Blood Into Wine Page #4

---

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 sh*t 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.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes