A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  He planted too descendants of the Luglienga, the strain that had been all but lost in 1915. “A neighbor found a vine nearby that had been kept alive by two sisters we call the Tamale Ladies,” he would explain. “One of them was Auralia, and her husband was a Spanish gentleman the miners had brought over to make their wine. When Prohibition hit, they had to pull out their vineyard.” But the sisters had rooted cuttings in glass jars on their windowsill and transplanted them in their garden, and Luglienga had survived to begin its new history in Merkin Vineyards.

  Maynard’s travels had prepared him well for the challenges ahead. During APC’s 2000 Adelaide stop, he’d walked the Penfolds acreage, toured its cellars, and listened to master winemakers John Duval and Peter Gago. “He wanted to know about anything and everything,” Gago recalled in a 2016 interview. “He was interested in canopy management, the wine-making process, barrel maturation—and tasting.”

  Peter told me how back in the ’50s, a young Penfolds winemaker, Max Schubert, coming from a background of sweet fortified wines, was sent to France to study sherry making. He discovered over there the dry, intense, delicate reds.

  He came back with a glow in his eye and tried to explain to his bosses that this was something they should embark on. They reluctantly gave him a small budget, and he figured out through trial and error that the best fruit they had in the area was the Shiraz grape. When they finally released the wine, people were so used to sweet sherries, ports, and brandies that they didn’t understand this dry red with aging potential. So they laughed in his face and shut him down.

  But he knew the truth. He knew he must continue this for their sake, so he continued in secret. Then in 1962, he entered his Penfolds 1955 Grange Hermitage in wine competitions and blew everybody else away.

  The reasons you’re even aware of Australian wine is because Schubert and like-minded people made the right choices and pushed through. He was the kind of pioneer who said, “I have a vision. You’re wrong now, but you’ll be right and you’ll all benefit.” He stuck to his guns and he didn’t give up.

  If Schubert had surmounted his obstacles, Maynard would have an even easier time of it, with Google at his fingertips and reference books delivered overnight to his doorstep. A successful vineyard, he learned, was an exercise in balance. If he pruned too much, the fruit would shrivel in the sunlight and become useless. A light hand on the pruning shears would bring on voracious foliage that trapped rain and dew, and then he’d have to deal with bunch rot. There would be monsoons and winter frosts, pesticides that might do more harm than good, and the red-tape nightmares of applications and regulations of a bewildering bureaucracy. “When we started planting, I installed a tank to collect spring water that flowed down the hill to irrigate the vineyard,” he would recall. “The town couldn’t wrap their head around that. The word tank wasn’t in their ordinance code.”

  It would take time to outfit a winery of his own and years before his fruit would be ready for harvest. But if he had to put one goal on the back burner, he’d take advantage of the delay and reach another. Working as a custom-crush client at a brand-new winery in nearby Cornville would give him access to its facility, and sourcing fruit from California growers and turning their grapes to wine would be a hands-on PhD program in fermentation and filtration and temperature control. He might not know from one year to the next which grape he’d receive, but the annual surprise would force him to learn the qualities and potential of Malvasia and Syrah.

  Smoky and citrusy with a curious black tea finish, his debut, the Caduceus 2004 Primer Paso—literally his first step—caught the attention of music fans and oenophiles curious to sample the latest celebrity release. The limited-edition Syrah and Malvasia blend sold out in no time and paved the way for the earthy Nagual de la Naga, the oaky, plummy Nagual del Sensei, and the Merkin Vineyards smoky-smooth Chupacabra.

  Encouraged by the success of his custom-crush creations, Maynard began to imagine what might come of his vines growing now on just under seven acres—Sangiovese and Tempranillo thriving in the Arizona sunshine, the Cabernet in the Judith block the most vigorous and hardy of all.

  Nearly a year and a half on the road would take him from pruning and pressing and blending, but Tool’s 10,000 Days tour that began in 2007 wouldn’t interrupt his studies. Stops across Europe were scheduled to coincide with the release of Italian and Bordeaux vintages, and wine aficionados were introduced to a new side of Maynard via his Wine Spectator blog, On Tour with Maynard James Keenan—his chronicle not of performances but of vineyard visits and the wines he sampled in fine restaurants across the continent: a 40-year tawny port in Lisbon, a Vieux Télégraphe Châteauneuf-du-Pape in Paris.

