Maynard James Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle Gets His Vineyard On

It’s been the prerequisite sidebar for every Tool article written since the release of the band’s 10,000 Days album last year, but let’s face it: Sting did it. Olivia Newton John did it… even Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe did it. All apologies to Francis Ford Coppola aside, the celebrity wine-making industry was well-established before Maynard James Keenan, vocalist for not one but two platinum-selling bands—Tool and A Perfect Circle—decided to throw his wallet into the ring. But that didn’t stop our man from founding Merkin Vineyards (incidentally, a “merkin” is a pubic wig) and Caduceus Cellars out in Cornville, AZ. In true DIY fashion—albeit the super high-end version—he didn’t even do much research before he got into it. “I just started punching holes in the ground out here to put in vines and discovered some people in the area doing it and hired them as consultants to kinda walk me through it,” he explains. “Before you knew it, we were kinda doing business together and I bought some grapes off the open market to crush at my winemaker’s facility, just to make a few bottles and see what the process was like. A lot of it was just trial and error—more error than success in a lot of cases. But there’s a sharp learning curve. You really have to buckle down and start doing all the math.”

All math presumably complete, Keenan and his business partner Eric Glomski started producing wines with names like Primer Paso (88% shiraz, 12% Malvasia, $49.99 per bottle), Sensei (88% cabernet, 12% syrah, $95.99 per bottle), Naga (67% cabernet, 33% Sangiovese, $69.69 per bottle, har har) and Chupacabra (”the mystery blend,” $25.99 per bottle) in 2004. Unsurprisingly, Keenan says this year’s batch—the first bottles of which shipped on September 15—is his finest yet. “All four are pretty kick-ass,” he enthuses. “The low-end one, which is the Chupacabra, is actually an ’06, because the juice that I had for the ’06 Sensei isn’t in bottle yet. It wasn’t gonna be up to par for a high-end. So I basically put all the juice from the Sensei into the Chupa, which is a sweet bargain because it was almost a high-end juice, but we stuck into the bathtub blend.”

In an era in which celebrity worship seems to be at a nauseating all-time high—and no-talent socialites like Ryan Seacrest, Nicky Hilton and Kelly Osbourne have their own f*cking clothing lines—you’d think Keenan’s rock star status would carry at least a modicum of weight, however inexplicable, in any outside commercial endeavor. As it turns out, the denizens of the fine wine community don’t listen to a whole lot of Tool. “Oh, it completely works against me,” Keenan says. “I’ve had so many times where I’ve sat down with my wines with a bunch of [restaurateurs] who are at first kinda looking at me like, ‘My friend told me I should meet with these guys, so I’ll be nice and play along.’ But then they actually taste the wine and nine times out of 10, they’re like, ‘I really didn’t expect these wines to be like this. I thought it was just gonna be some Vince Neil swill.’”

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