Many students have been driven to drink by the effort of understanding Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” Only one, perhaps, has been driven to wine, exclusively and for life, and that is the inimitable California vintner, punster, screw-top evangelist, and all-around Don Quixote of the vineyards, Randall Grahm. In the nineteen-seventies, when he was a philosophy major at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and struggling with a senior thesis on the concept of Dasein, the most obscure idea in Heidegger’s obscure classic, he happened to wander into a wine store in Beverly Hills called the Wine Merchant. It was a time when the great crus of France were relatively cheap, and the owner, Dennis Overstreet, soon to be his employer, was generous. “There was a kind of Bordeaux scandal at the time, and he had taken some really crappy stuff off the exporters’ hands in exchange for several cases of Musigny,” Grahm explains. As he and Overstreet shared a bottle of the 1971 Comte Georges de Vogüé Musigny, Vieilles Vignes, the mystery of Dasein was replaced by the mystery of Musigny: how, Grahm wondered, had something so haunting and complicated been produced by growing grapes, juicing them, and then letting them grow old in bottles?

Within a short time, Grahm had enrolled at the University of California at Davis, the M.I.T. of American fermentation, where winemaking had become an object of academic research. There, he began an obsession with creating an American wine that has some of the qualities of great red Burgundy—or even those of the great wines of France’s Rhône Valley. As he points out, several figures in the making of California wine culture were also renegade philosophy students, including Paul Draper, the recently retired head winemaker of Ridge Vineyards and one of the few whom Grahm unstintingly admires. He offers a simple reason for the connection between philosophers and wine: “Wine is a mystery that holds the promise of an explanation.”

His improbable quest has led him to become a pioneer of Rhône Valley varietals in Northern California; an apostle of the screw cap as the one right “closer” for good wine; and, for a while, a very successful beverage businessman (at one point, largely on the strength of his popular wine Big House, he was selling four hundred and fifty thousand cases a year). Next came a semi-orderly downsizing of his wine label, Bonny Doon, prompted by fears of its being corrupted by too much commercialism. Most recently, he has decided to take possession of four hundred acres of land near the little mission town of San Juan Bautista—it’s the place where Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” reaches its climax, though the tower from which Kim Novak falls was added to the mission by the film’s art-department team. Thirty or so miles from Santa Cruz, on a hillside where nothing but grass and weeds has ever grown, Grahm is going to try to make an American wine that is an entirely original expression of its terroir, of the land on which it’s raised and the place from which it came.

The effort at the new vineyard, called Popelouchum, involves a three-pronged assault. First, Grahm intends to plant and test a series of uncelebrated grapes that have languished in the shadows of European viticulture. Next, he will “auto-tune” some familiar European grapes by breeding them incestuously and then testing for slight improvements in each successive generation. Finally, he hopes to produce an entirely new American varietal by growing and crossing unlikely pairs of grapes from seed—which is a bit like an ambitious Yankees general manager trying to raise starting shortstops from embryos. “There may not be one great American grape,” Grahm says, philosophically. “It may be the intermingling of a thousand grapes that becomes the great grape.”

The Don Quixote comparison is self-imposed—Grahm once wrote a ten-thousand-word poem with himself in the role of a character called Don Quijones—and so, given the scale of this year’s windmills, any small sign of reassurance raises his spirits. “I had a geomancer out to Popelouchum,” he recalled not long ago, from the driver’s seat of his 1972 Citroën, “and he said that we must orient the entrance of the site in only one direction.” Geomancy is an ancient means of divination involving throwing soil and rocks and interpreting their omens; Grahm, in the Northern California way, is an agreeable mixture of tough-minded agricultural science and what he calls “Santa Cruz woo-woo.” He went on, “So, the geomancer goes like this, definitively: ‘Northwest! That’s the way in which prosperity lies!’ I’m sure that he had no idea that he was pointing directly at Cupertino!” Cupertino is the site of Apple’s headquarters, just around the bend.

“And then we had the Bourguignons out to the vineyard!” Claude and Lydia Bourguignon are a legendary and aptly named French surveying couple who evaluate sites for wine growing. “They identified five distinct terroirs within the property,” Grahm said. “And the really exciting thing is the extravagance of limestone—there’s limestone everywhere.” Limestone, he explained, is typical of the greatest vineyards, which tend to be stony rather than loamy, stress making finer grapes. “Rocks are always good, but I think it’s the porousness of limestone that explains its power,” he added. “It breathes. Of course, on the other side, there are so many forbidding negatives! There’s the fault line—we’re right on the San Andreas fault line. No one knows just how that will change things. And there’s the rats! We have these giant mutant vineyard rats that basically ate the entire first crop. We can’t poison them, of course.” The new vineyard is meant to be not only organic, without pesticides of any sort, but also “dry farmed,” without irrigation. “So I’m renting some Jack Russell terriers who are demon ratters.”

Grahm was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, with his fourteen-year-old daughter in the back seat. He has the long face, ponytail, and ironic, shrugging manner of a surviving comedian of the nineteen-seventies, a sort of George Carlin fed on red wine rather than on coke and whiskey. He has many manners of melancholy. He can look distressed even when he is drinking wine—especially when he is drinking wine, including his own. There is an ever-hopeful first swirl and sniff, and a half glimpse of pleasure as he begins to drink; then he becomes pained, and eventually his expression conveys something close to the resigned despair of a Shakespeare hero in the fifth act of his tragedy. As he once explained to someone puzzled by his seeming distress at drinking a perfectly nice wine, “I don’t want another nice wine. I want a wine that’s like the old Saint-Émilion Cheval Blanc, a wine that when you drink it you just want to inject it directly into your veins!”

He is a passionate Francophile—his daughter is named Amelie—and the ’72 Citroën, perhaps the most curvaceously beautiful family car ever made, needed an undue amount of fidgeting and tending. “The car is part of my shtick,” Grahm said with a laugh. He is one of those people—more often found in the upper reaches of show business—who are sincerely shrewd, or, better, shrewdly sincere. His passion and erudition are real, but he is aware that being passionate and erudite is, in the wine world, a good look, a useful kind of product differentiation.