Patrick Comiskey

An appreciation of Steve Edmunds, Winemaker

Presented at Rhone Rangers, Sonoma, CA, 6-28-24

We’re here to celebrate the career of Steve Edmunds, winemaker, beermaker, musician, husband, father, grandfather, postal worker, philosopher, poet—and intuitionist. With the support of his wife, Cornelia St. John, he’s been at this for nearly fifty years, and professionally for nearly 40 of those years.

For more than half of that time I’ve been lucky enough to be able to call Steve a friend. Early in his career and in mine, I invited him to Forty-Two Degrees, a Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco’s China Basin near where Chase Center now resides, where I was wine director. He presented his wines on our garden patio in 1997 and quietly blew us away with blends inspired by the Rhône Valley. I have friends that came that tasting, 26 years ago, who are still happy customers of Edmunds St. John wines.

The wine program included many of the winemakers devoted to Rhône varieties. Steve’s wines were a fixture there; years later I was hired to write the history of the American Rhône and I was able to draw from those early experiences; that’s when I learned how Edmunds has served as a kind of binding ingredient to so many moments, events, developments, efforts over the years. In a real sense, we have Steve Edmunds to thank for making the Rhône movement a movement, and he did it in his own quiet way—those efforts bring us to this evening.

In my book American Rhône I make a comparison between Steve and another influencer, maybe not so quiet—Randall Grahm. I wrote: “If Randall brought the flash to the Rhône movement, Steve Edmunds brought the soul, a framework for authenticity that served the movement through its early years and provided a kind of moral compass, a winemaker whose sensitivity translated effortlessly to his wines. The combination got to the heart of what the movement was about.”

When you look at a California wine label you usually get a producer’s name at the bottom telling you who made it and where it’s from. Steve has never put the winery name, Edmunds St. John, in that space. Instead, he’s put a number of—what do we call them?—taglines? DBAs? mottos? watchwords? in that space instead. He’s used

“La Methode Ancienne” –a nod to his winemaking; he never forgot that this was an ancient process, and  a simple one. As he wrote in an early manifesto of his methods, “The key to producing a wine that is an elemental, unfettered expression of its origin in place and time is being able to pick at that point closest to the moment when the flavor in the grapes has come fully into focus, a moment when that flavor is most energetic.” Then he moved on to

“Rhapsodies in thirst” –calling out his love for music, his Lonesome on the Ground side-hustle, and his efforts to draw music and wine together. Both, he felt, were fundamental to human experience; for a time he used

“Wayward pilgrims of the vine” –hinting perhaps at the wilderness he found himself in with respect to wine styles at certain junctures, staying true to la methode ancienne, leaving things be, not pushing, during periods when pushing was practically a prerequisite, if not for success, then for attention. For a while he used

“Thirsty pagans with big ideas” –which sounds a bit like a drunken horde armed with books of poetry instead of pitchforks; lately he’s been using the phrase

“Thumbnail moonlight” which sounds really lovely; I have no idea what it means.

But I think the best of these was the phrase you found on his earliest labels: Intuition and blind luck. Because Steve Edmunds’ career in wine has been marked by intuitive decisions that have, in no small measure, altered the course of California wine history, and exemplifies how the authentic, and the heartfelt, and the stubborn, can change things.

I will gloss over much of Steve’s early biography—born in the Bay Area, pursuits of music and beermaking, a formative retail career which puts him in the wine milieu at a critical juncture, a brief and dispiriting tenure as a postman which prompted his wife Cornelia to ask, matter-of-factly, “do you want to be a postal worker for the rest of his life?” Well, Cornelia, if you put it that way….

So prompted, Steve got down to business. At one point he acquired several bottles from a winery mere blocks from here, Sebastiani, and poured himself a few glasses.

“I hadn’t really learned how to taste,” he said to me in an interview long ago. “You’d put it in your mouth and swallow it, and if it wasn’t too bad you do it again. And at a certain point you decide it’s time to stop, or it’s time to get up on the table and dance.”

(I have struggled for decades, by the way, trying not to imagine Steve Edmunds dancing on a table…see? I dare you to not see that image!)

This time, though, when he tasted these wines, everything slowed down. “Just in the act of smelling the wines, all the aromatic stuff, paying attention to how they felt in the mouth and all the stuff that goes on in the mouth and the back of the palate.”

It was the proverbial thunderbolt. “It was as if someone had installed a whole set of circuitry in my head I didn’t even know I had, and flipped the switch. Everything just lit up. Some part of me that I had no acquaintance with emerged, and I was just on fire. I felt like I was seeing visions, renaissance era tapestries, brilliant colors, all this passion and feeling and I was thinking ‘Jesus, this is wild!’”

No other substances were involved. Hardy Wallace wasn’t anywhere near the place.

He still wasn’t certain which path to take, but things kept pushing him in the direction of Rhône varietal wines. Articles from the scholar Robert Mayberry directed him to underutilized varieties like carignane, cinsaut and mataro. His friend Kermit Lynch nudged him toward Provence and the Rhône valley. Finally at Chez Panisse in Berkeley he’s waiting with Cornelia for a table and orders a glass of syrah from Bob Lindquist’s fledgling winery, Qupe, and is again gobsmacked. Not only is it delicious, it’s proof that delicious syrahs can actually be made in California. In a recent interview with Jason Haas, he called this moment ‘a sign from God’—half jokingly. But signs only exist for those who are present enough to receive them.

