Bonny Doon Vineyard Le Cigare Volant Central Coast 2013
HEY!! Unless you are currently doing heart surgery ---- STOP, breathe, and allow the MAJESTY of Bonny Doon’s Cigare Volant deal that we are serving up WASH over you. WOW. A LEGENDARY wine from maestro Randall Grahm, at the BEST price you have EVER imagined. Deep, complex and intense “Chateauneuf-du-Pape in CA” brilliance. MUST be tasted to be believed at our price. Sensational. Truly sensational. 93 POINTS!!!
Bonny Doon, and this wine in particular, holds some significance for us (well, your humble scribe, anyway). It was really one of our “epiphany” wines way back in the oh-so-distant mid-90s. At our price, this is a whalloping, face-melting guitar-solo level of a deal for a wine that is fantastically complex, layered, chameleon-like, and a critic fave. 93 POINTS?! Did we mention that?
Deep, dark, mysterious and redolent with Chateauneuf-like savory-ness, it packs in sweet macerated blue fruits, smoked meat, teriyaki, and delicious pie crust highlights. This truly is a dead-serious mouthful of wine. A TOTAL COUP for us!! PLEASE do not miss!! Wow!! We still can’t believe it! While it lasts…
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.
Technical Details
Country: United StatesRegion: California
Appellation: Central Coast
Blend: 55% Grenache, 25% Syrah, 16% Mourvèdre and 4% Cinsau
Varietal: Grenache, Red Blends
Vineyard: 38% Rancho Solo, 21% Bien Nacido 18% Ventana, 17% Del Barba, 4% Bechtold, 2% Alta Loma
Winemaker: Randall Grahm
Farming: Biodynamic viticulture and biodynamic practices
Alcohol: 14.50%
PH: 3.48
TA: 6.5g/100mLs
Production: 2400
About The Producer
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.1
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 States. 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.
Pairing Suggestions
Lamb dishes of all sorts, Moroccan tagine, roasted game birds, braised
beef short ribs (we recommend a braise in our Clos de Gilroy), steak
frites, roasted wild mushrooms.
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