Dinner With Randall Grahm
and 14 of His Wines
– A Rare Evening –

Or,
What’s Doon is Doon:
A Comprehensive Consideration of the Celestial and Terrestrial Oeuvre of Randall Grahm
(Along with a Pretty Spectacular Meal)
Randall Grahm’s Greatest Adventure
[from a 2009 visit]
Monday, June 10, 2013 at 6:30 pm
Call 510-547-5356 for reservations
When Oliveto sommelier Esteban Brunello went to a Bonny Doon Vineyard wine tasting a couple months back, he tasted all of Randall Grahm’s currently available wines and returned astounded. He thought all of them — some twenty different wines — uniquely good. It’s unusual enough for a small independent producer to offer that many wines, but that they were all, every one of them, estimable, doesn’t happen.

We’ve known Randall for quite some time: the Rhone Ranger of old, deeply devoted to terroir as the source of a wine’s character, leader and practitioner of a movement for transparency in wine labels, advocate of the screwcap closure, lover of obscure Italian grape varieties, biodynamic farmer with dry-farming leanings, the man who would plant grape vines from seed and plant a vineyard that looked more like a garden (“promiscuous culture,” in the vernacular). He is an original thinker, a charming, witty, and gentle person.

Randall, for all his renown and knowledge of wine’s most important topics, has said he’d really just like to be known as someone who makes really good wine. So, after Esteban’s pronouncement, we decided that, while presenting a wine dinner with 14 different wines would be challenging, we could make it fresh, fun, unpretentious, and, most important, about delicious wine.
So, here’s the evening we imagine:
One seating at 6:30 pm, in casual, family-style tables of twelve.
Randall will chat about:
Biodynamics, the painful beauty of vins de terroir, his very ambitious plans to plant a truly sustainable, genetically heterodox, dry-farmed vineyard. He will talk about the esoteric mysteries of the Tantric élevage of wines (with a special geeky sidebar on wine electrochemistry), and will say something or three about the wines he is presenting.
6 courses from Chef Jonah, matching (as best we can) a very large array of wines:
(Sparkling Riesling as apéritif)
’04 Le Cigare Blanc
’01 Le Cigare Volant
’05 Le Cigare Volant
’06 Nebbiolo
’07 Nebbiolo
Price: $125
plus tax and gratuity
Menu to follow
Call (510) 547-5356 for reservations
Dinner is June 10, 2013
Please note there will be one seating at 6:30 pm