Welcome back to...
Focus on Interesting Things.
Today we have a very special guest.
It's Main Man Keenan.
May...Nerd.
Nerd.
I've got to admit, I'm playing a little bit of catch-up here.
I don't know if you know this,
but the reason you're here is we had a last-minute cancellation.
We Were supposed to have Keanu Reeves on.
Unfortunately, he couldn't make it,
so we're stuck...
with another rock and roller here
who's got some other product
he has made
in his basement apparently, so.
I actually stayed up really late last night
and prepared a bunch of questions for Neo
and his experiences with Laurence Fishburne
and what kind of that dynamic was like on the set.
Well, I'm a Speed freak.
I love his work in that film,
and I wished he Was in Speed 2.
Like we do every week, we have a guest that has
a very interesting thing that they'd like to show to the world.
Maynard, what do you have for us today?
I make wine in Arizona.
Just the kind of Wine you can get at a supermarket for cooking or-
You could cook with it,
but I prefer you drink it.
You know, Tim was actually telling me
that you went to the grocery store and there's--
Hundreds of wine available.
He said he looked down an aisle,
and he said he could only see wine bottles
as far as a man could see.
So I wouldn't necessary categorize it as an interesting.
You know, my problem with wine is the tart acidic flavors
and the way that it doesn't make you feel well later.
It's not-- It's not something I'd recommend, would you?
Yeah. I mean--
Yeah, I make wine. I'm a Winemaker.
But is it something you'd recommend people drink?
Yeah.
- When I go to the grocery- -okay.
Whenl look at a bottle of wine,
I see a big logo that says
"Women don't drink,
"children don't drink,
- "men don't drink, between-- -zero and--
...seniors don't drink."
And that kind of a warning to me says...
hands off.
I'm not going to drink this poison.
I don't know where you're getting that.
It doesn't say that you shouldn't-- that men shouldn't--
You think that people should be drinking this stuff that you have in the bottle?
- Yes, I do. - Okay.
That's just Where we're going to have to differ With that.
If Keanu was here, I could ask him--
So, Maynard, I have a silly question for you.
Why do you think people like to drink wine?
I don't think there's a simple answer to that one.
Do you want the hippie answer or the obvious answer?
Let's try the hippie ansWer.
In the movie The Fifth Element,
Milla Jovovich, the Supreme Being--
They're showing you DNA structure of a human.
It's a double helix DNA strand,
and then all of a sudden they start reconstructing the Supreme Being,
and it's 64 pairs, you know,
or some crazy number of DNA strands
that make up this much more complex being.
Just the complexity within a grape
is so far beyond other fruits,
you just end up, when you make--
When you ferment them and you consume them later,
just the complexities that come out of those--
that enzyme structure and everything that goes on in that glass,
it's a Supreme Being.
I'm going to suggest that this thing is just so far evolved
and so much more complex.
It has so much more of a history than the other fruits,
which is probably, on some level,
why we respond to it
and embrace it.
That's my hippie explanation,
other than, you know...
get drunk at prom
and get those panties off.
So why do you think people like to get drunk?
They don't like wearing panties?
I don't know.
Hello. I'm Marshall Trimble, official Arizona state historian,
and I'm here on the scenic Verde canyon Railroad,
right alongside the Verde River in Verde canyon.
Perched on the side of cleopatra Hill here
is the ToWn of Jerome,
the Billion Dollar Copper camp it was called,
and others called it the Wickedest city in the West.
Well, it had a wild reputation,
and it also burned completely to the ground
three times in its history.
It even became a ghost town for a While,
andthen it came back alive and bigger than ever, I guess.
Then a man named Maynard Keenan, in the mid-1 990s,
he came out to the Wickedest city in the West,
and there he met up with Eric Glomski,
and by golly, they started groWing grapes.
I came to Arizona inmy teens
in the '80s--late '80s-- to go to college.
And Arizona was kind of a place where I became conscious as a human being,
so I've always felt this really strong affinity to Arizona.
And I think Maynard, when you get a chance to talk to him, would express--
he probably has some kind of parallel story
about finding home and relating to a place.
And so in a nutshell, I'm here because Arizona's my home
and my wines are an expression of a place that I call home.
I had a dream about being in Arizona,
and I had no real interest in moving to Arizona.
Nothing against Phoenix, but it wasn't really where I wanted to live.
And my only exposure to Arizona was that, which is, of course,
the first criticism that people have or question.
When We say we're growing grapes here, they say "Isn't it a desert?
Isn't it full of cactuses and, you know, cement and ex-strippers?"
And the answer is, "Not necessarily up here."
So Tim Alexander brought me up here
to show me this little town in Northern Arizona.
Brought him up here and was like, "This is it," you know.
And the side of the mountain overlooking all this great vast beauty.
It's artists and musicians and a lot of creative people.
And I think the energy is here, and he fell in love with it and stayed here.
So-- And then I split. Got the hell out.
Northern Arizona, in general, away from the cities,
you can see the stars forever, you can see the Milky Way.
It's pretty amazing sitting there
with a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, um, checking out the sky.
The full moon was kind of highlighting some of the landscape.
It just felt like a few of the times I've been on the road in Europe.
Those long, long, long bus rides, and all of a sudden you Wake up,
and you're on some two-track highway
going to some festival in the middle of vineyards.
That just really kind of hit me that this area's ripe for it.
And I fell in love with it right away, and it didn't take long for me
to start having visions of grapes on these slopes.
I've kind of got a wild hair up my ass to actually plant these vineyards.
And I'm one of those people that kind of trust my intuition,
and I kind of went with it.
But at some point, your intuition only can go so far.
NoW you need some technician or somebody who has experience
to kind of help you to get to the next step.
So I started looking around the valley
just to see if there's anybody around here doing this at all,
and as it turns out, there were a couple people.
I was helping another winery get off the ground,
but l was planning on going off on my own,
so I kind of said, "Hey Maynard, let's get together sometime."
We met up here overlooking this vineyard, and we've been working together ever since.
I think We found out that we had a lot in common as far as our drive,
both from our interest in sustainability and agriculture,
but also our interest in our entrepreneurial sides.
It just immediately made sense.
Within, like, three conversations, we knew that we were going to be--
I was going to end up being guided by this person.
I left the Santa cruz Mountains making wine with David Bruce.
They said, "Why did you go to Arizona?"
And the difference is did I want to just be
another vineyard and winery right next to everybody else
and just do what they're doing,
change it a little bit, and say, "Okay, here's who I am,"
versus coming here and trying something completely different?
And in doing that, it means we have to dial things.
And we really are in a frontier.
We don't know what is around the next bend,
and that certainly goes for these viticultural efforts.
This is Merkin West.
And we're on a hill slope here,
kind of southeasterly facing, overlooking the Verde Valley.
And what you're looking at here
is kind of the subsoils underneath Maynard's Cab vineyard.
This whole valley below us here used to be an ancient lake bed,
and it's possible that this material here
are old sediments that sat in the bottom of that lake.
And that would help explain a little bit why some of these rocks are smooth.
Maybe they were deposited there by rivers,
or maybe water was working on them over time.
This ultimately is going to be what gives Maynard's wines their character.
So not only are we on a frontier here with regards to, you know, Arizona,
but we're on kind of a frontier here with viticulture
and the idea of expressing this place that is Maynard's vineyard.
And it's unlike any other Cabernet I've ever had before.
Eric, at some point, had either called me,
or over dinner, had talked about meeting this rock star.
He said, "Well, his name is Maynard Keenan, and I think his band is Tool, I think."
The way he presented it was pretty funny.
Something about in the cellar working and this car rolls up--
big black car-- and this guy gets out.
And I think a girl with a leash or a collar and black leather,
kind of like a female wolverine, gets out of the car.
That's-- No.
I'm going to roll into a fuckin' vineyard with a chick in a dog collar?
Come on, dude.
So you dispute that story?
I completely dispute that
because I wouldn't roll into a vineyard with somebody like that.
That's not-- It's not-- Look at me, dude. I'm not, you know...
What, am I Ozzy Osbourned-out right now?
I love Ozzy. Don't get me wrong.
But we're not shouting at the devil right now.
We're not barking at the moon or any of that stuff.
We're just--It's just, we're in the fucking woods.
We're out here digging in dirt.
No dog-collared eyeliner chicks allowed. That's just embarrassing.
I met Maynard back in '93
on a tour called Lollapalooza.
He came walking up.
Who's this crazy guy? He's got, like, this Mohawk.
I think he had army fatigues on or something.
I was like, "Who is this guy?"
You know, one thing that Maynard's done is that he's sold a shit-ton of records.
He's an incredibly successful person,
and he's, you know, what they call a rock star.
He is a guy who made it.
Only probably the biggest genius in the entire world.
Singer of Tool, singer of Puscifer, singer ofA Perfect circle.
He's a very sexual, very, you know, human being.
You know, he's in tune with himself.
A god amongst men.
I really don't know what to say. It's Maynard.
Our best concert experience was New Orleans.
It was a big festival, 80,000 people general admission,
and we were third row, and it was just outstanding.
The crowd just moved us, and it was the best.
We thought we were gonna die.
He has a beautiful voice. Beautiful voice.
- And the way he mixes it up... -His words.
His voice-- Literally, his voice-- not his artistic voice--
His physical voice is, I think, at this point,
something that will be heard and listened to
as long as people are still listening to rock music
that involves, you know, bass guitar and drums.
I love drawing people. And his lyrics are like a muse to me.
- This is Maynard. - This guy right here, Maynard.
We named him after the guy from Tool, man.
We've been listening to them since we were 1 3.
We're going to be 23 soon, so it's been a good decade.
-Yeah. - A decade with Tool.
That was fucking awesome.
That was awesome just to see them for a whole .2 seconds.
.2 seconds was well worth the wait.
My perception of Maynard moving to Arizona to make wine
was probably similar to a lot of other people's.
There was a bit of skepticism.
I think there's always a bit of skepticism
when somebody who's known for one thing
decides that they want to do something else.
You know, when Paul Stanley from KISS says,
"I'm going to start painting,"
you're like, "This is not going to be any good."
And then you look at the paintings, and it's not any good.
I was just like, "Okay, dude's got a lot of money.
"You know, he's moving to Arizona,
and he's going to, like, you know, try his hand at this."
And then it became sort of clear very quickly
that this was not some sort of dilettante,
you know, "Maybe I'lltry making some wine."
This was a passion for him.
So, Maynard, I guess what everyone wants to know
is, you know, why did you get into winemaking?
How and what did you fall in love with about wine?
I get that--I get that question a lot, and I guess I could ask--
You know, I could retort with, you know, "Why music?"
I think it's just everyone has that moment
when they discover something on their own
that wasn't handed to them that kind of resonates on some certain level
that, you know, drives them to ask more.
And it's kind of, you know, a self-fulfilling thing.
You're kind of, you know-- You're kind of learning about yourself.
It's a matter of self-discovery, and then you ask more questions.
And you make a sound, and it's your sound,
and it resonates on some certain level, and with me it was with winemaking.
I had that same moment where l was, you know,
having the right wine with the right dinner,
and something clicked, and it just compelled me to want to know more
about what that's about and how it relates to my world
and this world I'm living in, and how far can I take this as an artist?
Um, are you guys going to follow me everywhere?
In the early '90s, I graduated from Prescott College
with a degree in ecology.
But I specialized in riparian ecology, or river ecology.
One of my first big contracts was to do an inventory
about perennial streams in the Prescott National Forest.
Within two years, I must have hiked, you know, thousands of river miles.
Without error, there was always a quince tree, apple, or pear there.
At that time, I was already making beer.
And I just took an initial interest in the fruit
because I got excited about the idea
of getting some of these heirloom apples that I'd come across in my hikes,
hiking them out, pressing them andmaking an apple wine.
I took the apples, went through the whole process,
and I'll never forget the first whiff I had of that apple wine.
It brought me back there. I could smell those grasses.
I could hear the little babbling brook. I could smell the ponderosas.
And it was really epiphanous for me. This was the moment
that made me into a winemaker.
Winemaking is something that helps us understand
our relationship with the earth and with each other.
There's a lot of situations where we disrespect the earth.
We manage our resources poorly.
We litter. We over-extract resources.
It all comes down to whether we really understand
what's going on around us and whether we're sensitive to it.
Do we have a responsibility to the earth?
Do we have a responsibility to ourselves,
to attune our senses to all these things around us?
And I know this almost seems hokey, but that sense of taste and smell
brought me to a deeper level of understanding
of myself and the planet.
It's like somebody saying God spoke to them.
And to me, the earth is really kind of my church, is my God.
And that was my religious experience.
My name's craig Martinsen,
and I'm the vineyard manager here at Page Springs.
When we prune the vines, we're really setting up
the vineyard for this next year.
I know I want to set about three tons of fruit per acre in this section.
And so, based on vine counts, if I leave two buds per spur,
and I space the spurs about the distance of my hand apart,
I know I'll get that.
l'm also pruning the vines, and I'm leaving my buds here.
They're all concentrated right along this cordon.
Sometimes we'll taste--
Like, here it's bleeding.
Taste that to see if it's sweet at all.
There's no sugars really flowing in the vines, and...
I guess that's the Farmers'Almanac way of testing things,
seeing how far they're along.
My name is Feather Jones,
and I am an herbalist,
a land journey guide, and a ceremonialist.
Grandmother, Grandfather,
Great Spirit, and Spirit Keepers of the Four Directions,
I honor you and I acknowledge you for your many gifts.
This is a prayer the indigenous people
use in order to move into a place of power.
And the vortexes are places of power.
A vortex is kind of a cool, groovy name,
but it was not known with the ancient people.
Sacred places of power. And they knew them all.
And these places offer a very strong earth resonance,
where the electromagnetic energies are concentrated.
So it's easy to walk into them and feel the energies.
I am a vortex.
I'm a mobile vortex.
I don't have my costume on right now, but I normally have, like, a--
It's a big V with a cape.
I am--I am a vortex.
Well, you should dispute this with the Sedona map
because you're not on the map.
Well, it's because I didn't donate to their chamber of commerce.
They took me off the map. And it was hard.
They just kept having to reprint it.
Every time I moved, they'd have to reprint the map
because I'm a moving vortex.
Let me say something to you.
Please.
The blood of christ is essentially wine.
Correct.
Who are you to put that in a bottle?
I don't know. That's...
There's a couple things we know about life.
Could we just open one? Or...
- Okay, go ahead. - Listen, it's a free country. Openthe wine.
If he wants to open the wine so much, he's probably an--
- He probably has a problem with alcohol. - I would just, you know--
- If you were running your own talk show-- - You're right. This is your--
At that point, you could say "I'm going to interview you,
then we're going to open the wine, then we're going to talk about the wine."
Okay? But that's not really what's happening here.
Right now we're trying to figure out why the hell Keanu is not here.
What kind of name is Keanu?
That's an interesting thing.
What is this now?
It's just an opener.
- What do you do with that thing? -You open the wine.
Come on. Seriously, what do you do with it?
You open the wine. You use it to open the wine.
And you make these things?
This is just a wine opener.
Now, if you were the inventor of a metal fish like that...
- Dennis, we gotta get the guy on the show-- -Now we're talking.
...who invents the wine opener.
- Get him booked. - That's a blast.
That looks like it's a lot of fun there, man.
Yeah, it's great.
If I hadthat thing, I'd buy the cheapest wine, and I'd open it up.
It would be a blast. I'd have my sons join me in that pursuit.
And then I'd just pour the wine down the drain
because I would never drink wine.
You don't like wine?
I would not know, sir, because I also have never drinken piss.
So I wouldn't know what that tastes like, but I certainly wouldn't drink it.
Douche bags.
Isn't that a neat little device?
This is the theory of civilization according to Tom.
Most people accept the idea...
that civilization as we know it grew up in the Tigress-Euphrates area,
and that the main civilizing factor for man was wheat.
Primitive wheat, before man got his hands on it,
kind of looks like Bermuda grass.
You get this little stalk with these tiny little seeds on it.
And I said to myself, if l'm a caveman back in the day,
and I'm dragging my lady around by the hair,
and I got a club in one hand,
and I see Bermuda grass, and I see a grapevine...
I mean, you know, which one am I going to go for first?
Well, of course I'm going to go for the grapes.
As it happens, the Southern caucasus,
in what used to be the old Soviet Republic of Georgia,
is the origin of vitis vinifera.
They have moved around the planet by the simple process of man saying
"I like those. I'm going to take some with me."
So it moved down the hill,
worked into the Tigress-Euphrates, and then slowly spread,
especially throughout the Middle East, over into Persia, into what is now Iran,
and became the center of the grape-growing regions.
The Greeks got real good at carrying the grapes around.
But the kings obviously were the Romans,
being the engineers that they were,
introduced these grapevines all over the Western world.
And what they're now finding--
They can do DNA analysis
on residue that they found in amphora
in sunken ships in the Mediterranean,
that they found in burial tombs
that they found in the pyramids in Egypt.
