Vineyards rocked in unlikely Arizona
When most celebrities set out to “make” wine they’re usually content to simply splash their name across the label and wait for their hoards of adoring fans to slurp up whatever slop they just endorsed. But not Maynard James Keenan vocalist for heavy bands like Tool A Perfect Circle and Puscifer (who make a tour stop in Calgary this Sunday at the Jubilee). In fact Keenan is out to do more than just make wine; he wants to introduce the world to a whole new growing region: Arizona.
Keenan met winemaker Eric Glomski in 2002 and the two partnered up forming Arizona Stronghold as well as other independent projects like Caduceus Merkin Vineyards and Page Spring Cellars. But local grapes were hard to come by back then and it wasn’t until 2007 when they purchased a 120-acre parcel that the two could begin expanding their programs. Keenan believes strongly in Arizona as a place to craft top-quality wine and he’s made significant personal investments to make it happen.
I’ve made the journey to Arizona twice to see first-hand Keenan’s various projects and meet with his team. One thing’s for sure these guys are serious about wine and they’ve accomplished a lot in just a few short years — but they have even more planned for the future. I caught up with Keenan (not an easy thing to do given his schedule) to talk with him about his pioneering venture to reinvigorate the Arizona wine scene. Here’s a bit of that chat.
What was your preparation for becoming a winemaker?
I travelled a lot which exposed me to a lot of things. Being an artist taught me a lot about winemaking. It’s really not that different — you understand schedules hard work and creating a product. After that it’s about paying attention and having a passion to do the work.
Was there a lot of research done before you got started — did you have a pretty good idea of what you were getting into?
Not really there wasn’t much to go on. We had to do it by trial and error and made a lot of expensive mistakes but we believe there’s great potential here. Everything was wiped out during prohibition [which lasted longer in Arizona than California] and we really didn’t have anything to go on except our intuition and what we’ve learned travelling to other winemaking regions.
If you compared Arizona to Old World regions what is it most like?
Probably Tuscany. We have more elegant wines here similar to what you get from Chianti. But it has a lot in common with Adelaide Hills in Australia and parts of Sicily too. We have crazy day and night temperature variations; it has a big impact on the fruit. Elevation is another big difference here — we’re over 4000 feet in some locations.
Have you started to see an Arizona style develop yet? If so how would you describe it?
We have more subtle wines — perfumed — not the big bombs you see from other places. These are lighter wines food wines and hopefully wines that can age. Arizona wines have a definite elegance and great balance.
It sounds like you’re still in a pretty experimental stage — what kinds of things are you trying out?
We’re having some success with Negro Amaro in Verde Valley at higher elevations and we’re looking at Nebbiolo and Aglianico. We’ve had good results with Rhone varietals and Sangiovese so we’ll be looking at more of those. Right now we have our first vintage from “the bunker” [his new winery for Caduceus] coming up and we’re really excited about it.”
What do you hope Caduceus will be in 20 years?
I’m not trying to grow it much. We’re trying to stay small and focus on quality — probably stay around 3000 cases. I hope in 20 years we’ll know a lot more about the area — we’ll have a library we can taste and look back on. We can learn a lot from how these wines age and then we’ll know what we have here. We haven’t had much time here yet and that’s really what we need to figure things out.
