Film Review - Blood Into Wine

Blood Into Wine is a documentary focusing on Maynard James Keenan, the lead singer of Tool and other bands, and his attempts to create a winery in Arizona. The film follows the life cycle of his first wine made with grapes from his vineyard – from planting to harvest to bottling. The documentary also focuses in on Keenan himself and his motivations for switching from the world of rock to the world of grapes.

From a wine perspective, much of the film focuses around the concept of terroir, or the thought that the ground you grow grapes in gives a character to the grapes that is unique to that specific area. Obviously Arizona is not a place that really anyone would think of when they think of a wine producing area. However, the film addresses this issue by explaining that grapes don’t need a whole lot of water and actually use less water than other crops that would be grown in the area, thereby remaining on the good side of the water control board. Keenan himself is seen explaining to a group of people at a tasting that the northern part of Arizona where the winery is located actually has to worry more about cold than the extended heat. Keenan and others are also seen commenting on how the soil itself reminds them of certain areas of France where vineyards are planted. Despite the similarities to wine growing areas, many of the difficulties of growing grapes are highlighted, including dealing with wild animals.

The documentary also highlights the process of creating the wine and shows certain mechanical processes like de-stemming the grapes and the fermentation of the grape must. This was useful to me, as I had only seen the pictures of these processes in class, or read about them in a wine book, so it was nice to finally have a visual of how the process actually happens. I definitely didn’t realize the sheer numbers of grapes that had to be processed for even a limited batch of wine.

I also liked that the film didn’t just focus on Keenan, and it also gave time to Eric Glomski, Keenan’s winemaker. As mentioned in class, wine is often a partnership between those growing the grapes, those making the wines, and those selling the wines. I appreciated Glomski’s point of view on the wine and the winery, as he had experience that Keenan did not, and also came across as far more personable.

A part of the documentary that I found to be curious was the marketing aspect of Keenan’s winery. I am not very familiar with how most winemakers market their craft, but I’m fairly sure I’ve never heard of one give multiple interviews on rock radio. I thought the concept of the wine bottle signing was interesting, but it seemed as though most of the people at the signing were interested in Keenan because of his musical career versus his new winemaking career. The scenes of fans made it seem like Keenan’s winery was capitalizing on his previous fame to sell a wine that may or may not actually be worth it. Of course, this is no different than a celebrity selling their own brand of perfume, but I thought the depiction of the cross-over between wine and rock was interesting.

There were multiple parts of the film that I didn’t appreciate. While not directly wine-related, the documentary had an underlying sense of bizarre humor that I thought really took away from the presentation of information in the film. In between scenes of wine making and crop growing, the movie would cut to a bizarre “talk show” where two unfunny people would bash wine and Keenan. The makers of the documentary also seemed to relish interviewing the strangest expert personalities they could find. Between the odd Hawaiian shirt-wearing wine taster and the 1860s stereotypical cowboy Arizona history expert, the film began to seem like a mockumentary despite its serious topic.

Speaking of the Hawaiian shirt wine-taster (I do not remember his name, unfortunately, only his attire), the most frustrating part of the film was when they had him do a blind tasting of two Arizona wines, a California wine, and a California/Arizona blend. The taster was extremely critical of one of the wines, but warmed up to the wines following it. I could not recall them actually saying which wine was which and it seemed like a loose end in the story.  I was left intensely curious to know if the Arizona wine was good or bad. Another peeve was when the taster spit out his wine into the glass – they really didn’t have the budget for a bucket? Obviously from all of the Gary V videos we watch for class, we know that it is customary for wine critics to not actually swallow the wine.

Overall I would probably not recommend Blood Into Wine to the normal person interested in wine. While the concept of growing grapes in Arizona is interesting, the strange humor of the documentary is enough to overshadow the point of the film. The terroir of Arizona was intriguing, but there were not enough exciting wine facts to, I think, keep the attention of someone who already knows a little about the process of winemaking. Perhaps if you revere Maynard James Keenan as an idol then you would think differently, but to those who don’t, it was an uninspiring film.