  By 2009, Caduceus Cellars was licensed and outfitted and operational. The compact bunker attached to the Jerome house was an assembly line of de-stemmers and vats and testing lab and oak barrels modeled after the wineries he’d explored. “I’d watched the basic process,” he said. “The fruit comes in, you either de-stem it or you don’t, you either press it or you don’t, it ends up in a bin or a tank. Then you ferment it. Every facility is going to be a version of that.”

  The setup was simple, yes, but mastering the more esoteric tricks of this new trade—the tricks that would transform grape juice to tannic reds and dry whites and oaky blends—would take more than observation. He must incessantly taste and test and tweak, make on-the-fly decisions about too-high sugar levels or too-unripe grapes. Most important, he must keep always in mind Peter Gago’s advice and step out of his own way and let the grapes guide the process.

  People come in and taste wine that’s fermenting. They make an ugly face and say it’s awful. Of course it is. It’s not done. Same as if I play a rough track. You can tell they want to say it’s terrible. Then I play the song when it’s completed or pour the finished wine, and they think it’s great. It’s the same with anything you do. Getting to the finished product is about patience, understanding—and a faith in the process.

  It wasn’t a process he would tackle solo. The vineyard would require a harvest crew and a vineyard crew, drivers and accountants and sales reps, and to oversee them all, a manager in Chris Turner, trained in his family’s California vineyards and who now made it his mission to understand the challenges and advantages of growing grapes in Arizona.

  It would take too someone to test pH and sulfur dioxide levels and conduct assessments to gauge the fermentation process. “I had avoided chemistry when I was in college,” Lei Li would admit. But she’d worked side by side with the pros at the custom-crush facility and had studied wine making nearly as diligently as Maynard had, and her respect and admiration for him had risen over the years until she believed as strongly in his dream as he. “We worked really well together,” she explained. “I knew even then that I always wanted to be a part of whatever he did.”

  And despite her early reservations about such things, she found herself promoted from personal assistant to lab manager, a part of the team that would hold one another accountable and recognize the importance of their individual excellence to the success of Caduceus Cellars.

  “In the beginning, anyone would think, ‘You’re going to start a vineyard in Arizona?’” Nancy Berry would reflect. “But Maynard did it. And not only did he do it, he takes so much pleasure in it and he puts so much physical hard work into it.”

  This was no prima donna celebrity cavalierly adding wine making to his résumé. From the beginning, Maynard was the one slipping Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell CDs into the player in the bunker and bending over the vat punching down with his fist the thick stew of grape skins and purple liquid. He was the one who monitored the juice as it aged, sampled the blends at every stage, and moved tons of Sangiovese Grosso and Tempranillo during the long, hot weeks of the harvest season.

  Once the grapes are picked, I’ll be at the bunker waiting on the forklift. Chris backs the truck up and I unload the fruit, weigh it, and put i
t in the de-stemmer. From there, it goes into bins, where Lei Li does all the testing. Then I either inoculate it or allow it to naturally ferment, then press it and put it into bins to settle. Eventually it goes into barrels, and I stack them.

  Or I’m cleaning up. I power wash the press and the de-stemmer, because that’s what has to be done. I’m not going to go find some manservant to do any of that for me.

  “There have always been surprises,” Tom Morello would say of Maynard’s new role. “When we lived in L.A., we were driving around and he told me he had a West Point background. He went from whatever he was before that to being a West Point guy to being a pet store guy. Maynard’s not afraid of a sharp left turn.”

  But wine making was not so much a change in direction as a shift in perspective—a seamless opening to another aspect of Maynard’s art.

  Maynard and Chris had nurtured the vineyard through 100-degree August afternoons, hail and monsoons and drought, Pierce’s disease and too-high potassium levels and the weedy jungle that overwhelmed the plots with the first drops of rain. They’d placed frost fans and covered with tarps the tender vines against icy winds and followed the advice of Kjiirt—who’d experimented with grape growing on his Vermont hilltop—and laid a crushed-rock ground cover to insulate against the night air that settled over the valley.

