MAYNARD'S MERKIN VINEYARDS OSTERIA

Jennifer and Maynard James Keenan have taken their biggest, most public plunge yet to encourage the developing premium food and wine culture in their beloved Arizona.

Their wild frontier high dry desert vineyard on what Maynard dubbed Mount Mingus, at Jerome Az, is one thing; their new Merkin Vineyards Osteria in Cottonwood pushes it in a helluva lot deeper. Take a stroll through that website. Anybody got a Gulf Stream idle?

Those'll be Mrs Keenan's highly-tuned squashers under the illos; here's me getting a bit of a squeeze last time Tool hit town ... such prestigious winemaker events are a perfect opportunity to get the Barossa Baronial robes and kit out, in all due respect:

the whiteman skin doesn't take too well to the brilliant laser light of a Tool show ... Maynard wisely stood in the dark all night way at the back of the stage,  just a silhouette ... it coulda been somebody else doing a Maria ventro trick but that sweet voice gave him away ... 

I reckon we all woulda still heard him and Danny going for it when the electricity went off ... not to mention him doing the entire show with his left arm extended at right angles to his bod, with a stuffed chook perched on his wrist. To this hillbilly, in the dark it looked like a Rhode Island Red ... 

It was a fucking A-Mazing night. Best laser show I've seen, flicking like a whip around one king hell zappo whup band from the magma. For once the maze fell shattered like a windscreen.

Dusted with heavenly pepper.

Below, the man holds the red he made with Taras Ochota whilst toughening the Toolbox larynx with a brace of Cubans ... we went to dinner the night before the last Adelaide Tool gig  and something terrible happened to that cast iron voicebox ... the sellout show at the Entertainment Centre was postponed for 24 hours while whitecoats did all kindsa voodoo round the royal froat and ten thousand  Tool fans ate every duck in an unsuspecting Chinatown ... village chat blamed the voice damage on me, but I joked about it being the Grenache ... Mick Jagger was the next famous voice to get into Ochota Grenache and at impossible odds his voice closed down so bad next day the entire Stones show in Melbourne wasn't only postponed; it was cancelled ... 

I've never heard of such impossibly freakly stuff happening to anybody but those two famous throats ... I mean mine was alright ... maybe the Adelaide water causes the trouble, only in the finest-tuned visiting Lamborghini larynxes ...

and then they don't drink enough Ochota/MJK Grenache - any good Hills or McLaren Vale Grenache - to do a proper healing job of it.

I have asked Lord Twining's ghost to prepare me an alchemic report.

Bacchus'll know the correct dose for assuagement. Maybe they'll have to make more.

anyway, get your peculiar behind into a seat at the Merkin Osteria as soon as you can and eat something really fresh and healthy with any of Maynard's beautiful wines ... 

the MJKs will be here later in the month with Puscifer on their Money Shot Tour Round Under so devour tickets and go boogie before Peter Gago breaks that chook arm in another hissy Adelaide wine spat and/or Maynard disappears into another vintage round under.

these two photos (in Peter Gago's offices in the old Penfold-Hyland headquarters at Penfolds Magill Estate) by Milton Wordley, all others by Maynard or Jennifer

proud winemaker with big new oaks in The Bunker at Jerome ... and here's another one by Milton: Puscifer gig in Columbus Ohio, July 2012 ... from our book A year in the life of Grange ... Maynard's singing into the back of the screen