And guess what. All those guys were drinking cabernet
and the same grapes that we're drinking.
So my thinking is that actually civilization arose
because of these guys saying "You know, those taste pretty goo."
And then, you know, one day, they had a bunch of grapes,
and they stuck them in a container of some kind
and forgot about them for a while.
Well, then they just got better.
Hey, Maynard, could you tell us a little bit
about what you guys are doing today?
Planting marijuana.
Medicinal marijuana.
We're basically replanting
on what is considered Merkin South.
This is our-- This vineyard has given us the most challenge.
The reality is I really don't have to think too hard
to talk about all the struggles associated with creating something like this here.
Right from the get-go, when I first saw this piece of land here,
I just knew this is where I wanted to be.
There were a lot of hard times--
times when Eric was ready to, you know, throw in the towel.
One of the biggest hurdles is that our localgovernment
really had no perception,
or no track record, on how to deal with somebody like me.
Here I was a farm business, but then I had a production business
and a commercial business all kind of rolled into one.
I purchased this vineyard back in, I think, '03.
Our first year and a half,
we actually lost a lot of vines to winter kill.
We weren't putting the vines to sleep.
We weren't, you know, pushing them into dormancy early enough.
This is the fourth time we've planted this vineyard.
Hopefully the last.
Everywhere where you see tubes out in the vineyard
is a place where we lost a vine to winter cold.
Not only is it costing us more time,
we also had to replant the vineyard, and really start over down in this section.
The cost of planting grapes in Arizona runs about $35,000 an acre.
And that's not nothing. That's a lot of money.
And then, if you put in a winery,
you're looking at, you know,
at least a couple million dollars for a halfway decent winery,
on top of your land, your grapes,
all the money you've invested thus far.
So the best way to make ten million dollars in the vineyard
is to probably lose about 100 million first.
Huge expensive mistakes.
Huge black hole of expense that goes into pioneering an industry like this.
And, uh, we're learning the hard way.
Pioneers are going to take the brunt of the setbacks and mistakes,
but we also have the opportunity to take
all the notoriety associated with it as well.
challenges on this vineyard so far are humidity,
mid-summer monsoons or bunch rot, little bugs.
And when the grapes are ready, you've got raccoons,
skunks, gophers,
birds, hippies,
all kinds of pests.
- Camera crews? - Camera crews.
When I was looking for vineyards, I basically was looking for water.
That's gold here in these-- these here hills.
For 30 years, we have been litigating water rights in the state ofArizona.
We've been back and forth-- United States Supreme court--
on every issue over jurisdiction and how to quantify these water rights.
There are claims to water
that predate statehood.
The mines actually own the water and control the water,
and in the area that have been used since the late 1800s.
But they have an agreement with the town of Jerome
as to how much they can use and for what purposes.
To put vineyards on the land
instead of putting a house on the land conserves the water.
There's one-eighth the usage of water on a vineyard
than there would be in just a basic nuclear family household.
We're dealing with a plant that is indigenous to arid regions in the first place,
so it's a very water-conservative plant.
These grapes use a very small amount of water.
What's special about the wine grapes that are growing here
is they are very deep-rooted plants.
They will find the water table.
They will get seriously, seriously involved in the ground.
This is not a shallow plant
where you can go over and just pull it out of the ground.
We barely water here because there is a water table
that's relatively just under the soil,
so when we get to the season
where the sugar levels are starting to get higher up,
we're noticing that we're getting a lot of bunch rot just because of the humidity,
if we get just a slight bit of rain.
We haven't actually got our canopy up into a quad-trellised system yet.
They really separate off the cluster, so they're not--
No leaf touching a cluster, no cluster touching a cluster.
We haven't quite gotten there yet, 'cause this is still a young vineyard.
We're still training these vines.
Typically, the growing of grapes use less water
than other traditional crops like cotton or alfalfa or corn.
And because of that, it's really a great product
for the Verde Valley area
because there isn't a lot of water to go around.
And so, using less water is always an important way
to approach any kind of sustainable business and economic practice.
My interest in sustainability
and that kind of whole survivalist mentality--
surviving-the-earth-changes paranoia that I had in the earlier life--
and my interest in wine
all of a sudden kind of came together out here in Arizona
when I was noticing the landscape and how a lot of these creatures fight to survive.
If you plant a garden in Arizona, you gotta be ready to defend it
because every creature, from--
from, you know, bug to fowl to mammal,
wants your food.
Here comes the story.
I get a panicked call about a week ago
from a vineyard manager calling his brother, going,
"I went down to Merkin East,
and a third of the Sangiovese is stripped right off the stems.
There's no Sangiovese in four of the rows."
So we're freaking out trying to figure out what happened,
so we had Nicki stay the night.
A pack of javelina
came through the fence
and got under the nets
and, basically, got up on their hind legs
and stripped off a third of our Sangiovese grapes down to the stems.
So, if you don't know what a javelina is, if you've ever seen Thhe Royal Tenenbaums...
the plaque that Bill Murray keeps trying to hang on the wall--
on the family portrait wall-- that's a javelina.
It's like a wild boar. We have herds of them running around the Verde Valley.
And now never mind the challenges with water rights
and issues with frost and cold snaps.
Now we have to worry about javelina, which I think is amusing.
How do you sleep at night knowing that you're making this trash?
I drink it, and then I fall asleep.
Wow. Okay.
I guess we've got a sarcastic comedian on our show.
We should reintroduce him, then.
Welcome back to our show, Focus on...
Interesting Thhings.
We're here with M. Keenan,
and he's the star of a new film, Blood Winee,
where we go into his home ofArizona,
where the mascot of Arizona is Zono the Frog.
That's an interesting thing. Arizona has zero frogs.
And to actually have a mascot named after a frog
that's in a desert, in a shit world that you live in--
that was interesting to us.
Now, tell me about the audacity
that exists in your mind and in the mind of your friends,
where you would think that someone would want to see a documentary
about you and the process that you undergo to make this poison.
It's filth, really.
- I'm sorry-- - cat got your tongue?
Or do you want some water, some birch beer?
We can get you anything non-alcoholic. Or is that not suitable for you?
You want us to run out and get you some--
- This is fine. - ...some paint thinner or something?
- No. l'm good. - Or is there plenty of wine left?
- Plenty of wine. - I have a question for you.
What kind of tool do you use to make wine?
- Only because I saw that note. - Did you see what I said?
Yeah. Because you're talking about the fish thing here.
"What kind of tool"?
I'm Tom Beaujour, the editor in chief of Revolver Magazine.
We've actually been covering Tool since day one.
One of the most important things
that Tool decided to do and has managed to do
was not play the media game.
They've actually managed to maintain an aura
of a unit of a band with a mystique.
Between Maynard's lyrics and the rhythms and the way that the music evolves--
that Tool music connects with people
on a really massively wide spectrum of levels,
which is why fans of theirs remain with them as the y evolve.
And even with A Perfect circle, he was more open
and, you know, willing to do things on his own
because it was his own project.
When he's in Tool, Maynard is part of Tool.
I think what Maynard has always managed to do
is write lyrics that you totally feel his suffering,
and you feel struggles, his evolution.
When you're writing songs and titling them, you know,
"Stink Fist" or "Prison Sex," you know that you're pushing buttons.
But he is able to connect with people's, like, inner Beavis and Butthead.
When he calls something "Stink Fist,"
he knows that it's disturbing and provocative
and opens up a whole can of worms, but he also knows that it's kind of funny.
I don't think any of Maynard's fans, at least until recently,
had a vision of him as a happy or, you know, well-adjusted person.
I'm very resistant to the idea of...
being a public servant and it being my responsibility to educate,
because I'm not really qualified to do any of those things.
I write these songs
to move through some pain or work out some issues,
and if I'm successful in my art, in my expression,
I shouldn't feel the same way I did when I wrote those songs anymore,
and there should be a logical progression.
But if, as an artist, I can express myself in some way
that ends up helping someone else get through some hard times,
I guess that's-- that's great for everybody.
It helps other people.
The problem with the music industry in general
is that artists get into it because they have a desire to be desired,
and they have a desire to scream their heads off
for whatever issue happened to them in the past.
They weren't armed with the proper tools to move through any trauma,
or they're a child of divorce or, you know, lost their parents.
What they do is they end up just kind of screaming their heads off,
and at some point, they get popular, and now they're part of an industry
that is run by people who are uneducated, emotional people.
In a way, it's kind of a dead end.
In this society, we expect those artists to continue screaming
to the end of their days.