  They learned that the stressors only produced grapes more hardy and resilient, and learned too to avoid tarantulas and scorpions hiding among the leaves, and that warding off angry javelinas was a snap. “You scare the boss off with an air rifle and they don’t come back,” Maynard would explain.

  The alchemy of rain and sun and soil—and six years of backbreaking work—had transformed the dream to reality. In 2009 Maynard released the first wine made entirely from Caduceus Cellars grapes, the 2007 Nagual del Judith, named in memory of his mother. The tannic Cabernet echoed with cassis and black olive, and Judith’s dream was printed on the back of the dark bottle.

  As a child I used to dream that I could fly. I would stand on one leg, look up towards the sky, and with my arms lifted out and up, my fingers stretched towards the sun, the wind would come and swirl all around me and then gently lift me up into the air.

  On that mild April day, a soft breeze rustled the Cabernet leaves, and Maynard stood on the eastern slope of the Judith block. “These vines and wines are her resurrection and her wings,” Maynard said. He uncorked the first bottle, tipped it, and returned the wine to the earth, a ritual of new beginnings.

  With one Caduceus success under his belt, he set his sights on the next challenge. “Maynard always asks, ‘How do we make this more interesting?’” Todd would explain. “‘How do we make it more fun and better than what it is?’”

  The barreled Sangiovese and Cabernets in the bunker were redolent of Old World blends, and given another few months of aging, Maynard imagined them an Arizona interpretation of the Super Tuscans he’d sampled in Italy, a confluence of his heritage and his future.

  I had a free afternoon during the 10,000 Days tour, and we had a family reunion of sorts at Bern’s Steak House in Tampa. My dad had flown down from Michigan to visit my uncle Herb, whom I hadn’t seen in about 30 years, and we toasted each another in vintage Lafite.

  I told Uncle Herb all about the vineyards, and I told him I was doing a new blend in honor of his grandfather that I was going to call Nagual del Marzo. I explained that I knew next to nothing about this guy.

  But Herb knew something. “His name was John Marzo,” he told me. “His nickname was Spirit.” I looked around the table to see if Todd or my dad were playing some kind of prank. They do that kind of thing.

  But they weren’t messing with me this time. My great-grandfather’s nickname really was Spirit. And I’d already named my wine. It would be called Nagual del Marzo—which means “The Spiritual Essence of Marzo.”

  With an eye for beauty and balance and style, Maynard oversaw the design of all things Caduceus. He’d discovered that marketing was far from a soulless chore. “Maynard is very sensitive to the imagery involved in marketing and publicity,” Kendall instructor Deb Rockman would explain. “He wants art to be a significant part of everything he does.”

  He led the creation of the Caduceus Cellars website, a virtual diary with deckle-edge pages rich with photographs and maps and pen-and-ink illustrations. He imported from Canada sleek, weighty bottles and made of each an objet d’art. Name and vintage and alcohol content were printed in bold inks directly on the glass, and lyrical tales of fantastic beasts and magical guardians and shape-shifters, and the Merkin logo a swirling interpretation of classical artworks and geometric symbols, their meanings as multilayered as the wines’ finishes. Ramiro’s paintings and woodcuts had been adapted for use in Tool promotional materials since 1994, and now his image Touch Down appeared on a Caduceus T-shirt.

  When space became available in Jerome’s historic Connor Hotel, Maynard realized that its footprint matched plans he’d sketched for an offshoot of the vineyard. He supervised the metamorphosis to the Caduceus Cellars Tasting Room, a welcoming space of wood and brick and sunny window tables. The Flatiron—the Main Street café that had won Maynard over to Jerome—was no more, and its managers, Brian and Alan, took charge and created a destination for locals who gathered for their daily espresso and for visitors eager to sample a flight of Arizona wines.

  Maynard planned rehearsals and recording sessions around the harvest and production schedule and—ever the businessman—continued promotions along the tour route. At every stop, he dispatched Todd to call on distributors and retailers and restaurant owners and tell the Caduceus story. “At first, it was very difficult to get people to listen,” Todd would recall. “People in the wine community had no time for Maynard. They didn’t care about another rock star slapping their name on a label. True wine connoisseurs, like sommeliers and buyers, they were kind of shunning it.”

