SOME WINEMAKERS FRET about the perfect mix of French and American barrels. Some lose sleep over whether September rains will waterlog the harvest. Steve Edmunds worries on a whole other level: He's concerned that when winemaking is ripped out of its traditional cultural context and done simply to accommodate the market, "we're losing the gift that wine has to give us."

Edmunds' barrels may be in Berkeley, but his heart is in the south of France. In what he admits are "ever-shrinking circles in Europe" wine is bound up with a way of life, tied to the land where it's grown and the history of the people who live there. It's not about racking up points with critics or satisfying the most consumers. "That's like letting the inmates run the asylum," he says. "That's not the way it's supposed to happen."

He recalls a Syrah tasting where California winemakers sampled and discussed each other's efforts over dinner. "With virtually every wine that came to the table, except mine," he says, "the number one topic of conversation was, 'What kind of oak are you using for this?' When I'm in France, tasting with people who are passionate about wine, they're talking about the place, the soil, how old the vineyard is, where the winemaker grew up—about the life of the place, not about commodities."

Edmunds is no armchair wine curmudgeon. He was among the first Rhone-style producers in California in the 1980s, scouring the state to save old-vine vineyards from being uprooted for condos or, worse, more Chardonnay. He compares the Rhone grapes he works with—Syrah, Grenache, Mouvrvedre, Counoise, Viognier, and so on—to the baseball-playing DiMaggio brothers: all distinctive, but related. Over the last 15 years, the small, handcrafted batches (under 4,000 cases a year) of Edmunds St. John wine have received raves from reviewers and consumers.

Dirt gets Edmunds excited. He buys grapes from all over the state and is particularly optimistic about fruit now coming in from El Dorado and San Luis Obispo counties. The goal of his low-tech winemaking is to capture a precise expression of place—soil, climate, history—to let the land speak through the wine. Edmunds fears much of the state's vineyard acreage is "dead ground" so drenched with chemicals that the vines can't yield expressive wines.

Sampling a barrel or a bottle, Edmunds tends to talk about "aromatics," not "flavors," since a wine's smell determines how it tastes. Rather than shooting for squeaky clean, he keeps his wines in contact with the grape and yeast solids for a relatively long time, pulling out everything the solids have to offer. He shies away from filtration, since that would mean bottling something different from what he's been tasting for months on end.

Even at a distance from the mainstream, Edmunds has the respect of his peers. "Steve is a superb craftsman," says Fife Vineyards winemaker John Buchsenstein, another early Rhonesmith. "He goes to great pains to (use) grapes that reflect their origins, and he's faithful to traditional winemaking. In a tasting of any collection of New World Rhones, Steve's wines stand out as the most Rhone-like."

Edmunds's winery shares space in Audubon Cellars. Through the stacks of Spaghetti Red (a budget blend), his barrels are easy to spot - oversized 132 - gallon casks, colored with age and designed to mature the wine, not flavor it. Operating from Berkeley involves a lot of driving to visit his distant grapes, but it also keeps him close to where his wife, Cornelia St. John, has her psychotherapy practice. A year living in the Napa Valley in the '70s left him feeling that people there were too image-conscious, concerned with how things looked rather than how things felt. "Of course," he says, "I'm not sure living in Berkeley is the real world, either."

Serious discussions with Edmunds are always laced with self-deprecating humor. To celebrate his 50th birthday, he found time between fermentations to record an acoustic folk-style CD of his own songs, backed by a first-rate crew of local musicians. Like his wine, the songs on Lonesome On the Ground are straightforward, heartfelt, infectious, and never over-orchestrated.

A true Berkeleyite, Edmunds isn't comfortable making wines only rich people can afford. He concedes with a chuckle that the only way he could offer a $10 bottle of wine would be "if somebody gave me the grapes, or I lived in southern Spain with a vineyard that had been in the family for 400 years." For now, his wines go for $15 to $35 a bottle.

Naturally, it's not about just the balance sheet for Edmunds; it's the dilemma of modern times. "How much will it cost us," he asks, "to remember what it's like to be a human being?"