‘Bottled,’ Not Canned, Laughter From the California Wine Country : Napa Valley: Wine makers, often assumed to be a no-nonsense lot, poke fun at themselves and their profession with humorous newsletters, labels and slogans.

GILROY, Calif. —  Some years ago, Bruce Cakebread was finishing up the harvest at Cakebread Cellars in the Napa Valley and found he had a lot of Cabernet Sauvignon grape pumice piled on the ground near his crusher. So he called Stu Smith of Smith-Madrone Winery.

Smith owns a dump truck, and he needed pumice to use as compost for vineyard areas where the soil is poor. So he hauled off a number of loads, ridding Cakebread of his pumice without having to pay anyone to haul it off.

The next day in the mail, Smith got a bill from Cakebread, saying, “Due: $100 for prime Napa Valley Cabernet pumice.”

One day later, Cakebread got a bill from Smith, saying, “Due: $101 for hauling services.”

River of Jocularity

The matter remains unresolved except to show some of the humor that can invade the business of making wine. It is a small river of jocularity that runs through wine country regions, but it’s needed to maintain sanity when the pressures of harvest and other trying times wear nerves thin.

Humor often is an unseen side of the wine business, which usually appears to most outsiders as if it’s peopled only by the stiff, formal, tuxedoed and egotistical. Those who take pinky-pointing lessons. But any wine maker who stands ramrod straight and doesn’t smile usually ends up the butt of inside-the-industry jokes.

When I called Randall Grahm last week to talk about a story I was doing on humor in the wine industry, the owner-wine maker at Bonny Doon replied, “Going to be a short article, eh?”

Legendary Rutherford Bench

But there is a sense of fun that occasionally pervades the wine business, and it was recently seen in the controversy surrounding the location of the Rutherford Bench, a geographical benchland region of the Napa Valley that supposedly has special qualities when Cabernet is grown in its soil. The boundaries of the bench remain a controversy among wineries and growers.

But Agustin Huneeus knows where the Rutherford Bench is. It’s in front of his Franciscan winery in Rutherford. Because of the controversy surrounding the location of the bench, Huneeus, president of Franciscan, installed a huge redwood bench in front of his winery and on it is a plaque proclaiming it as the Rutherford Bench.

Such unstuffy approaches to wine are refreshing in an industry often swallowed up in recitations of gold medals and whose Chardonnay was served to the “Prince of Jabalalalala” at a recent state visit.

The first person I think of when it comes to humor is Grahm. Much has been written about this guru of Bonny Doon of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Usually what’s said is that Grahm is a certifiable loon who has wild hair.

Literary Puns and Linguistic Tricks

The fact is, Grahm is crazy as a fox. The former philosophy student at UC Santa Cruz is a brilliant thinker, intelligent beyond most folks’ understanding of the term, and a genius as a wine maker and marketer. (One glance at his marvelous winery newsletter gives you an inkling.)

His latest newsletter begins with a parody of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” entitled “The Maven.” It is filled with enough literary puns and linguistic tricks to tickle an English professor. (There’s even a parodied line from “Treasure of the Sierre Madre” buried in this concoction.)

Bonny Doon’s wine labels also are hilarious, more testament to his quick wit and his (accurate) perception that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, or that you sell more wine with wit than with statistics.

For that reason Grahm named one of his wines Le Cigare Volant, which in French means “flying saucer,” after he learned that a French community had passed a law outlawing UFOs from invading. His Clos du Gilroy is named because his winery is “close to Gilroy.” But, of course.

Another of Grahm’s ideas was to place the label for one of his wines with the type facing inside the bottle. And, using a play on the French term for top quality, Grand Cru, he labeled other wines Grahm Crew. The label for them is a photo of Grahm and his staff in a boat seeking a spot to land. The wines, by the way, are superb.

To get on Grahm’s mailing list, drop him a note at Bonny Doon Vineyard, P.O. Box 8376, Santa Cruz, Calif. 95061.

Wine From the World’s Garlic Capital

I visited Tom Kruse the other day. I had never met the man, but I have admired his sense of fun for a decade, and it was after this visit last Sunday that the concept for this story materialized.

Kruse is the owner-wine maker at Thomas Kruse Winery here in the garlic capital of the world, and over the last two decades this former home wine maker turned commercial vintner has put out a lot of good wine. There’s little that you would rate as nirvana, but they are good, sound wines at fair prices.

The attractions have been the labels. They are a scream.

