes and fully applying his know-how to rock opera librettos. No conventional wine writer ever thought to write in these formats, Grahm is unique.

Reading the book requires a certain linguistic preparation. Fluent English, as well as French, Italian, Yiddish and wine jargon are not enough. Grahm is a great master of puns, and his texts are generously mixed with philological jokes which cannot be tamed in any other tongue. It is a waste of time to translate Been Doon So Long in any conventional language, including Russian. Moreover, Grahm’s thinking processes occur in complex multidimensional spaces, so the list of his own references and annotations takes up almost half of the book.

Unlike the style, Randall Grahm’s ideology is forthright and unbending, like that of Don Quixote, with whom the writer-winemaker likes to compare himself. There is an endless search of great terroir, fights for the purity of wine styles and continuous castigation of critics with their senseless and uncompromising points. “The epilogue to this volume will be written in wine-dark ink”, says Randall Grahm. It means that Grahm-writer can be expected to produce another volume of the Been Doon So Long vinthology, and Grahm-winemaker — a new wine, beyond the lines of ordinary. What will be better? It is impossible to answer.