Wine Film Review: Blood into Wine

Wine Movie Blog: Blood into Wine

            This wine movie blog is about the documentary Blood into Wine. It was aired during class time last week and it was said that the class could then blog about it afterwards. This movie documented the undertakings of Maynard Keenan, the lead singer of Tool, and Eric Glomski. Keenan, although he is the lead singer of a hardcore rock band, has a deep passion for the art of grape growing and wine making. He teamed up with Glomski, who has had prior experience with wine and beer crafting, to open a vineyard and wine making facility. This premise itself is interesting enough for a documentary, but the real interesting aspect that this film entails is that their business is located in Jerome Arizona! It is well known that in that specific region of the country California is the powerhouse of wine production, but these two entrepreneurs decided that the mountainous terrain of Arizona is where they wanted to produce wine.  

            The film follows Keenan and Glomski as they struggle to start the vineyard and then eventually succeed in making quality wines. Much of the movie shows just how difficult it is to successfully grow and harvest grapes and then turn those grapes into wine, especially in a region where wine grapes have not historically been cultivated. It mentioned a few times in the film that the terrain where the vineyard and winery resembles areas of Europe such as Tuscany Italy. While very few wines are produced in Arizona, it seems from the film that the conditions are quite beneficial to growing wine grapes. The climate is warm, dry, and gets little rain which allows them to closely monitor the water that the grapes receive. The local town also likes that grapes are being grown there, since the crop uses very little rain, much less than houses would require if they were on that land instead.

Keenan and Glomski are followed and their undertaking is portrayed in chronological order following the steps involved in the growing, harvesting, and wine making processes. The vineyard that they have established is not overly large in terms of size, but a variety of grapes are grown there, both whites and reds. The wines they produce are also wide in variety, consisting of whites, reds, and both varietals and blends of these grapes for the wines.

            I gained a large amount of wine based knowledge from watching this film. A lot of it revolved around Keenan and his transition from rock singer to wine producer but it did a great job of illustrating what it takes to grow wine grapes and make wine from those grapes. It was very interesting to see the struggles that Keenan and Glomski went through in establishing their vineyard. They had to deal with a plethora of difficulties, even some that most people wouldn’t think of such as wild boars and other animals eating the grapes off of the vines. What was also interesting was seeing their wine production facilities in operation. They showed all of the machines and their uses in making wine and also their mixing of wines in order to obtain desirable tastes found in the blends. Not only did they simply show the machines they used to make wine, but as they did they described, in good detail, what was required to do so. The covered most, if not all, of the processes that grapes go through before becoming wine, including planting the grapes, harvesting the grapes, crushing the grapes, the fermentation processes, and the bottling of the final wine products. Towards the end of the film a highly acclaimed wine critic from Wine Enthusiast visited their wine production facility in order to sample their wines and had very positive things to say about them. It would seem that a critic such as this may be hesitant to do this since Arizona is not a classic wine grower, but it was quite the contrary. Keenan also did, and probably still does do a lot of promoting of his wines. As one would think, he gets a lot of rock fans taking interests in his wines since they know him well from his rocking days.

            In terms of recommendations, I would absolutely recommend this film to a friend and I would probably go ahead and watch it again with them. It was a very entertaining combination of wine knowledge as well as comedy provided by Keenan and his rather interesting personality. It was very cool to see a person go from practically no knowledge of wine production, and take his love for wine drive him to be a successful wine producer. Keenan is not just a rich celebrity figure who just bought a vineyard and had people run it for him. He is actually out there days on end digging in the dirt, planting grape vines, harvesting grapes, and making the wine himself. It was just really cool to watch all of this and really easy to relate to a person like Keenan which all made this movie an effective and entertaining film to watch.