The Art of Doing Artist’s Interpretation Project is a collaboration between us and the artists we’ve asked to depict superachievers from our book, “The Art of Doing.”
When we wanted to find someone to portray the wildly imaginative Northern Californian vintner Randall Graham we thought of the wildly imaginative Northern Californian artist Karen Barbour whose work—in its joyful organic complexity—looks like how we imagine Grahm’s mind to be with its visionary thoughts floating and exploding.
Grahm is the wine world’s renegade, a viticulture rebel, who knows as much about the grape as anyone and yet has ceremoniously rejected the cork (and held a mock funeral), slapped on full-disclosure ingredient lists to his bottles “to keep himself honest” and prodigiously markets his tongue-in-cheek vintages like Le Cigare Volant (The Flying Cigar), named after U.F.O.’s feared by Frenchmen in the Rhone region in the1950’s.
But that was all before Grahm took the ultimate step, eschewing millennia of man’s attempt to tame Nature to produce the wine of his dreams—vins du terroir. These are the wines, Grahm explains, that so embody the essence of the soil and microclimate from whence they come that when tasted, they express a sense of place. These wines only exist in the Old World where they have been cultivated in centuries’ old vineyards. Continue reading “Visionary Vintner Randall Grahm:
An Artist’s Interpretation”