Pearl Jam have announced the release of their own wine, getting into the same business that Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan has been in for years, and they’re doing it for a great charitable cause.
Keenan, whose grandparents and great-uncle made wine in Northern Italy, owns Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars, based in the unincorporated area of Page Springs/Cornville, Arizona, southwest of Sedona, where he resides. While the winery is named after an ancient symbol for commerce (caduceus), the vineyard is named after a pubic wig (merkin). He is also a partner of Stronghold Vineyards, “an 80-acre site dedicated to producing affordable wines in the state”, located in the small, unincorporated area known as Kansas Settlement in Sulfur Springs Valley, Arizona.
Below are details on the wine from FoodandWine.com:
For wine-loving Pearl Jam fans, this scenario sounds perfect: a chance to purchase a box of four officially-sanctioned Pearl Jam wines produced by a couple of top-notch, Pearl Jam-obsessed Washington winemakers with all of the profits going to the band’s charity, the Vitalogy Foundation. Just one problem: Only the most hardcore of fans got the chance to score this vino. It reportedly sold out within 12 minutes of being announced via Pearl Jam’s email newsletter.
The specially designed box set “Home X Away” was created, with Pearl Jam’s blessing, by the Underground Wine Project – which itself is a collaboration between Mark McNeilly of Mark Ryan Winery and Trey Busch of Sleight of Hand Cellars. Finding two more suitable winemakers for this project would be nearly impossible: McNeilly has named a number of his wines after Pearl Jam songs (The Dissident, for instance), while Busch named his entire winery after a lesser known Pearl Jam song (Binaural’s 11th track). Each of the 450 limited edition sets contained four bottles of the Underground Wine Project’s already touted Idle Hands wine, with each bottle featuring a different label, designed by Pearl Jam’s art crew, showing an interpretation of the skylines of the four cities the band will be playing on its upcoming “Home X Away” tour. That tour, which is also already sold out, kicks off next month with a couple of “home” Seattle shows before heading to Missoula, Chicago, and Boston.
The boxes were sold for $150—which at a reasonable $37.50 per bottle explains why they went so quickly—meaning, in total, the promotion raised $67,500 for the Vitalogy Foundation, described as supporting “the efforts of non-profit organizations doing commendable work in the fields of community health, the environment, arts & education and social change.”
Jill Vedder posted the following photo.
