“I’ve been hearing voices, somebody breaking out inside of me, can you tell me who it is?”

—“Rocks and Gravel,” from the album

“Singing to the Ghosts” by Steve Edmunds

If you know about Edmunds St. John, you know. Most people don’t. Beyond industry insiders and a core of devoted fans, few drinkers are aware that a Berkeley winemaker named Steve Edmunds has been producing some of California’s most soul-stirring wines for the last 33 years under his Edmunds St. John label. He is, for California at least, the ultimate winemaker’s winemaker.

Unmoored from the structures that tend to prop up California wine businesses — vineyards, wineries, regional organizations — Edmunds is something of an island. With no winery of his own, the Edmunds St. John brand has drifted between various production facilities over the years. Edmunds has no employees: no assistant winemaker, no marketing manager, no salesperson. He has no land, either, and has had to fight to get some of his most beloved varieties — unpopular, commercially cryptic grapes like Mourvedre, Gamay and Vermentino — put in the ground.

In his light-filled, cozily cluttered Berkeley home, it’s easy to see Edmunds, sporting narrow-rimmed glasses and trim white goatee, as an embodiment of his work. Both are characterized by understatement and a quiet precision. Edmunds’ facial expressions are compact, his smile emoting within a limited range of motion. His speech is unhurried and deliberate, conspicuously free of glottal stops.

Back to Gallery Steve Edmunds is the unsung hero of California wine 9 1 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 6 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 7 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 8 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 9 of 9 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle

















Edmunds pours himself a glass of his slight, pale 2012 rosé, from El Dorado County Gamay. “I’m 70 now, so I’m not going to be venturing into the wilderness much anymore,” he says. He means that he’s stopped trekking around California to search for vineyards that fit his specifications. Edmunds produces about 2,000 cases of wine per year now, half what he once did. He’s slowing down.

But Edmunds’ creative drive has not stalled. Ever eager to challenge California winemaking traditions, in 2016 he added an unusual Rioja-style blend to the Edmunds St. John roster. And the creative drive extends beyond wine: In January, Edmunds released his second musical album, “Singing to the Ghosts.”

A little bit bluegrass, a little bit Americana, “Singing to the Ghosts,” like his wines, is hard to classify. And like his wines, the record is designed to outlive him. “I had this thought about wanting my children to be able to hear my voice when I’m dead,” Edmunds says of the motivation for recording the album.

This is the major question for Edmunds now, as a winemaker, a musician and a father: legacy. At 70, he isn’t on the verge of retirement, but he’s not that far away, either. “Not before a few more years” is how he quantifies it. And what will become, then, of Edmunds St. John? Will a larger wine company buy the brand? Will it go gently into the good night? Even to the steady, understated, deliberate Edmunds himself, these are open questions.

***

Edmunds began making wine in 1985, an offshoot of what we might call the Chez Panisse diaspora: those denizens of post-counterculture Berkeley so fond of the rustic flavors of southern France. In the 1970s, Edmunds stoked his growing love of wine by frequenting Kermit Lynch’s Berkeley shop; the two became friends. Lynch (also a musician) was then beginning to import the wines of Domaine Tempier, whose earthy, structured, Mourvedre-based Bandol rouge would come to define the aesthetic of Chez Panisse — and would spark Edmunds St. John.

With those Tempier Mourvedres in mind, in 1985 Edmunds found some old-vine, mountain-grown Mourvedre in a Mount Veeder vineyard owned by the Brandlin family. “I knew that this was something very special, and I knew it while the grapes were still in the fermentor,” he says.

Lynch was taken with Edmunds’ efforts from the beginning. Once, while tasting a young Edmunds St. John wine from a barrel, Lynch told him it was the best Cornas he’d ever tasted. So impressed was Lynch with that Brandlin Mourvedre that he showed the 1986 vintage to Francois Peyraud, the owner of Domaine Tempier itself. “I wanted him to taste California wines that would impress him,” says Lynch. In a now-famous utterance, Peyraud tasted the wine and proclaimed “la terre parle.” The earth speaks.

“I could not believe what he was doing with the Rhone varieties,” Lynch says. “I was introducing America to northern and southern Rhone wines, and Steve seemed to be able to make some of the best — right there in Berkeley, using California grapes!”

