Eric Asimov of the New York Times did an interesting profile of winemaker/wine provocateur Randall Grahm in print and online versions about a week ago, portraying the boy from Bonny Doon as a "new man" whose "new idea is to get small." After a stretch of years in which the Big House brand and the Pacific Rim Riesling venture rocketed production up to 450,000 cases, Grahm has spun off and sold whole lines of wine, dropped production to 35,000 cases, purchased new vineyard land in San Benito County near San Juan Bautista (appropriately, the town whose Mission was the setting for "Vertigo"), and focused back on the purist of original, distinctive, terroir-driven wines.
But Blind Muscat has learned there's a little more to this new phase. A modest project on the Franco-Swiss border, deep under the ground, far away from the prying eyes of the wine media and the TTB. Yes, the rumors are true: Randall Grahm is hoping to turn the 2008 Cigare Volant, now in barrel, into the world's first Big Bang wine by drenching it in super-charged elementary particles from the Large Hadron Collider.
Pause for a minute, reflect on Randall's trajectory, and it makes perfect sense. In his many incarnations, he's often worked with wines from Europe, often acted as a negociant who pulled rabbits out of hats and made interesting wines from the effort, and shown, Lord knows, a willingness to try just about anything. Asimov describes his interest in making wines in clay amphorae, and notes that a portion of the 2008 Cigare currently rests in glass carboys, home-winemaker-style, following the lead of an Italian winemaker Grahm admires. He has tried aging in stone bottles; he's tried to portray minerality through crystallography; he's thinking of planting the new vineyard from seed, not grafts; he's even been willing to say nice things about Carignane.
So when it turned out that the Large Hadron Collider, originally scheduled to roar into action last September, needed a year-long delay to fix a few things, Grahm realized he could rent it on the cheap in the meantime, run it at half power, and go where no winemaker had ever gone before--close to the moment of creation of the Universe, not just the creation of another tasty wine.
True, this reversion to the highest of high tech goes against the grain of some of his other recent resolutions. As he told Asimov, “I don’t want to rely on winemaking tricks anymore,” mentioning things like aroma-enhancing yeasts, enzymes and spinning cones. “You can’t make an original wine that way," he said. "You can make something clever or artful, but not great.”
But how great would it be to inject a few Higgs bosons into your wines, the hypothetical particle, never yet observed, that could help clarify how the Universe hangs together? Sometimes referred to as "the God particle," the putative Higgs would explain, among other things, where mass comes from, currently a bit of a gap in the Standard Model of particle physics. And just think what that the essence of mass could do for the body of your wine!
Perhaps this grand experiment was what was running through his mind when he told Asimov, “This is either going to revolutionize everything we do, or not,” he said. “But I think it will.... I’ll have made a sincere effort to create something new and strange and different, which may be the best you can hope for in the New World.”
There's a producer of commendable offerings in South Africa that is trying a clever gimmick. They are situated on the slopes right next to the successful vinyard of the country's world famous golfer. Their experiment is a pond, rather deep and constant in temperature into which they roll their barrels for aging. They like the temperature range and the constancy of the temperature. As I witnessed the first barrels of the experiment in the water, I can't comment on the final product but mind you I've wondered many times since, just how the idea turned out.
Posted by: Larry | September 30, 2009 at 06:47 PM