Of course I bought the wine with Proust on the label, cheered to notice that my local purveyors had clipped a personal note of endorsement to the shelf. I would have bought it unendorsed, but as it was, I hurried home through the fog with great expectations.
We uncorked the bottle, but uncouthly did not wait for it to breathe before pouring. We raised our glasses and offered the standard toast, "Proust!", sampling without further preamble. The taste was at once rich and full, yet light and, well, fruity. How appropriate. How delicious.
This fall I went to Bonny Doon Vineyard, near Santa Cruz, about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. I had a dual mission: to acquire a quantity of Clos de Gilroy for the 72nd Annual Proust Wake in November, and to meet Randall Grahm, the vintner of Bonny Doon.
Bonny Doon may well be the most literate vineyard on earth; their newsletters feature parodies of famous literary works, rewritten around the theme of wine ("Shall I compare thee to a Chardonnay?") Breezy, good-humored erudition exudes from every line of these highly personal dispatches, as well as a lot of insight into the process of making wine and the people who do it.
While my friend Nancy and I waited in the tasting room for Randall Grahm we chatted with the charming people behind the bar about my Proust fixation. One of them confessed that they liked to cut out the Proust cameo on Clos de Gilroy's label and paste it on their IDs when they go out.
When the vintner of Bonny Doon appeared, we were surprised to find a casually dressed young man with long hair accompanied by a big dog named Cesar. I suppose I'd been expecting someone resembling Orson Welles or Sebastian Cabot. We followed him to a building farther back from the road, noticing the large, graceful animal sculptures mounted on the sides of the vineyard's various facilities, and climbed the stairs to his office.
The office itself is spare, arty and lived in by man and dog. Cesar lounges with a proprietarial air. Unobtrusively tacked to the wall is Bonny Doon's James Beard Award for 1994.
Our discussion began with my inquiring if he was a Proust nut. Our host confessed that he never managed to finish Remembrance, and that the label with Proust's portrait began as a take on a traditional French business card. When the preliminary artwork was completed, he explained, they felt it needed a portrait to complete it, someone quintessentially French, and Proust was a perfect choice. I, of course, concurred.
Clos de Gilroy, he told us, is not unlike a Beaujolais, a wine best drunk young and chilled, a summer wine, delightful in sorbet with blood orange. Subtle complexity, what you might be lead to expect by the label, comes from the interaction of many fruits [sic].
The words "Clos de __" on a label indicate that the grapes were grown in a walled-in vineyard, probably from historic vines. In the case of this Grenache, Grahm tells us, it means that the grapes came from close to Gilroy.
At Bonny Doon one has the sense of being amidst people who love what they do, and have a great time doing it. Each wine has a story, a reference, and all the ones I tried were wonderful, including the desert wines, which in unsubtle hands could be cloying. It is a beautiful ride down the coast, and Bonny Doon is a delightful destination, equally charming to the palate, mind and senses.
Bonny Doon Vineyard, P.O. Box 8376, Santa Cruz, CA 95061, (408)425.3625, and fax (408)425.3856.
...the alcohol that I had drunk, in stretching my nerves exceptionally, had given to the moment a quality, a charm, which did not have the effect of making me more competent or indeed more resolute to defend it; for in making me prefer it a thousand times to the rest of my life, my exultation isolated it therefrom; I was enclosed in the present... momentarily eclipsed, my past no longer projected before me the shadow of itself we call our future... by a contradiction which was only apparent, it was at the very moment in which I was experiencing an exceptional pleasure, in which I felt that my life might yet be happy... it was at this very moment that, delivered from the anxieties which it had hitherto inspired in me, I unhesitatingly abandoned it to the risk of an accident.
-Within a Budding Grove
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