The labels always have a text, but there’s no florid prose extolling the virtues of the prismatic luminescence in the bottle. They are hand-written by Kruse, reflecting his thoughts of the day. In some cases, there are recipes for dishes, on others he muses about wine snobs. One has the title, “Wine Writers or Pontificating Parasites?” about whom he writes:

“Whence this gaggle of gustatory gurus whose gossip and grandiose gushings grace our newspapers and magazines? Who are these people who write things like . . . ‘a somewhat earthy aroma is redolent of a forest after rain, with scents of damp leaves, mushrooms and spice’? “

Once, in 1977, Kruse had the effrontery to make a wine from 100% Thompson Seedless grape, the table grape variety with no discernible aroma or taste. The wine had the proprietary name of Chutzpah, the Yiddish word for gall, and his label said the wine’s aroma was “pleasantly innocuous and the flavor distinctly evanescent if present at all. This wine goes good with practically nothing.”

Buy Six Bottles, Get Six Free

In his 10x10-foot tasting room, Kruse sells olive oil and pasta besides wine. There is a sign with the prices of the wines, and underneath, “50% case discount.”

“That means,” he said, as if someone couldn’t figure it out, “that if you buy six bottles, you get another six free. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t figure this out. Now, if someone has six bottles on the counter and I like the guy, I tell him, ‘Hey, you can have six more bottles free.’

“But if he’s a jerk, well, I just write it up as six bottles and carry the wine to his car.”

Kruse, an English major at Northwestern University, moved after college to San Jose, a half hour north of here, and began making wine at home. He was a real estate broker and sold wine-making supplies before turning, in 1971, to Gilroy.

He bought a small farm and built a winery. Today it’s a veritable Fibber Magee’s closet of disorganization, but it works efficiently.

He buys almost all the grapes he makes into wine, his one acre of vineyard land bearing only three tons of French Colombard. Ninety-five percent of his 4,000-case production is sold out of the tasting room. He will sell mail order too (4390 Hecker Pass Road, Gilroy, Calif. 95020; (408) 842-7016).

Prices for his wines are fair, including attractive $10 Chardonnay, $10 Cabernet and a fine $7 Riesling. His aptly named Insouciance (it means carefree) is a sparkling wine made from Pinot Noir. The flavors are excellent; the wine soft and faintly sweet. It’s $12.

How to Start a Winery

Some Kruse wines are not labeled with the vintage, even though they are entirely of the same year, because Kruse dislikes re-submitting labels to the federal government for approval each time one little thing is changed.

On one label, Kruse gives advice on how to start a small winery: “Put the winery on a hill, difficult to get to; visits should be by appointment only; the wine maker should be aloof, haughty, arrogant and must never be observed exhibiting unrestrained mirth. The wines should be tannic, acidic, over-oaked and unpleasant. Grotesque caricatures of the variety.

“Last and perhaps most important, price the wine obscenely--somewhere around a dollar a sip.

“Wait a minute. I think I went wrong somewhere.”

Humor can be seen in artifacts of the trade.

--Frog’s Leap Winery in the Napa Valley was named as a sort of takeoff on Stag’s Leap, which had won international fame for its Cabernet Sauvignons. Wine maker John Williams at Frog’s Leap uses corks imprinted with the word ribit.

--Nearby, Folie a Deux winery was founded by Larry Dizmang, a psychiatrist, and his wife, Evie, a clinical social worker. The name of the winery is the medical term used to describe two people who share the same delusion. In this case, it’s making fine wine. (But it’s no delusion: the wines are excellent.)

--Gundlach-Bundschu has put out numerous hilarious posters, one showing a vintage automobile stopped by a policeman, whose foot is on the running board. The caption is, “If you can’t pronounce Gundlach-Bundschu Gewurztraminer, you shouldn’t be driving.”

The Sure Cure for Snobbery

--Weibel Vineyards’ had an advertising campaign three years ago that said we should stamp out wine snobbery. At wine festivals, winery personnel showed up wearing doctor’s smocks with signs that said, “We can cure you of wine snobbery.”

--Rabbit Ridge Winery is not named for the rabbits on the property in western Sonoma County. Wine maker/owner Erich Russell, who is also the wine maker at nearby Belvedere, was a star cross country runner in high school, “and they called me Rabbit,” said Russell. “When I enrolled at San Jose State, I was on the track team with Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Lee Evans--basically the whole (1968) U.S. Olympic track team, and my nickname became the White Rabbit.”

--David Bruce made an awful 1976 Cabernet from Monterey County grapes. The wine was recalled from store shelves when it grew worse in the bottle, and Bruce chose to sell it through his newsletter. At $12 a case. A flyer on the wine said it smelled like rotting weeds.

--Andy and Debra Cutter’s Duxoup Wine Works in Healdsburg was named after the Marx Brothers’ movie “Duck Soup.”

‘The Chateau La Feet of California’

--Mike Houlihan, who markets the reasonably priced line of Barefoot Bynum wines, uses the slogan, “The Chateau La Feet of California.”

--In the mid 1970s, Monterey Peninsula Winery made some Zinfandel called Stomp, which was crushed by human feet. Authorities said such a practice is unhealthful (although it’s been done that way for thousands of years), and they prohibited the winery from selling the wine. As wine. Instead, Monterey Peninsula relabeled the wine to read “Souvenir Value Only, Not For Human Consumption.” (Some people actually risked their health by consuming it. It was excellent.)

