Is it possible to joke about wine? Bonny Doon winemaker Randall Grahm thinks so. In a conversation with Food Republic‘s editor-in-chief Richard Martin, Graham discusses his approach to the perpetually pokerfaced field of wine including his goofy technicolor wine labels (his A Proper Claret label features a man wearing red fishnets) and his thoughts on serious wine (“The secret of being a great marketer of a luxury brand is creating the impression that you don’t give a shit whether anyone buys your wine.”).
But Grahm also gets serious and muses over the meaning California terroir saying, “the way we grow grapes in California is not really suited to the expression of place,” while revealing he’d prefer to grow grapes from seed rather than depend on the grafting system in regards to his new project in the non-wine region of San Juan Bautista, which he admits could “be completely nuts.” [Food Republic] [Photo: Flickr/Neeta Lind]