In the mid-1970s, David Darlington writes, “a whole generation of liberal arts-educated (and drug-seasoned) college graduates, faced with the prospect of locating a livelihood in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, were searching for some form of existence that (1) did no harm and (2) promised more enjoyment of life than the example of their parents.” Some found their way to California, “enrolled as grad students in pursuit of master’s degrees in enology or viticulture” at the University of California at Davis, and soon emerged to preside over a revolution in American wine-making.
“An Ideal Wine” is Darlington’s account of their rise and its unintended consequences. The American wine industry as it exists today bears little resemblance to what the young pioneers idealistically (and naively) had in mind back in the ’70s as they purchased their first vineyards and made their first wine. Beginning with the hope of making good wine and perhaps making some money as well, they found themselves drawn inexorably by the forces of the marketplace into a transition they had not foreseen, “from a ‘cottage industry’ to one run by big corporations.”
Darlington tells this story as it has been experienced by two men, Randall Grahm and Leo McCloskey. Himself a well-regarded writer on food and wine — his four previous books include “Angel’s Visits: An Inquiry Into the Mystery of Zinfandel,” now available as “Zin” — Darlington sees these two as representing “warring worldviews in the emerging dialectic.” Grahm, “the leading iconoclast of California wine,” gained eclat and commercial success as proprietor of Bonny Doon, then turned toward smaller ventures, while McCloskey, after leading Ridge Vineyards to comparable esteem and success, founded Enologix, “a business offering ‘metrics that assist winemakers in improving wine quality and boosting average national critics’ scores.’ ” The exceptionally articulate Grahm defined the philosophical difference between the camps in which the two reside:
“There are basically two wine businesses. Industrial and artisanal. An artisanal wine is largely, if not entirely, predicated on the quality of a particular vineyard site. That’s what makes it distinctive — it’s the site that’s special. Industrial wine can still be very good wine, but it’s not predicated on the distinctiveness of the site — it’s predicated on the cleverness of the winemaker as blender, so there are limits to how great that wine can possibly be. In the New World, we’re basically making wines on the industrial model. All of our sites are hit and miss, because we haven’t had time to determine what is a great vineyard.”
Grahm is a New World winemaker but an Old World guy: “In the wine industry at large, Grahm is still widely known as the Rhone Ranger, a title he secured in the 1980s by popularizing the grapes of France’s Rhone River valley — syrah, grenache, mourvedre, roussanne, marsanne, viognier, et al. — in California, whose climate he found better suited to those varieties than to pinot noir or cabernet sauvignon, the totemic grapes of Burgundy and Bordeaux.” Darlington gives more or less equal time to both men, but there’s little doubt that his heart lies with Grahm and the artisanal approach, which emphasizes what the French call “terroir,” translated as “land,” defined by another California winemaker as “the right grape in the right soil with the right climate and the right winemaker” — wine that can only be made in a certain place in a certain way and can be identified, by people with highly educated palates, according to place, grape and winemaker, a subject explored two years ago by Neal I. Rosenthal in “Reflections of a Wine Merchant.”
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