"Wait, boy. D'ye hear that?"
"What is it grand-pop?"
"Music, lad. The sweet song of Bonny Doon."
"What's a Bonny Doon, grand-pop?"
"Not a what, son, but a where. They say, long ago, there was a village in these hills, so wondrous, so beautiful, so full of wine that the townsfolk decided to cast a spell on the whole of the town, so that it shall not appear on this Earth save for every hundred years when it rises from the mist once again."
"Aw, yer joshin' me, pops!"
"Nay it's true! Me own pa said he saw it with his own eyes, boy. Some say it's the lurid color and CO2 what binds the spell to the town. Other say there's no spell at all, and that the inhabitants are so inebriated that they just can't find their way out of the village."
"I find that characterization offensive to Scots, pop."
Enter a man in a suit.
"Hi, I'm Fitzsimmons von Spoonwanter, vice president in charge of caricatures here at Woot. I'm here to clarify that the Bonny Doon Sparkling Syrah is not in fact a Scottish wine. It's a lovely Californian vintage from the central coast. Thank you."
"What, that's it? No apology?"
2011 Sparkling Syrah 750ml 3-Pack
One of the recurring themes at Bonny Doon Vineyard is the odd locus at which we always seem to find ourselves—the intersection of the terminally hip and the terminally unhip, and this is nowhere more vividly exemplified than in the 2011 Sparkling Syrah (not Shiraz!). At first blush, this is not an obvious wine for us. It’s so, y’know, Antipodean… And yet, can we not also make the same claim (of terminal hip/unhipness) for the denizens Doon Under themselves? You have to hand it to a group of blokes—it had to be a bloke who first dreamed this up—who turn a received wine style on its head, and, y’know, just messed with it, throwing out all notions of propriety. (I must confess to find this notion quite agreeable.) How does one think about a sparkling red wine? You begin by first fearing not the tannin—we picked a base wine that had wonderful natural acidity but relatively low tannin. And then you come to realize that CO2 or fizz as we know it, is a great amplifier of aroma, indeed of everything. You love the aromas of Syrah, right? Now, get ready to smell them REAL BIG.
You note the lurid deep, violaceous color. Don’t be afraid. It’s crushed velours with a tantalizing playful effervescence that you’ll soon be sipping. You get the typical quality of smoked meat that one often finds in cool climate Syrah, but not so sauvage; there are the more civilized elements of wintergreen and crushed blackberries that offer cool comfort. Clearly, the still red wine that you still remember has undergone some sort of magical transformation. Grapefruit? Cassis? Perhaps some unnamed tropical fruit with mysterious magical seeds, each one containing a yetto- be fulfilled magical wish. Wait, it’s Necco wafers, yes, spearmint Necco wafers, to be precise, with perhaps a hint of a refreshing sarsaparilla. Yes, there’s definitely a candied quality to this very elegant fizzy red wine—it’s candied violets (there is hardly anything more elegant in the world).
In the mouth, it’s just plain fun. You can’t help but smile. It’s like listening to your favorite piece of music transposed into another style. The wine is clearly a Syrah, but rendered in a way that is startlingly unexpected and just totally fun. Don’t stress out about what to serve with this. Undoubtedly, there is some extraordinary food combination that you or I will never figure out. But use it as you would a Syrah table wine; I think with a leg of lamb it would be brilliant. But perhaps also with a chocolate layer cake.
An important serving note: the Sparkling Syrah is quite effervescent, so please use caution and patience when opening!
Food Pairing Notes: Grilled pork sandwiches with radishes, carrots & chiles (Bánh mì), Sweet and spicy Missouri-style BBQ, roasted turkey leg, Rogue Creamery Smokey Blue.
Food Pairing Notes: Grilled pork sandwiches with radishes, carrots & chiles (Bánh mì), Sweet and spicy Missouri-style BBQ, roasted turkey leg, Rogue Creamery Smokey Blue.
While Bonny Doon Vineyard began with the (in retrospect) foolish attempt to replicate Burgundy in California, Randall Grahm realized early on that he would have far more success creating more distinctive and original wines working with Rhône varieties in the Central Coast of California. The key learning here (achieved somewhat accidentally but fortuitously) was that in a warm, Mediterranean climate, it is usually blended wines that are most successful. In 1986 Bonny Doon Vineyard released the inaugural vintage (1984) of Le Cigare Volant, an homage to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and this continues as the winery’s flagship/starship brand.
Since then, Bonny Doon Vineyard has enjoyed a long history of innovation – the first to truly popularize Rhône grapes in California, to successfully work with cryo-extraction for sundry “Vins de Glacière, the first to utilize microbullage in California, the first to popularize screwcaps for premium wines, and, quite significantly, the first to embrace true transparency in labeling with its ingredient labeling initiative. The upside of all of this activity has brought an extraordinary amount of creativity and research to the California wine scene; the doon-side, as it were, was perhaps an ever so slight inability to focus, to settle doon, if you will, into a single, coherent direction.
Bonny Doon Vineyard grew and grew with some incredibly popular brands (Big House, Cardinal Zin and Pacific Rim) until it became the 28th largest winery in the United Stated. Randall came to the realization – better late than Nevers – that he had found that the company had diverged to a great extent from his original intention of producing soulful, distinctive and original wines, and that while it was amusing to be able to get restaurant reservations almost anywhere (the only real tangible perk he was able to discern from the vast scale of the operation), it was time to take a decisive course correction. With this in mind, he sold off the larger brands (Big House and Cardinal Zin) in 2006 and Pacific Rim in 2010.
In the intervening years, the focus of the winery has been to spend far more time working with vineyards in improving their practices, as well as on making wines with a much lighter touch – using indigenous yeast whenever possible, and more or less eschewing vinous maquillage, (at least not to Tammy Faye Bakker-like levels). Recently, Randall has purchased an extraordinary property in San Juan Bautista, which he calls Popelouchum, (the Mutsun word for “paradise,”) where he is profoundly intent on producing singular wines expressive of place. There are also very grand plans afoot to plant a dry-farmed Estate Cigare vineyard. #staydooned.
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