If you don't eventually feel better,
then I'm not sure how effective your screaming was
and how your screaming is going to help somebody else.
So I should work out of those issues and move on to some other challenges.
And that's, for me, what the wine is.
I think I've moved through a lot of the problems
that I've had in the past.
I don't necessarily want to scream my whole life.
If the songs don't help me,
how are they going to help you?
So here I am, making wine.
It's a much more grounded experience than being in a bus,
being surrounded by decadence.
I just returned from a short run with Tool,
which confirmed my suspicions that it's very grueling on my body.
As soon as I got back, I collapsed and got sick for a couple days.
It's very taxing, so I think it's--
I'm much happier in this setting, doing these things.
Not that I don't enjoy making that art and expressing those ideas.
But I just--
My body now feels more comfortable here.
It's...
It's more where I am in my progression, in my life path.
This is just kind of where I feel more comfortable now.
You can see the grapes are going into veraison already.
Some of the little green spots on these berries--
that's going to clear up over time.
Once these canes are more established,
we're seeing in some of the older vines
that you don't really get that anymore.
Once it kind of finds its way and it kind of gets itself acclimated to the site,
over the course of, you know, six or seven years, it kind of--
it kind of gets what it needs to do to survive here.
And those green berries will start to disappear.
Right now, though, this is the third harvest, so it's still kind of finding its way.
And it's doing really well.
Hi. We're making wine in Arizona.
I know the first thought is cacti
and cement and all kinds of heat.
But we're in the high desert. We get snow in the winter.
And it's actually a lot cooler than, say, Paso Robles.
I'm sure you've had some wines from the Paso Robles area.
We have more problems with cold than we do with heat.
So, just to dispel that myth right away, get on to the wine drinking.
This is the first wine that I actually made with Eric Glomski in Arizona.
I actually lived in-- I moved to LA in around 1990.
It took only about five years for that to sink in it was a bad idea.
So '95,
l ran screaming from your lovely city toward Arizona.
Ended up in a small town called Jerome, Arizona, in '95.
It didn't take long for me to look at the slopes there
and realize that this is the place to start planting grapes.
But I didn't really have any wine background.
So, going into this whole thing with Eric Glomski,
l'm kind of like that drunk child with a loaded weapon,
bouncing around the winery going, "Hey, let's mix these things together.
What does this taste like?"
And this is a direct result of that clumsiness.
can you-- Did you hear all that in the back?
No.
Location, location, location.
Here's some food!
How do you find time to, like, actually write music,
when you know so much about wine, like?
Well, honestly, I don't really know that much about wine.
I'm learning as l go. And I'm learning about the winemaking process over time.
It's going to take-- It'll take a decade or two
for me to really catch up with...
with all the hot air that I'm throwing around.
It's a steep learning curve.
It's a quick learning curve, and then it levels off,
and there's a lot of hard work that occurs in that last 5%
to really get you to the next level.
But it's like music. It's about listening.
And, so, like, where do you see yourself in sort of 1 5, 20 years?
Like, do you see yourself, like, performing on stage or, you know, growing wine?
I think the stage performances will end up being the fun part,
the break from the winemaking.
Wow. So wine is, like--
Gone for a few weeks, do some shows, focus on the winemaking.
My role in Puscifer is really
whatever--
whatever it can be at any kind of moment, you know?
I'm such a huge Maynard fan altogether, you know?
That's creepy.
I know. I know.
- How did you get in the room? - Isn't weird to have a crazy fan?
- Where's the bouncers? - No, it's true.
- Security. - And, you know...
So anytime Maynard sings, I want to be there.
And if he asks me to sing with him, of course I will, so...
Puscifer track in the next Resident Evil...
film.
Know anybody?
Don't we realize that no one knows what Puscifer is?
You know why? Because no one knows what it is.
Even the guy who came up with it
- doesn't know what it is. - No, but that's not--
No one knows what it is. That's the point.
Right. What is Puscifer is what Puscifer is.
- What is Puscifer? - And not-- And what it isn't, you know?
Puscifer is an ever-evolving project,
not unlike a wine.
- It's-- When you put the bottle-- - Good plug.
- When you put the wine in the bottle,
it's going to be different
depending on what day or week or year you open it up.
- It's always going to be evolving. - You're holding that really weird.
Now, how-- how do I pronounce it again? I always want to say--
- caduceus. - caduceus.
Caduceus is the winery. Merkin Vineyards are the vineyards.
Merkin Vineyards. And you're not--
You don't have a problem that your-- your winery--
the middle syllable almost sounds like "douche"?
- You're not worried about that? - Not at all.
I mean, this is all-- We're all-- We're embracing nature.
Good. And Three Douche Bags Vineyards out of Italy
is, like, one of the biggest producers on the planet,
so it clearly didn't hurt them.
Not only of wine, but of douche bags.
Of douche bags. Yeah, they do amazing--
Because they got the old olive oil. You know, the great vinegar.
They make it all by hand. They stone-grind the rubber.
Yeah, it's all cold-pressed. It's all cold-pressed.
- Jesus God. - cold-pressed douche bags.
What are we, a couple of bad morning deejays?
Hey, how about that Three Douche Bags Vineyard?
We're here with Maynard Keenan here from ca-douch-us Winery.
Hey, Maynard--
Sorry. So what is this one called?
This one's called Sancha.
Yeah. You want to read the back there?
I do want to read the back. Hang on.
- You need the glasses? I have glasses. -No. I got it.
You know what you should do on the next back of one of these?
Just add one-- Like, do all the technical stuff and then add one line
that just makes no fucking sense just to see if people catch it.
You know? Like, "Personally frightened by Rhea Perlman once a week."
- lnsult it to death. - Yeah, to prove, just, like--
Wait a minute. What? What? Wait a minute.
That's not real.
And they go to your Web site,
and you have footage of Rhea Perlman screaming at a barrel of grapes.
Yeah.
Personally frightened by Rhea Perlman.
- Now, this isn't-- Thank you. - cheers.
This is also young. We're pouring these wines way before their time.
- We shouldn't be pouring these at all. - So we're robbing the cradle.
- We're robbing the cradle. Yeah. - God.
- Wow. - That's got some tannic structure to it.
Damn, dude.
That has got some tannis.
This is what they give, like, a gunfighter before a shootout.
- Like, just, "Here, get a sip of this." - Yeah.
- "lt'll steady your hand, dude." - Here.
By the stem. You don't want to warm it. There you go.
- Wine before murder, always. - Remember that movie you were pitching,
Gunfighter Wine Snob?
No?
Gunfighter Wine Snob.
Think a Cabernet is better than a Syrah, buddy?
Better take three steps back.
Gunfighter Wine Snob.
So how is that piss?
How is that poison you're putting in your mouth?
You have a vinegar waft coming this way.
Smells like...
Tim, don't get close to that.
l can't tell you-- curiosity killed the cat.
Give me a little taste.
It's rank.
Smells like my Pepper's shoes.
No, not for me. Not for me.
Does it hurt?
"Does it hurt"?
It tastes like my daughter's cough syrup.
lt does smell like fruit now that it's sort of sitting out in the air a little bit.
- Give me a sip of that. - Feel free.
It's got a...
When people taste wine,
and they are maybe intimidated sometimes,
because they'll be sitting there at a wine tasting,
and somebody will swirl that glass and take a whiff,
and they'll say, "What lovely aromas and characteristics of cassis
and chocolate and tobacco and forest floor and mushroom."
All these are-- words are descriptors
that may be applicable to that wine at that moment.
Because we're such a visually oriented and stimulated culture,
our vocabulary and our senses
that have to do with taste and smell are really underdeveloped.
It's not that they're not there,
we just don't have an intellectual kind of connection,
and our mind doesn't connect to our vocabulary
and our ability to describe those things.
And furthermore, because we don't have that,
we tend not to pay attention to those things as much.
I think it's good to have some--
a kind of few key words that that you can use like "forest floor."
It gives you kind of an earthy character
or an experience of an earthy character.
So there's a few kind of fruit terms you can use
to kind of get people down the right path.
This is dark fruit. This is blue fruit.
Wine definitely does not contain strawberries or black cherries.
But when you try to describe something,
we have to use terms that we're familiar with
and that everybody can kind of understand.
With regard to our senses, I really kind of think we have
an obligation to educate ourselves about these things,
because there's this whole world out there
that most of us aren't even paying attention to that is huge.
You want to smell flavors that are fruity and aromatic.
You don't want to smell things like bleu cheese,
and you don't want to smell things like wet dog and barnyard.
I mean, these are things that are also descriptors of wine,
but may be something that went wrong in the winemaking process
that created those flavors and smells.
