Loves and Hates

[Jason Perlow]

Randall -- thanks for joining us. Although I've never sampled any of your wines, I most definitely will soon.

What do you love and hate about the American and Californian wine industry? What demons keep you up late at night thinking about them?

Related question: What do you feel about the prodigious use of oak in California wines?

[Randall Grahm]

Dear Jason,

What I hate about the wine industry in California is its sometime acute self-consciousness. We often are just trying too hard and tend to be too focused on life-style rather than life. I think that we are too lemming-like; one winery puts on a cigar(e) band on their bottles, everybody's got to have a cigar(e) band. What I love about the industry is its relative youth and insouciance. We don't know that certain things are impossibly difficult and we pursue them with dogged ambition. As far as reliance on new oak, it is a pernicious thing. Those who think of new oak as a primary flavor in wine are the same people who think of ketchup as a vegetable. Cheers, RG.