BERKELEY, Calif. -- Splatter a bit of blood on your wine label and you might just have a seasonal superstar.
At least, that's been the experience for Michael Machat, founder of Vampire Vineyards and a rather busy man this time of year.
His wines, which feature a drop of blood on the label, are available year-round -- certainly benefiting from Hollywood's enduring interest in things that go bite in the night -- but "it just becomes easier selling this time of year," says Machat.
His isn't the only meeting of ghoul and grape.
In Northern California wine country, there's Ghost Block, made of 100 percent cabernet from the Rock Cairn vineyard in Oakville, next to Yountville's Pioneer Cemetery.
The graveyard is a great place to visit, advises Paul Torres, national sales manager for Ghost Block. "It's really so cool."
So far, Torres has not seen the ghost of wine country pioneer George C. Yount, but being from the San Francisco Bay area, "I have an open mind about these things," he says.
Heading toward the Sierra foothills, Twisted Oak Winery in Calaveras County (home of Mark Twain's Celebrated Jumping Frog) puts out River of Skulls about this time of year, with a label featuring a vivid red skull.
The wine, a limited-production single-vineyard mouvedre (a red wine grape) comes with a suggested food pairing of "Dead people! -- just kidding! How about lamb, pork and risotto?"
This is the third vintage of the wine, which derives its name from the English translation of calaveras, "skulls."
"Other than just being an inherently cool name, it actually has some significance to the area," points out winery owner Jeffrey Stai.
The wine is ideal for a Halloween party, says Stai. Just not for him, since this time of year generally coincides with the controlled frenzy that is harvest.
"We've always wanted to have a cool Halloween party in our wine cave. We just never seem to have the energy to pull it together," he says.
Other wineries getting into the Halloween spirit include Elk Creek Vineyards in Kentucky, which sells Ghostly White chardonnay and Bone Dry Red cabernet sauvignon. And from the Armida Winery in Healdsburg comes Poizin, a zinfandel, with some bottles sold in a little wooden coffin inscribed "the wine to die for."
Machat got the idea for Vampire Vineyards in the 1980s, partially inspired by his discovery of Bram Stoker's Dracula -- "I couldn't believe how good that was."
The first bottling was a syrah from Algeria, though he later took the concept further with grapes from Transylvania, a region in Romania.
As production grew, "I decided we really needed to take control over the quality," Machat says. "Either I could move to Romania or I could just move the production to California."
California, it turned out, was the place he needed to be -- yes, his office is in Beverly Hills -- and since 2006, the wine has been made with grapes mostly from the Paso Robles area of the California Central Coast.
Vampire sells several varietals, with merlot, cab and pinot noir generally the most popular, Machat says.
Apparently it's better red for the undead.
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