My wife had a great line a while ago.
Back when Eric was just bringing us in for these random tastings,
she said one of the wines was like kissing Elizabeth Taylor.
90% of the process of tasting wine is smelling wine.
So you're really not tasting chocolate in the wine.
lt's more like your tongue and your nose come together,
and the effect of that flavor
comes across to your brain as slightly chocolaty.
Eric always amazes me-- the things he can notice in a wine.
And I think I'm starting to get there.
For me, sensualism really developed more to the concept
of smell really, and somewhat taste.
Because taste is really all about smell, you know?
If you have a cold and you eat some food or drink some wine,
you can barely taste it at all.
Most of what we're tasting with wine is our retro-nasal.
But as the wine goes down the back of our throat,
it volatilizes and turns into a gas and it goes up into our sinuses,
and that's what we really, really smell and taste.
When you really get into wine, wine just coaxes you
to develop your sense of smell.
1 0, 1 5 years ago, I could walk into a room,
I wouldn't notice that
this guy used Irish Spring and this woman's wearing pertume,
or I wouldn't notice all the different shampoos in the room.
I wouldn't notice, unless it was really extreme,
that this person was exercising right beforehand.
You know, I wouldn't notice that this woman was on her moon.
I wouldn't notice that we were downwind from a certain type of forest.
Like this forest right here.
I could smell the cottonwoods way up at my house.
And somebody walks into the room--
Even if l don't hear them, I can tell if somebody's in the room now.
And to me, that's a whole world that didn't even exist before.
And I can't imagine living a life without that extra sense.
It would be like all of a sudden losing my eyesight now.
Here we're seeing an interest in Verde Valley,
where major winemakers from other parts of the world
and, of course, people from this region,
are really paying attention to what's happening.
And so we expect to see a lot more vineyards planted here in the valley.
Many have already been planted in the last four or five years.
We see major makers coming in
and taking a look to see what they can capitalize on.
One of the fellows here in the valley--
Actually, the head of economic development in cottonwood
just came back from a trip to Napa, Sonoma.
And he made it a point to visit
as many tasting rooms as he could while he was there,
and said he was a little bit surprised to find out
that everybody he talked to was familiar with the Verde Valley.
They may not have known all of the nuances,
they may not have been able to name all of the wines,
but they knew something was going on out here--
that the word was already out
that this was a region to kind of keep your eye on.
My name is Alder Yarrow, and I run what many people consider
to be the world's leading wine blog, vinography.com.
I taste between 3 and 6 thousand wines a year,
and 99.9% of them are not from Arizona.
The world doesn't know there is wine in Arizona yet.
The world barely knows
that there's, you know, wine in half the regions of california.
Here in the Livermore Valley, we've been farming since 1 883,
when first generation C.H. Wente founded the winery.
It's been a wonderful operation here.
Five generations of family involved in the business.
And today, we're operated by the fourth generation
and have the pleasure of having our fifth generation winemaker, Karl Wente,
making all of our beautiful wines.
My family's been farming grapes and making wine onthis land since 1 883,
and we're celebrating our 1 26th vintage this year.
I think I have the best job here
with the oldest family-owned and operated winery in california.
Grow grapes and make the best wine in the world.
And it's all about execution when it comes to grape growing and winemaking.
It took, you know,
decades to figure out what to plant in parts of california,
and I think, you know,
they have the advantage of watching other failures and successes
in other parts of the world that resemble theirs.
We're farming cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Bordeaux,
Malbec, Tempranillo, Triga Nationale, Triga Francesca, Sauzal, Marselon,
Roussanne, Viognier, Syrah, Senso, Grenache, Graciano,
Termpranillo, Orange Muscat, Muscat Canale, Sauvignon blanc,
Sémillon, Nebbliolo, Sangiovese, Barbera.
I might have said Zinfandel, or l might not, so...
I mean, that's a lot, a lot of grapes.
And the winery is about an 18,000-ton winery.
On the sales volume side, we're about a 350,000-case brand,
and then we also sell grapes as well, and we sell bulk wine.
So, when you're vertically integrated
and have these beautiful estate-grown vineyards,
you stay out in front of the growth of your main wines.
And so, there's times where we have too much fruit,
so we're able to sell it and just choose the grapes
and the wines that we want to come into our product.
There are all sorts of hurdles for beginning winemakers,
and that's...
even if they're in a place that everybody knows about already
like Napa or Sonoma or even, you know, Upstate New York.
Folks from Arizona, you know,
they got to get past the "Arizona?" question
before they really get
to the "okay, maybe I'll even try the wine" question.
The Napa Valley is the most recognizable
wine district in the New World, I think.
If you consider California the New World,
I think when you look at Arizona,
perhaps, you know, it's a blank slate.
Maybe it's like trying to make wine on the moon.
It's really only the wine geeks at this point,
or perhaps people who live there,
that understand that Arizona has a wine country.
The big boys up in Napa seem to have it all figured out--
growing grapes and selling their wines for a heap load of coin.
Meanwhile, Maynard and Eric are hunkered down
and working hard down in Southern Arizona,
harvesting grapes at their vineyard.
They call that vineyard the Arizona Stronghold.
Our boys are making their wine on the same plains
that the mighty Geronimo waged his war against the U.S. government.
The terroir is so outer-worldly
that NASA recently held supersecret training there
for the mission to Mars.
I reckon the landscape is so similar to Mars
that the boys at NASA thought it was a spitting image.
Grandfather Fire,
Grandmother Earth, Grandmother Cedar,
I join you sacreds here in holy union
that you might bring forth in our midst creation
in the manner of balance and harmony.
Shamanism is humanity's oldest
and most enduring spiritual practice,
and these ways are conversant all across the globe.
With the harvest going on today,
it just makes it that much more rich,
vital, and alive, what we're doing here,
because it's not a staged event.
Rather, this is the actual blessing consecration of this vineyard.
After we destem the grapes, we put them in these-- in these vats.
To get the stuff cooking out here, to inoculate it,
to get this grape juice into wine, we add yeasts.
The yeasts are basically going to take the sugar in the juice
and convert it to alcohol.
As the yeasts start to metabolize the sugars,
they give off carbon dioxide, they give off heat.
They create alcohol. This thing starts to form what we call a cap.
If I move a bunch of these grapes-- Watch this.
I push down here. You can see this foam, okay?
And that's the beginnings of the fermentation.
Making wine is a little bit like making tea.
Envision these berries as the tea leaves.
Our job as winemakers is to dunk that teabag
down into the water, which is the juice.
One of the misconceptions that people have
about processing the grapes and after destemming is that,
you know, we all roll up our pant legs and jump in the bins
and start stomping on them like Lucy.
And that's not actually the case.
As I'm punching through the cap, you can see that it starts to foam.
This is our mixing process that's helping this color and the flavors
and all the wonderful things that make a red wine what it is
extract from these-- from these skins.
See how this thing is much denser now than the other one?
This is a much more compacted cap. And watch this.
Okay? You might want to get the sound, too.
Okay. Did it.
We used to just kind of indiscriminately add a bunch of nutrients,
because we wanted to make sure this fermentation finishes.
But there are some compounds that come from yeast stress
that add another layer of complexity to the wine.
And we try to dial it to just the right point,
because too much of it is too much.
None of it, and then things are too squeaky clean.
The wines that are too perfect just aren't as interesting.
At some point, we free-run them and we press them.
And we want to basically get this stuff out first
and separate that out into a bin, and we'll barrel that down.
And then we'll take, you know, the skins that are kind of left on the bottom.
There's still juice in those. So then we dig those out
or put those into the press
and then press those out slowly so we get what we call the pressed wine out.
And then they end up in one of these tanks, depending on the size of the batch.
So even though we pump off liquid,
there's all kinds of suspended sediments and solids in that liquid.
And then we get the secondary fermentation going.
And once the wine's completely done, all those solids start to settle out.
Once that has occurred, we--
that's usually the time we end up going to barrel.
Barrels are all about aging wines primarily, but there's also a seasoning,
i.e., like a chef and a spice rack, and you're adding different spices.
You've got to pick the right barrel to accent
and support and enhance the wine you're putting in it.
You can choose different barrels, you can choose different aging regimes,
but when it really comes down to it,
you get to be the chef when you start putting wines together.
To me, the art of winemaking is blending.
Most of our wines are blends, and that's because I love blending.
I mean, do I just want to make cabernet Sauvignon every year,
or just make a Syrah every year, or do I want to tinker with it
and see if I can take that wine and make it better?