  But after sipping the tannic reds, the rich rosés, the Caduceus Naga or Sensei or Sancha, the restaurateurs sat up and took notice. These were intriguing wines, they realized, complex and delicate, wines that would step from center stage and allow the flavors of their entrées to expand and transform. They recognized the win-win wisdom in giving their chefs a free hand in creating pairings to enhance both the wines and their cuisine—fish eyes and fish sperm in Tokyo, pastas and meats and cheeses at Babbo on Waverly Place in Manhattan, guinea hen and creamy polenta at Mark’s American Cuisine in Houston.

  The all-Arizona wine list at Scottsdale’s FnB restaurant soon included Caduceus Dos Ladrones and Oneste and Malvasia blends. “We serve an heirloom tomato salad with golden, crispy, steamy hot polenta croutons,” Pavle Milic, FnB co-owner explained in a 2014 interview. “You need a wine that’s not going to overpower the sweet tomatoes and red wine vinegar and onions. Maynard’s Marzo Sangiovese rosé with that dish is out of this world.”

  It didn’t take much convincing before Mark Tarbell, Arizona Republic wine columnist and proprietor of Tarbell’s in Phoenix, offered Caduceus wines in both his dining room and in the restaurant’s wine shop. “I am my customers’ advocate,” Tarbell said. “I have to put wine in front of them that has value, and some of Maynard’s wines are outstanding. I see honest expression in his bottles and grapes and choice of blendings.”

  And Maynard began to take part in Tarbell’s annual dinner gala to benefit the Arizona Wine Growers Association. “I’m the chef and he’s the celebrity,” Tarbell explained. “He’ll cook, plate, and serve. He’s got some good skills and some good moves around the kitchen.”

  The kitchen in the Jerome house shifted into high gear. Maynard slipped over his head his white apron and re-created the gnocchi and roast lamb he remembered from the North End, grilled salmon, a Thanksgiving pizza. “I go to Maynard’s house, and he’ll be waiting on me like I’m in a restaurant,” Todd explained. “That love comes from a very specific place.”

  Maynard’s fea
sts arose too from the need for a bit of bench research.

  People usually drink my wines in restaurants, so I experiment by pairing them with restaurant-style food. I make a ravioli from Arizona wheat dough and local eggs and herbs, and serve it with my wine and a top-notch wine as a comparison. If mine doesn’t measure up, I’ve got to figure out what I did wrong, and if it does, figure out what the heck I did right so I can repeat it.

  Thanksgiving pizza was Lei Li’s idea. Derek, who works in our vineyards, is an awesome pizza maker, so he did a dough and we lined the deep-dish crust with gravy, turkey, and stuffing and topped it with cranberries. With that, we opened a Tuscan blend and barrel-tasted some Oneste, our Caduceus Merlot-Barbera blend.

  Wine making was certainly no longer just a hobby. By 2015, annual production had reached 6,000 cases, Cadeuceus wines were sold in 1,000 retail outlets and shipped to customers in 33 states, and Maynard’s vineyards covered 115 acres throughout Arizona.

  His collection of silver and gold medals only grew, awards from the Jefferson Cup Invitational, the Texas Sommelier Conference, and the San Francisco International Wine Competition, and the FnB Judgment of Arizona blind tasting that pitted Arizona wines against those of California, Italy, Spain, France, and Australia—and ranked the Caduceus 2008 Nagual del Judith above all other reds.

  Doubters had set a lofty bar, but there was no denying it now: The rocker in blue body paint and Mulhawk was a winemaker.

  “Things have changed a lot,” Todd explained in a 2014 interview. “When Maynard talks about wine making now, people realize he’s not some clown off the street.”

  The job of Merkin Vineyards frontman would involve more than producing a fine bottle of rosé, and Maynard added to his e-mail signature “World Class Multitasker.” The hard-won lessons of the vineyard must be shared.

  “Maynard really does give a shit about what’s happening here,” Milic explained. “Let’s call him the gateway winemaker.”