Blood Into Wine

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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,

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