So how do you not only achieve complexity,
but get these things to knit together and form this fabric
that is beautiful and smooth and velvety?
And again, I think this all relates back to the idea of deliciousness.
My job as a winemaker is to tinker
with all these different batches in here, get to know them as grapes,
then get to know them as must, get to know them as young wines,
and form these relationships with these wines
so that over time, I start to have this kind of a mental and emotional map
of how these things ought to work together.
This one has something over here that's wondertul, but it's lacking something.
But just the other day, I was tasting this over here,
and I think it's got what that needs.
And there's nothing cooler than watching somebody drink a glass of wine
or a blend that I put together and just watch them close their eyes and smile.
You can see it take them away to somewhere else.
I mean, to me, that's-- I did my job.
Bottling is kind of the process that every winemaker rues.
I'm pretty mechanically minded, and I can keep this line going.
And there's a bunch of complex processes
that are all interacting to make this line function correctly.
You've got to be kidding me.
And my job is to understand as many of those as possible
so when the line breaks down,
I can figure out how to get it back up as quick as possible.
We've talked about the whole process today,
but we haven't really talked about the endgame here,
which is the most important part.
Today we're bottling caduceus Primer Paso.
"Primer Paso" means first step.
This was the first wine Maynard ever conceived here with me
at Page Spring cellars.
As you know, Caduceus--
I've helped Maynard make these wines from the get-go.
This is a really neat wine, and it's unique
because it's a blend of white and red grapes.
Syrah blended with Malvasia.
So not only was this his first step,
this is also a great first wine for somebody who's getting into wine.
It's soft, it's aromatic, and it's not over the top.
Here's what our ten-hour day-- but really the culmination
of almost 16 months worth of work
all coming together in this bottle right here.
April 1 0th, 2009.
This is the first time we have bottled
a hundred-percent caduceus wine from Northern Arizona.
All the elements that go into making up the terroir of this area--
it's the limestone, the volcanic ash,
the slopes, the rainfall, everything going into it.
This has kind of added up to something
that's far less Californian than we'd anticipated.
It's much closer in profile to, like, a Léoville-Las Cases
or, like, a Left-Bank Bordeaux.
If this is what we can get out of this soil, kind of letting the soil speak for itself,
then anything's possible.
It's taken about nine years
contemplating the areas where we were going to plant,
breaking ground, navigating local politics to even break ground.
Very hands-on, very small site.
We have just under 670 vines on this spot.
No one in their right mind would plant a vineyard
that's less than 6 acres or 10 acres
just because financially,
it's just as easy to farm a hundred acres as it is to farm ten acres.
So to farm a half an acre is just kind of silly.
But the location is special.
The vineyard itself is special.
It's worth taking the risk, basically.
This is the first bottling of Nagual del Judith,
cabernet Sauvignon from Yavapai county, Arizona.
Judith is named after my mother, Judith Marie.
She passed away several years ago.
She was an invalid for almost 30 years.
She had an aneurysm when she was about 31 .
It left her paralyzed on the right side of her body,
and so she couldn't really do a lot of traveling,
couldn't do much of anything really-- read, write, speak, walk, tell time.
You know, having to live roughly 29 years in that state.
It just kind of felt like this was the obvious solution--
to spread her ashes over the vineyard.
That way, she kind of comes back in the form
of vines and grapes,
and she gets to travel the world now and see other places.
There's not that much of it, really.
Our first year, we were only doing about a hundred cases of it.
I'm going to pull the first one off the bottling line and, uh, stick it away.
I'll probably take the second one
and send it to her mother,
just because she'll want this-- she'll want this bottle.
I'm a little numb at the moment.
This is not...
Yeah.
It's a special day.
Spending the last five years getting to this point.
You know, since the first day that we met
and we looked over your vineyard before there were vines there.
It's been a long haul,
and I'm definitely proud to be here with you.
I'm glad we pulled this off, man.
My name is Hugh chappelle, and I'm the winemaker
at Lynmar Estate in the world-famous Russian River Valley.
Our wines routinely get great scores from the critics,
but the most important thing to us is staying true
to our winemaking style and philosophy.
We are right now on our home estate, Quail Hill Vineyard,
in the heart of the Russian River Valley,
one of the largest freshwater wetlands in Northern California.
This area really is perfect for Pinot Noir and chardonnay.
And while we're most widely known as a specialist in Pinot Noirs,
our chardonnay recently got a 93 from the Wine Spectator.
You're asking me, uh, how critics come up with the numbers for their wines?
Hi. My name is Steve Heimoff,
and my job is to taste all the california wines.
I have never tasted an Arizona wine, to the best of my memory.
So are you going to ask me which is Arizona and which is California?
You guys are going to bust me.
I'm definitely not fond of wine scores.
It's like saying "Just because you like this, everybody else should like this."
They're incredibly politically influential.
A lot of times, you give your wines to people
who have palates that have developed around specific regions,
and you give them something a little different,
and the next thing you know, they don't like that wine
because they've been drinking the same stuff their whole lives.
In wine scoring, I don't know if "political" is the word I would use,
but certainly style-driven.
Well, when a critic comes up with a score for a wine,
they're trying to give it an honest evaluation
on whatever scale makes sense to them.
The one that's most predominant here in the United States is 1 00 points.
Thank you.
It smells good, smells clean, smells rich.
Some good fruit.
It's a very nice red wine.
It's very dry.
It's fruity.
It's balanced.
It's complex.
It has a long finish.
It's got some nice blackberry,
black cherry and spice.
And I think it's quite a good wine.
You actually can hire companies that-- They advertise.
They have a formula, a recipe you can follow
that will help you develop a point-driven wine.
There's been wines that have scored 60s and 70s,
but you don't really hear about them
because as soon as somebody gets that score,
they just try to pretend it never happened, of course.
This doesn't strike me
as quite as rich and complex as the first wine.
It's a little earthy, dusty.
For the same reason that people look for the thumbs-up from the movie critic,
people look for, these days, a 90-point score or above
from a wine critic as a sort of validation.
But it really comes down to your palate.
You really have to decide what you like.
And if you have a Wal-Mart palate, then you have a Wal-Mart palate.
That's fine. You have to trust what you like.
Thank you.
The wine is also not all that satisfactory,
once it's in my mouth.
If we could get rid of scores altogether, would that be a good thing?
Probably. The problem is that they're really useful for consumers
who don't have the time and energy to maybe sometimes even read a tasting note.
I mean, they're a good guide, they're a good starting point,
but if you really are serious about your wines,
you really need to get to know the palate
of the person who's scoring the wines.
I kind of like that, too.
I kind of like that, too. It's...
It's dry, which is good.
It's balanced. It's round.
It has a certain creamy mouth feel that I like.
There's certainly a good explosion of berry,
cherry fruit in there.
But it's not a fruit bomb.
It's not jammy.
The fruit seems to be balanced
with earthier
spices and tobacco
and maybe even something that seems leathery.
But it's a very nice wine.
A lot of people go home
with 90-point scoring wines or 92-point scoring wines
or even 100-point scoring wines, and they think,
"Where did that score come from? I hate this wine."
The American palate and all these rating systems
always seem to focus on massive.
It's like only women with big tits are good-looking, you know?
I'm just not-- I'm not a big-tit kind of guy.
It doesn't give me any joy to bash a wine,
although I will say that sometimes it gives me
a little joy to bash a $200 bottle of wine.
We're not chasing the market. We're not chasing Parker scores.
We're not chasing wine enthusiasts with Spectator scores.
We're making wines that we love to make,
and we're going to always do that here.
It's just the way it is.
What we're doing and what we're presenting...
We're like an indie band. We'll sell our--
We'll sell our cDs. We're fine.
Here is "The Mission" from Puscifer on 1 01x.
Maynard James Keenan and Eric Glomski have come into the studios today.
Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you for stopping off this afternoon.
- Thanks for having us. - Hi.
Explain to everyone in Austin, Texas exactly what you're doing here.
Well, we're here promoting our winery.
Arizona Stronghold's our joint project.
I've got Page Spring cellars. Maynard has caduceus.
And we're here to share wines with people.
So, when you guys are putting together
and making your wines, picking the grapes,
what are you trying to put on the table and get out to the public?
It's like writing a song.
Just want to let the sounds happen in a room and go with them.
Whatever Arizona, on this particular spot on the globe,
wants to offer up for flavors, that's what we're going to do.
We let the grape speak for itself.
- Guys, thank you for coming to Austin. - Thanks for having us.
We came out to Arizona last year to meet you guys.
So this was a shorter trip from Oklahoma, so...
