Kendall-Jackson Winemaker Finds Rebirth In Earth Caving, Winemaking Share Underlying Values.

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SANTA ROSA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 5, 2002

Damian Grindley has this fantasy about a cave and some wine.

Out he crawls, muddy and disheveled. Awaiting him are a dozen glasses of wine glistening on a white-linen table cloth. His senses stripped clean and renewed from the long stay underground, he is ready to taste and evaluate with sharper perception than ever before.

In reality, many of Damian's daydreams hover around wine or caves, or both. Every month or two the winemaker for Kendall-Jackson Winery's Vinwood Cellars in Sonoma County joins an elite group of other cavers on subterranean journeys into a landscape few can imagine.

Damian and other members of the Cave Research Foundation leave the workaday world and descend into one of the last frontiers on earth. Sometimes for days, they study and chronicle a world of utter darkness. Members of the Foundation are high-achieving professionals from all walks of life -- though Damian believes he is the only winemaker.

"It's my way of dong something my mother wouldn't approve of," he said. "It's all part of being an eccentric Welshman, eccentric winemaker. And most people think cavers are barking (mad) too."

Caving offers discovery and camaraderie, but few public rewards.

"This is one of those sports with no trendy colors," he noted. "You're covered head to toe with mud in five minutes. It's a tight-knit group. There's no pretense, no room for egos."

There's not much room for claustrophobics either. The entrance to one cave, for example, required wriggling for 90 minutes through a tube just large enough to accommodate a caver. But it can be cozy --even romantic.

In a narrow passage in Australia, Damian met his future wife Amanda.

"I was crawling one way and she was crawling another," he recalled. "So one went over and one went under. There's no place for prudes in caving."

Australia is where Damian became a confirmed caver. As a winemaking student at the University of Adelaide, he worked weekends for winemakers who had planted vineyards over networks of limestone caves.

Many were concerned their vines would collapse into the caves, so Damian and a clutch of other students got busy exploring and mapping the caves for the farmers.

"You're learning about caves and you're learning about the wine region, so it was a perfect job for students," Damian said.

When he came from Australia to work for Kendall-Jackson in California, Damian discovered a nirvana for cavers. The state boasts a wider variety -- sea caves, granite and marble caves, lava tubes -- than most regions of the world. Sequoia National Park is the most interesting cave region in the state, Damian said.

He was on a Foundation trip to Sequoia in May when the group made an important discovery. They mapped a cave at more than 30 kilometers (18.6 miles), qualifying it for Major Cave status and putting it on the world caving map.

"Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints" is a slogan serious cavers try to live by. Damian, in fact, has grown fond of photography on Foundation trips, and his photos appear in major caving journals like "NSS News" and "Descent."

Winemaking and caving sometimes find common cause. In Europe, caves historically served as aging cellars, providing ideal, stable temperature and humidity at no cost.

Some California wineries, including Kendall-Jackson, construct custom caves for the same purpose, yet natural caves are scarce in California Wine Country. Damian nevertheless finds his own kind of kinship between caving and winemaking.

"It's a release and refreshment for me," he said while walking the barrel chai at Vinwood Cellars, the Kendall-Jackson winery in Geyserville, California. "If I don't go caving for three months or so, people around here can tell. They'll suggest, `Hey, don't you need to go caving about now?'"

More importantly, for Damian the values of caving and winemaking cross over and reinforce one another. Awe for the monumental timeline of geology, insights into conservation, a regard for the unfettered processes of nature, all color his winemaking when he returns, he said.

"When you're underground you're not thinking about the rest of the world. It clears out your mind, it cleans your palate, everything. It gives you a fresh start."

For high resolution digital images of Damien Grindley caving in Liburn Cave, Redwood Canyon, Sequoia National Park, visit the Image Bank at http://kjsales.com/imgs/staff/DGCaving.jpg

To reach Damian Grindley by email, write to [e-mail]

Kendall-Jackson will celebrate its 20th Harvest this Fall. For more details, visit http://kjsales.com/media

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