Intuition. Blind luck.

When he does pursue winemaking he proves to be a natural, despite having very little in the way of a technical background. “Laissez faire, kind of there,” is how I described his winemaking in a 2003 story I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle. He learns quickly, however, that good fruit, fruit with energy and depth, is critical. He pursues Rhône varieties with a pretty good sense that he can find grenache and syrah.

Then he goes in search of mataro, and finds that everyone seems to be pulling out this heritage variety. Finally, on a bulletin board in a home winemaking shop, he sees an ad for sauvignon vert and cold calls them. “Do you happen to have any mataro?” The Brandlins Chester and Richard, had mataro, they dry farmed it on their family property, with vines going back to the 1920s. Intuition. Edmunds made a Brandlin Ranch mataro, which is to say he got out of its way.

So much of Edmunds’ backstory qualifies as ‘lore’, iconic stories that take on a mythic quality in the American Rhône pantheon of stories. The most famous of these involves his good friend Kermit Lynch, who arranged in 1987 for Edmunds to meet with Francois Peyraud of Domaine Tempier, in Bandol, home to perhaps the most famous mourvedre in the world. Edmunds invited him to his cellar, where he tasted without comment from a number of barrels. But when he got to the Brandlin mourvedre, says Edmunds,  “He stuck his nose in the glass, and he absolutely just stopped and stood there, for about two minutes. And then very slowly he lowered the glass and his head came up and his eyes rolled back and he took this deep breath and he said, ‘La terre parle,’ the earth speaks.”

All right, some more lore. This story involves the founding of the Rhône Rangers in 1987. Keep in mind this is just 2 years after Edmunds has joined the fold, so to speak, when he and John Buechsenstein start talking about organizing the ragtag group that are producing Rhône varietal wines. They get the ball rolling by assembling 30-odd producers at Lalime’s, a Berkeley restaurant Edmunds knew well, and over some light mediterranean courses and many bottles of wine, this not-quite-a-group begins its initial exchange of ideas.

Weeks later, Edmunds stopped by a wine shop in the East Bay called Vino! owned by a retailer named Mike Higgins. “Mike had some of my wine in his shop,” he says, “and while I was visiting he said that he’d had this idea that I should change the name of my blend ‘Les Cotes Sauvage’ to ‘The Rhône Ranger.’” Edmunds thought about this for a moment, and said “That’s just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” But as he drove away it occurred to him that the name could serve another purpose. His next note to the group was addressed “Dear Rhône Rangers.”

Edmunds has never owned vineyard land, he’s never been a vigneron. Sources have come and gone over the decades, which has made his progress as a brand at times fitful and erratic. But still he had a knack for finding good sites. In another intuitive act, he bit into a peach in Placerville, California. The peach was so delicious it prompted him to think ‘if whoever’s growing these peaches grew grapes, I bet they’d be pretty good.’

That person was Ron Mansfield, who planted or expanded vineyards for him, which led to Wylie-Fenaughty, a double vineyard designate, some of the more soulful bottles of wine Edmunds ever made. Mansfield’s meticulous farming inspired or chastened other Sierra Foothills vignerons to shore up their vineyard practices, which has led to a mini-renaissance for that region, and allowed us all to see the potential that was always there, lying in wait.

There are other, non-Rhône related acts of intuition that Edmunds has committed, and I’m sure quite a few that qualify as blind luck, dumb luck, or just dumb. I want to mention one of these that certainly seemed dumb at the time—the time being the age of Robert Parker. I’m talking about his decision in 2002 to plant gamay noir, about as un-Parker a variety as you could think of in California. That planting led to Bone Jolly, which led to a kind of gamay renaissance in California, and may even have sparked a resurgent interest in Beaujolais in this country.

It will be bittersweet not to be able to follow along with Steve Edmunds’ intuitions any longer, as he eases into retirement. But I think, and I hope, that he’s inspired us all to cultivate our own intuition, to welcome blind luck into our lives with an open heart and an open mind.

Testimonials! I’ve asked a number of fellow old timers to share some memories of the early days or of a moment they shared with Steve.

John Buechsenstein

Fred Cline

Bill Easton

Randall Grahm

Bob Lindquist

Adam Tolmach

Kermit Lynch:
Steve Edmunds, The Magician. Yes, it was magic, the magic touch of Steve Edmonds. How in the world did he make his California Syrah taste like the Syrahs I was importing from the northern Rhone?  It is not something you simply decide to do.  You have got to have some voodoo going, or John the Conqueroo dancing on your barrels at night.  Make a list of my favorite Rhone wines? Okay, let’s see, Gentaz, Trollat, Chave, Clape, Edmunds, Verset and, hey, what the???  How’d that Berkeley kid sneak in there?  

David Bowler:
I’ve known Steve for 30 years.

Here’s a few of the things I know about Steve:

He’s stubborn, prefers to work alone, doesn’t care (too much) about scores, makes the wines HE wants to make (drink) and believes passionately in terroir. 

He is the only winemaker to have received both a 95 and a 75 point score from Parker.  All I can say about that is that it wasn’t Steve’s winemaking that had changed.

He’s also a talented musician and songwriter and he loves Dylan nearly as much as I do.  He would argue MORE than I do. He also is married to a gem of a woman, Cornelia St. John.  The two of them are quite a pair! Plus she gave her name to that great wine label, Edmunds St. John.  In short: Steve is one of a kind and the world of wine is richer for that!