These chupacabras could really use, like, a year aging,
if you're so disciplined.
If their reason for buying the wine
is because of something I said a couple years ago,
that's fine because the wine is good,
and they'll discover a whole new world that has nothing to do with Eric or I.
And it'll be just a good--
a good step forward for them as far as
expanding their awareness in the universe.
Don't use a straw, though. Actually use a glass.
Gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by.
Arizona Stronghold is the wine, and you can find it at azstronghold.com.
- Yep. - correct?
- And caduceus.org. - Caduceus.org.
So there it is, gentlemen. Thank you so much.
Guys, welcome to San Antonio. It's good to have you in town today.
- Thanks for having us. - When your fans--
music fans are coming up to these signings you've been doing...
What's the process at the wine signings, I guess?
We tend to kind of offend people a little bit.
We're getting them through, and, like, you know--
- Yeah. - ...if they have a quick question, that's great.
We try to offer up, as the y're buying-- looking at the wines or buying--
We tell them, quickly, what--
- You know, what to do and what not to do. - Try this with meat. Don't chill it.
- You know, air it this way. - Right.
Don't pass out.
I'm not.
You can see the expectations in their eyes at times.
Yeah.
And not to mention, a lot of them are nervous.
- There's a camera behind you. - Yeah, l know.
- You're going to be famous. - I know.
- Here you go. - Not that cool. Thank you.
- You got it? - Enjoy it. Thank you.
You know, coming up to this-- this icon of theirs,
they kind of bottle up,
and then you hand them this bottle, and they shuffle off,
and you can see they wanted to say the right thing or whatever,
- and it didn't happen. - Yeah.
There's some disappointment as people leave.
How'd it go in there?
How did it go in there?
He...
What did he say?
Honestly, I have mixed feelings about it.
This is more personal than somebody just buying a bottle of wine
off the shelf somewhere because it's a pretty label or whatever.
On the other hand, I thought it would be fun
if you guys interviewed people on the way out
and say "Did any of you know who that other guy sitting next to Maynard was?"
It's an interesting study of people
who might or not have been into wine.
But maybe they'll actually go try the wine in spite of the signature
and discover a whole new world that has far more to do
with art and cuisine than it does with...
short-tempered rock stars.
Do the wine song.
- Do that one wine-- - I like this one.
I wish I had one of them horses that's on a stick.
Put it between your legs.
Jump up and down with it. Those are fun.
- Hildy. - Yeah, Billy Lee?
I was perusing the Inter-Web the other day
in the search of new and interesting forms of pornography,
and I came across something very interesting
that juxtaposed against Aunt Mama's missionary position on alcohol.
She didn't like alcohol.
No, she did not. But this here fact kind of undermines that position,
which I assume is a bad position.
The key figure in her mythology, a Mr. Jesus,
apparently used to turn water into wine.
No shit?
Yes. And I have an idea. I'm looking around the room here.
I see a lot of people with Aquafina.
I'm thinking if we find Jesus and get him down here,
we can take that Aquafina, turn it into wine,
take this punk rock party up a nocth.
What do you say?
I say, hey, Jesus!
Maynard has really
two completely different persona, I feel, live.
With Puscifer, he almost has a more--
like, Andy Kaufman is a good example--
a very provocative, humorous persona,
where you're really never sure exactly,
you know, where the fourth wall is.
Is Maynard kidding with some of these things?
Is he trying to push your buttons?
He really has this completely other identity with his newer stuff.
I've built an entire career on not giving away
the whole farm as far as explanation.
It's been an element of...
I'll give you-- I'll present to you a particular odor and throw it out in the air,
and then you, you know,
have some kind of sense memory of those shapes,
colors, sizes, sounds,
and you-- and you draw on your own experience.
And then if you have-- If there's missing pieces,
and you're the kind of person that likes to ask questions,
there's going to be a lot for you to discover.
Mr. Jesus
-Hey, Jesus! - Save our body
Hey, Jesus!
- With His wine - Hey, Jesus!
His retching dog was sour grapes
We have just received some exciting news.
The folks making this here movie have reached out to Mr. James Suckling,
the world-famous wine writer.
In case you don't know,
Mr. Suckling writes for a magazine called the Wine Spectator.
They decided it would be a neat experiment
to bring Mr. Suckling to town all the way from Italy
to wet his whistle with some good old Arizona juice.
Never ones to back down from a challenge,
Maynard and Eric are getting everything ready for Mr. Suckling's visit.
I heard tell once some TV yokels
called this beautiful region a shit world.
Well, that made me madder than a wet hen.
So let's pay close attention and see how it all turns out.
Mr. Suckling?
Sweet.
All right. Shall we begin?
Let's do the business.
My name is James Suckling.
I'm the European bureau chief of the Wine Spectator,
which is the biggest wine magazine in the world.
We have 2 million readers.
In a year, I might taste 5, 6 thousand wines.
But, you know, that's my day job.
What I really enjoy is sharing great bottles of wine with friends,
so that's what I do.
This is my little concoction.
This is the Primer Paso from caduceus.
And this is pure Arizona fruit?
- Yes. - I told him what it was.
I believe the blend is...
90 or 91 % Syrah,
9 or 1 0% Malvasia Bianca.
Okay.
We don't co-ferment.
We put the Malvasia in near the end.
I like it, but I don't find it has that much Syrah character yet for me.
And also, the Malvasia, I think it gives it a little bit...
It's quite a strong character, particularly in the nose-- Malvasia--
and so I'm not sure that that works 100%.
You can say that. It's all right.
- Maybe you're-- - I won't kick you out.
Whatever you're trying to be, trying too hard on this one.
Not at all. I love this wine.
I make what I like.
So the next wine is Mangus, which is our project.
This was just bottled, so it's really young.
55% Cab, 36 Sangio, 9 Merlot.
Wow. The Sangiovese really comes out in the nose.
l think so, too, despite the fact that the cab is the dominant varietal.
That floral and dried cherry character.
Wow.
Well, as you know, since l live in ltaly,
particularly Tuscany, I know a bit about Sangiovese.
- The y grow it there? - They grow it there.
- That's the holy grail, baby. - Yes, it is.
So I think you guys are really on a good track with Sangiovese.
I don't think California is doing many Sangioveses like that.
Yeah.
What a view.
I had no idea with-- And these terraces?
- So much work it's crazy. - Yep.
It must have cost a fortune to plant them.
Yeah, pretty much.
You really don't see something like this in Napa Valley.
I wouldn't really know. I don't really--
I've never spent really any time in Napa, to be honest.
- Really? - Maybe a day.
I've been asked that a lot. Like, how much time--
Spend a lot of time in Napa, but I haven't really.
Yeah, because it's funny for me.
I mean, I've been to Napa, of course, but as you know,
l live in Europe, and I've been there 25 years.
I've seen all the great vineyards, live in Italy.
But for me, you know, it feels like-- like parts of Europe.
Maybe parts of the Rhone Valley.
But this looks volcanic, even.
- Were you saying that this is volcanic soil? - Yeah, absolutely.
If you look at a topographical map here,
you'll see hundreds of volcanoes throughout this area.
Basically, from about this area north,
up past Flagstaff, up toward the Grand canyon.
It's just amazing. It looks like-- It looks like pimples.
Yeah. This is pumice.
And what's funny is it reminds me
of vineyards I've been to a number of times in Sicily,
on the hillsides of Etna,
the volcano.
- Never been. - That's cool. I mean, it's off the charts.
Judith.
This is 1 00% Cabernet.
- And this is named after your mom? - Yes.
Yes-- I really like the "spearmint, eucalyptus, mint" character.
It reminds me of some of the classic Cabernets from Napa Valley
like Heitz and other wines, even old Mondavis.
They came from the floor there-- vineyards on the floor of Oakville.
- Yeah. - Let's see what it tastes like.
Classic Cab grown at almost 5,000 feet.
Finally.
All the bullshit you used to make from California.
Thanks, James.
No, but this tastes like something interesting.
Don't you remember the first time I met you?
- Wasn't it a Cab you gave me? - Yeah.
- We met at chateau Marmont. - Yeah.
And you go, "What do you think of this wine?" I just go--
- "Get out." - No, I wasn't that mean.
I said, "You can do better."
I said, "lt tastes like a lot of other things."
- Right. - But this has this real currant cassis.
More Bordeaux, but something, you know, a little bit different.
And when you think ofArizona--
- Hello. - Granite edge.
You know?
I'm just not so sure it goes with roadkill.
You just don't know.
Is that coming for dinner tomorrow night?
No, but seriously, this--
- this is pretty impressive. - You like?
