Blood Into Wine Page #2

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all this great vast beauty.

It's artists and musicians

and a lot of creative people.

And I think the energy is here,

and he fell in love with it and stayed here.

So-- And then I split. Got the hell out.

Northern Arizona,

in general, away from the cities,

you can see the stars forever,

you can see the Milky Way.

It's pretty amazing sitting there

with a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape,

um, checking out the sky.

The full moon was kind of

highlighting some of the landscape.

It just felt like a few of the times

I've been on the road in Europe.

Those long, long, long bus rides,

and all of a sudden you Wake up,

and you're on some two-track highway

going to some festival

in the middle of vineyards.

That just really kind of hit me

that this area's ripe for it.

And I fell in love with it right away,

and it didn't take long for me

to start having visions of grapes

on these slopes.

I've kind of got a wild hair up my ass

to actually plant these vineyards.

And I'm one of those people

that kind of trust my intuition,

and I kind of went with it.

But at some point,

your intuition only can go so far.

NoW you need some technician

or somebody who has experience

to kind of help you to get to the next step.

So I started looking around the valley

just to see if there's anybody

around here doing this at all,

and as it turns out,

there were a couple people.

I was helping another winery

get off the ground,

but l was planning on going off on my own,

so I kind of said, "Hey Maynard,

let's get together sometime."

We met up here overlooking this vineyard,

and we've been working together ever since.

I think We found out that we had

a lot in common as far as our drive,

both from our interest

in sustainability and agriculture,

but also our interest

in our entrepreneurial sides.

It just immediately made sense.

Within, like, three conversations,

we knew that we were going to be--

I was going to end up

being guided by this person.

I left the Santa cruz Mountains

making wine with David Bruce.

They said, "Why did you go to Arizona?"

And the difference is did I want to just be

another vineyard and winery

right next to everybody else

and just do what they're doing,

change it a little bit,

and say, "Okay, here's who I am,"

versus coming here

and trying something completely different?

And in doing that,

it means we have to dial things.

And we really are in a frontier.

We don't know

what is around the next bend,

and that certainly goes

for these viticultural efforts.

This is Merkin West.

And we're on a hill slope here,

kind of southeasterly facing,

overlooking the Verde Valley.

And what you're looking at here

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