Edmunds was not alone: Throughout California in the 1980s a movement was taking shape that would call itself the Rhone Rangers, dedicated to the premise that Rhone varieties — grapes like Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre and Viognier — could thrive on these shores. Vintners like Gary Eberle, Bill Easton, Bob Lindquist and Randall Grahm had all preceded Edmunds’ efforts. But Edmunds played a special role.

“If Randall Grahm brought the flash to the Rhone movement, Steve Edmunds brought the soul,” writes author Patrick Comiskey in “American Rhone,” the definitive history on this subject. Edmunds supplied “a framework for authenticity that faithfully served the movement through its early years and provided a kind of moral compass,” he continues.

What defined Edmunds’ winemaking in those days — that “framework for authenticity” — is still true today: The wines are quiet, reticent to announce their substance. That fresher, lighter, brighter (read: lower-alcohol) approach to winemaking may be in vogue now, but Edmunds stuck with it before it was trending.

“Everything that I do, that my peer group does, is possible because of things Steve did 25 years ago,” says Hardy Wallace, the Napa-based Mourvedre specialist who owns Dirty & Rowdy Family Wines.

Though the Edmunds St. John wines age gracefully, they are approachable when young, which to Edmunds’ mind was always one of Rhone wine’s great virtues. “Up to that point in California we were so focused on Bordeaux, long elevage, setting it up for age,” Edmunds says.

Forging one’s own path can be a lonely road. It’s the fate of the non-landowning winemaker to have his heart broken: “I’ve run into situations where I can no longer get grapes that I used to buy,” Edmunds says. Unti, in Dry Creek Valley in Healdsburg, once the source of his Rocks & Gravel blend, stopped selling him grapes after 2015. Bassetti in San Luis Obispo, whose fruit was “so vibrant you expected it to glow in the dark,” and which produced an achingly beautiful Syrah, decided to launch its own brand, keeping all the Syrah for itself.

More than once, Edmunds’ savior has been Ron Mansfeld, who farms several vineyards in El Dorado County and has planted various varieties at Edmunds’ request. In 2000, when he asked Mansfeld to plant some Gamay at the Witters Vineyard — Edmunds longed to make wine like cru Beaujolais, which he found “so delicious and so completely seductive” — the notion, Edmunds says, seemed outlandish. “The momentum then was still swinging toward bigger wines,” he says. Gamay, a lightly colored, delicately perfumed variety, seemed hopeless. “My friends told me I’d lost my mind.” At Edmunds’ urging, Mansfeld planted more Gamay at the Barsotti Vineyard in 2005.

***

But the vineyard heartbreak has been generative, too, forcing Edmunds toward new terroir. In 2016, he sought out Ann Kraemer, who owns Shake Ridge Ranch, a renowned site for Rhone grapes in Amador County. Did she have some Grenache? Yes, and she also had some Tempranillo and Graciano. He’d never worked with Tempranillo before, but found it to provide a “loud, funky bass note.” He went for it, making a Rioja-inspired blend called El Jaleo. A Spanish-style wine might seem off-brand for Edmunds St. John, but 33 years in, he welcomes the challenge. “It reminds me of my first years making Rhone varieties,” he says.

Could a winemaker like this ever feel satisfied? “There have been a few years where I felt like I was finally making a wine that was approaching what I’d set out to do in 1985,” Edmunds says in characteristically slow tempo, pausing as he says “approaching.”

He’s still chasing a single, original goal: “How do I take what I think I’m receiving from this vineyard,” he says, “and figure out what I need to do in order to bring that out in its most transparent form?”

In many ways, that’s how Edmunds experiences songwriting too, as counterintuitive as it may seem. “I’m not so convinced that writing songs has very much to do with intention,” he says. “It’s really letting the song come through you.” Observing the natural world, listening carefully to conversations with others — it all becomes material to bring out in its most transparent form.

And like hearing good music, drinking good wine — drinking, for example, Edmunds St. John — can be a full-body experience.

“It makes your whole body shiver sometimes,” Edmunds says. “You get tingles up your spine and say, ‘What was that?’”