Thank you. Cheers.
Judith would be happy to hear that.
What l like about a lot of wines is there's a story behind it.
Wine is an evocative, consumable product.
You drink it, and you think of where it's from.
The Judith I really like
because not only is it a very, very good wine--
I love the structure and the character--
but l love the story about--
about Maynard's mom,
and that's really touching.
But I also appreciate where the wine's from.
I've walked in the vineyards, I've touched the soil,
I've smelled the flowers,
the area,
and now in my mind and in my heart, it'll always be there.
Wine is a time machine,
particularly when you drink old wines.
I've had wines from 1 865.
And you drink it, and you think, "My God, this wine is so beautiful.
It has such flavor."
But then, at the same time, you think about
when it was made and what happened.
The Judith-- when I drink that wine, it's there.
It brings it back right away.
I'm back there in the vineyards with Maynard, tasting it.
I mean, its early days,
but I'm really happy, and I'm excited for--
you know-- for Maynard, because, you know, he's a friend,
and I wish him the best.
And, you know, I just--
And I'm happy that it's not just a whim, because, you know, you know,
friends and also artists like Maynard...
You know, you can do whimsical things.
And I think that, in fact, I'm going away knowing
that my friend actually is doing something serious,
and that it's all going to be okay.
I got a question for you.
What kind of tool do you have to be to live out in the desert and make wine?
This doesn't taste like wine.
It smells and tastes like shit.
If you guys weren't relatives...
You know, I used to play guitar in my band.
We had better-- had songs that were--
many more songs than that-- than you had.
Sing us your song.
My song for-- The songs--
We had better--
I remember that fucking band that came out.
- Your band was on MTV. - I went to see your fucking band.
Yeah, we had--
It would have been better if we play-- if we could tour,
but they wouldn't let us tour, so...
Good luck.
- Thanks for being here. - Best.
Thanks so much for coming.
- That's all we have for Focus on Interesting Things. - Interesting...
In 20 years from now, will Maynard be remembered
as the man who launched
the Arizona wine craze and, like, Tool as a footnote?
Probably not, but anything is possible.
I think that he's got his hands in so many things right now
that sort of the legacy of Maynard
is still really up for grabs.
And I think that that's what he's probably not consciously doing, but think--
I mean, he's a man creating his legacy beyond Tool right now,
even though Tool is still going strong.
Maynard, we haven't told you this yet,
but we were in L.A. shooting the Interesting Things, you know, interview.
Yeah.
And we were approached by a reality show producer.
- A big-time producer. - One of the biggest.
One of the biggest. He works with--
You're not rolling, Cary?
- No, just checking the lights. - Okay.
This guy's huge.
He's worked with Mark Burnett since the beginning.
We're talking Survivor. We're talking The Apprentice.
He's basically the biggest guy in reality TV.
And, you know, he saw a trailer of this film, BIood into Wine,
and he's kind of--
He put an offer on the table to do a reality show--
to turn this film into a reality show.
Just kind of take it from here and just keep going.
Keep the crews here.
Really tell the story further.
And we were thinking that, you know,
it'd obviously be huge for wine sales and for money.
- We'd all make millions, probably. - Yeah.
Is that appealing to you in any way?
What are your thoughts about that?
The only reason people are going to know that I'm out here on my knees,
digging holes and making wine and, you know, cultivating grapes
is because you have a camera on me.
That's the only reason.
And who know--I mean, it's a camera.
Who knows what happened when the camera goes off?
We could set this whole thing up. It could be all bullshit.
This might be my first time on this location. You don't know.
As soon as the camera's on, people act different.
It's just the nature of reality TV.
This may not be how I am.
People get into winemaking all the time, you know,
with such little knowledge of what this really entails.
Okay? l mean, think about this really.
When people see-- Whenthey think of a winemaker, okay?
I think sometimes they think of "the salt of the earth" kind of guy,
but a lot of times they think of somebody sniffing wine
and pontificating and, you know, the nose inthe air and all that stuff.
You guys may even have some shots like that.
But, you know, 90% of winemaking is labor, okay?
It's hard labor.
So why am I not in Vegas
with hookers and piňa coladas at the pool at the Hard Rock Hotel?
Look at me.
We reserve those kind of things for good-looking people.
I'm not the beautiful people.
I'm the hardworking guy.
I'm going to have to till the soil.
Nothing I get comes easy.
And I don't see life as you get to a certain point,
and then you just kind of level it off and coast.
There is no such thing as coasting in life. There's always going to be a curveball.
It's always going to be change and chaos, and I don't mean that in a bad way.
I think that chaos and change is goo.
It took people seven years to get Tool.
It took people seven years to get Perfect circle.
It'll take people seven years to get Puscifer.
And it takes seven years to see a dollar
out of a bottle of wine that we're making here.
It's just a-- a natural-- a natural process
and a perfect number to assign to that learning curve.
l'm alive still, and there's so much to learn,
so much to know, so much to explore.
I can't really-- I just-- I guess I just can't really sit still.
I'd like to think that l've played a role in helping him take steps.
I think with each year we get closer to him operating independently.
lt's going to take me many years to really learn how to make wine on my own,
and so getting out of the nest is going to be really important.
Eric's going to be a key factor in that. He's my mentor.
He's going to be the one that's going to help me with that footing,
and that's that step of the Stronghold that we're establishing.
I'd like to be able to present him a bottle of wine that I made by myself
and have him give me the nod that...
I've accomplished something on my own.
And then it would be more of a matter of us
both having our businesses side by side and calling-- you know,
being like the old men and calling each other up
and saying, "You know, "have you tried this yet?"
And "I did this last week, and it worked great,"
and, you know, stuff like that.
And that's where I see us. I see us as guys
who are going to get this place dialed.
And other people will come along after us
and take advantage of what we learned.
But I think we're going to stay at the forefront of it, because we're both
very motivated, ambitious people, and we're curious.
And, you know, 'cause this isn't just about making money.
This isn't just about getting our names on some plaque
that says, "Here's the guys who did this."
It's more about our own innate curiosity and drives and interest in the world.
I think I could probably speak
on behalf of Eric on this one and say,
fuck, no.
Wow.
You know, when this is a wrap,
I want to get back to my life.
I mean, I don't know if you noticed over the course of this whole film,
but l'm not really much of a people person,
so this is not really what I like.
And head back to the cave,
get back to work and, you know,
shoot trespassers.
You included.
Wow.
But, I mean, obviously we respect your feelings.
I mean, we'd handle it artfully.
I mean, do you feel like this film, Blood into Wine--
We're at the end of the movie now. Do you feel like it's told your story-
you and Eric as winemakers?
I mean...
As artists, it's Eric and my job to observe,
interpret, and report as sensualists,
in whatever medium that may be.
And it's our hope that over the course of this film,
you've had a little glimpse into our process,
our creative journey and our journey of self-discovery,
and hopefully it will inspire you
to either continue your journey
or to start your journey toward self-discovery.
And hopefully, we'll see you down in Arizona Bay.
I usually light the cigarette from the...filter, and...
It smokes much better from there. Yeah?
I don't like smoking without nicotine gum.
You know?
Because the nicotine has a friend
when it comes into your mouth.
No one should be alone. Yeah?
Ever.
This is my workspace.
This is where I work on the grapes.
Look at the grape.
There are four sides to the grape.
There's a top, there's a bottom,
there's the outside and there's the inside,
and then there's a right and left side, too.
But that makes six sides to the grape.
You take your tool and you plunge it into the grape.
Right?
And this is the purest wine you'll ever have--
what you...suck off the tool.
Yeah, that makes the purest wine.
Look at that. It's like sex.
Oh, man.
Magnifique.
Oh, Mother.
Mother's-- Mother's milk.
That is the purest wine.
What is wine?
Wine is grape juice
that has gone bad.
The best part of the wine is the cork,
because it's unused, it's pure.
A wine bottle is just a--
a means of shipping cork around the world.
Open the wine.
The cork is free.
I freed you.
Yeah, I freed you.
Come out, little cork. Come out.
You're free to roam.
How do you get the cork out?
You come all the way from that tree--
that tree--
the cork tree.
And now look at the world. Look at the world.
You've never been here to France, have you?
Enjoy. Enjoy.
I will take the cork around Paris later.
"château Lafite, 1 827."
I use this to wash my dishes.
Look at the grapes. They laugh.
They laugh at the wine.
You've gotten old.
You're no good no more.
Look at us. We're young.
I'll squeeze you.
Fuck you, wine!
Fuck you, old man!
And so, you see,
everything you think about wine
is exactly wrong.