Maynard James Keenan had a vision – to create a vineyard near his Northern Arizona home that would offer an appealing vintage for wine connoisseurs. The obstacle-filled exploits of the Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer frontman, along with his vineyard partner Eric Glomski, were chronicled in the documentary Blood Into Wine. The critically-praised film opened in over 100 cities last winter, and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. It also features comedians Eric Wareheim, Tim Heidecker, Patton Oswalt and Bob Odenkirk plus Milla Jovovich who worked with Keenan as part of Puscifer.
I discussed the documentary during Keenan’s tour with Puscifer, his music/theater project that has its roots in the LA alternative comedy scene. After his two musical projects — Tool and A Perfect Circle — Puscifer offers a no-holds barred, confrontational, multi-media presentation laced with comedy. Onstage it combines live music, theatrics and video production. For Keenan the goal isn’t merely to entertain audiences but to live up to his concept of creativity. Past reviews have described Puscifer live as a “performance art spectacle” that confronted “preconceptions of what to expect from a rock show.”
Typical of the busy state of Keenan, since that tour, a string of dates with Tool took place this summer followed by an announcement of fall shows with A Perfect Circle plus news of him working in the studio with Tool. But, as shown in Blood Into Wine, just like a good vintage, these newest creative endeavors will emerge when the time is right.
JPG: What came first, did you decide to move to Arizona and then decided to get into the wine business?
MJK: It takes awhile for you to really sink into where you are. I didn’t know it would even be a possibility. I moved here in ’95 and I started breaking ground for vineyards in 2000.
JPG: Your partner Eric Glomski, did he or someone else come in to do soil samples and say…
MJK: Someone came out from UC Davis, but generally speaking, depending on where you are, unless somebody’s been doing it there for awhile, nobody can really help you ‘cause there’s things that are happening here that don’t make any sense. They don’t occur anywhere else, which is good because if it was exactly the same soil, exactly the same weather, exactly the same problems, the wine would be exactly like someplace else. And that’s kind of the point. I’m sure you’ve had it. Local growers around your area, for whatever produce and, depending on where they’re growing it and how they’re growing it, some of it’s better. Just a perfect site.
JPG: There are wineries all over the country, Northeast Ohio, western New York…do you still go to such places, even around the world, just to check ‘em out?
MJK: No, pretty much… If you know how to play Rush tunes then Led Zeppelin doesn’t have to happen. All we need to do is know is what we are capable of here. Of course, you want to have a broad sweep of things as far as understanding grapes in general and understanding winemaking in general. But as far as how it applies to your area, you don’t really need to know how it applies to somebody else’s area in detail. You just need to know what the basics are here. So, you really start learning the details of where you are. It’s about reconnecting to where you are.
JPG: But what I meant wasn’t so much to gain knowledge from these other places but just to check out wines as far as flavors…
MJK: Oh yeah. I think there’s lots of people doing great things, as long as they’re taking the artist’s path. If they’re taking the businessman’s path, their wines probably suck. There’s probably no better example as far as quality over quantity than grapevines. You’re cropping your fruit back and keeping it concentrated and have low yields that you balance with your canopy management, then you’re going to have some fantastic wines for your site or they’re going to be as good as they’re going to get. If you set too much fruit, it’s going to be not very concentrated. The flavors aren’t going to be complex ‘cause you’re going for volume. That’s your box wines.
JPG: Do you still have a half acre of land that was mentioned in the documentary?
MJK: I have many sites but that particular one that we were speaking of is still happening today, the half acre.
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