--Saintsbury Winery produces Pinot Noirs that are like those of the Beaune region of Burgundy. So the owners of the winery, Dick Ward and David Graves, produced T-shirts that sports a Springsteenian line: “Beaune in the U.S.A.”

One of the funniest guys in the wine trade is Mike Lynch, wine merchant with Pacific Wine Co. in San Francisco. The text of his newsletter always ends with a slogan for the month, such as the following that have appeared in the last year.

--”Pacific Wine Co.: We took the ‘s’ out of swine.”

--”Just because we smell well doesn’t mean we smell good.”

--”Where ignorance really is bliss.”

Dream Was to Become a Soda Jerk

The text of the Pacific Wine Co. newsletter is, charitably speaking, off the wall. An example: “As a child Dick Ward had modest ambitions. All he wanted in life was to become a soda jerk, and today half of that dream has come true.”

A recent item from Lynch: He wrote that while dining with some French friends in Beaune, he decided to order the wine in a French restaurant, “even though my command of the language was rudimentary at best.” He placed an order, “and the waitress’s face registered surprise. Then she placed her head on my shoulder and said, ‘Kiss me, Eddie.’

“She then verbally abused her chef while signing what appeared to be a false income tax return and then lay down in the center of the room perfectly still.

“I was embarrassed, and then she explained that instead of ordering the wine I had actually asked her to do her impersonations of Topo Gigio, Leona Helmsley and Ferdinand Marcos.”

To get on Lynch’s mailing list for newsletters, drop a note to Pacific Wine Co., 124 Spear St., San Francisco 94105.

Cutting Through the Wine Mystique

Another wine crazy in the retail trade is Gerald Weisl of Weimax in Burlingame. “The wine business is too full of mystique and bull, so we try to cut through some of that,” said Weisl.

His pun-filled, cartoon-graced newsletter is a riot, as is the shop (one particularly buttery Chardonnay in his shop is displayed under a sign of a butter carton). The cover of the recent newsletter has a drawing of a guy holding a wine bottle for a bat and the caption is “a Leoville Slugger”).

Weisl often does curious stuff, such as publishing a wine horoscope (“Virgo: Avoid subscribing to Portuguese investment letter called Dao Jones.”)

Weisl also suggests what the new names of wineries would be if they merged with other wineries, such as if Frog’s Leap and Silver Oak merged, the new name could be Silver Croak; if Hallcrest and Montevina merged, the new name would be Monty Hall; if Amador Foothill and Clos du Val merged the new name would be Clos du Dor.

“And if Raymond moved to Alaska, the winery would have to be renamed Raymond Burr,” said Weisl.

To get mailers from Weimax, send a note to 1178 Broadway, Burlingame, Calif. 94010.

Humor often is up front, on wine labels. Here are a few examples:

--Bill Wheeler, owner of William Wheeler Winery, put out a wine in 1987 called a Nicely Balanced Little Chardonnay. The wine’s cartoon-like label had a picture showing the vintage date, 1984, falling off a tightrope. A companion wine, a Full-Bodied Little Zinfandel, had a caricature of “a heavy-set woman sitting on one of those little ice cream parlor chairs. The original artwork must be worth millions today,” said Wheeler, who says he drew the label designs and frankly doesn’t know where the originals are.

--The 1985 Nalle Zinfandel, produced by Doug Nalle, carried on its side label this homage to waiters at chi-chi restaurants who like to introduce themselves: “Hi, my name is Zinfandel, and I’ll be your wine tonight. May I suggest our pasta special or perhaps the pepper steak or cassoulet?”

In 1984, Ed Masciana, national marketing director for HMR Ltd., created a second label wine, 1981 Santa Lucia Cellars Burgundy, that had a label designed to look like the wine label on wines of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, “as close as we could get, anyway,” said Masciana recently. Some people thought the wine, which was selling for $5 a bottle (a tenth the price of Romanee-Conti), was hilarious. But not the people at Romanee-Conti. They got a temporary restraining order halting the sale of the wine.

Discovering the Formula for ‘Fresca’

Some years ago, a San Joaquin Valley winery, intending to make Sangria by blending flavorings into a tank of red wine, accidentally blended the flavors into a tank of sweet Sauterne. The wine maker responsible said the result was a financial disaster, “But I think we accidentally discovered the formula for Fresca.”

And to conclude, the Napa Valley has its share of wild folk, such as Bo Barrett, wine maker at Chateau Montelena.

Barrett’s annual tradition to celebrate the crushing of the last load of grapes each harvest season took place a week ago Wednesday when the cellar crew and picking crews staged a giant water fight in front of the winery. Even folks working in the winery’s offices and some surprised tourists got wet.