Bonny Doon no longer for laughs

First the Paso Robles tasting room burned down, prompting Bonny Doon to pull back to its Santa Cruz roots. Now the whole wine line is changing.

AFTER two decades of not-so-gently ribbing those who dare to take wine seriously, winemaker Randall Grahm is dismantling his successful Bonny Doon Vineyard to create a smaller company that will take wine, well, very seriously.

Last week, Grahm sold his famously tongue-in-cheek 200,000 case-a-year Big House wine brand as well as the whimsically named 20,000 case-a-year Cardinal Zin line to the privately held Wine Group for an undisclosed price.

“I cashed out of the cash cow,” Grahm says. The deal slashes his company, which he says produces 400,000 cases of wine annually, by more than half. To further distance himself from Bonny Doon’s well-known mass-market wines, Grahm plans to isolate the remaining low-priced brands in a separately operated division called Pacific Rim, which will be located in Washington.

Going forward, what’s left of Bonny Doon will have a singular focus: making small-production, vineyard-specific wines using the extreme organic farming philosophy known as biodynamics. Expressing terroir — the French term connoting wines that reflect the specific place where the grapes are grown and the wine is made — is the goal.

I wish Grahm the best of luck (as the old joke goes, “How do you make a small fortune out of the wine business? By starting with a large fortune.”). But the iconoclastic zaniness of Bonny Doon will be missed. Some of their wines were quite good (particularly some not mentioned in the article), and I hope they’re still available in the future.

(via Ginger)