Caduceus, Arizona
Maynard James Keenan made a name— and a fortune—as frontman for Grammy-winning alt-metal band Tool, and he’s ploughed much of that money into a winemaking operation in northern Arizona near Flagstaff, in a onetime mining boom town that’s now a sleepy hamlet. (There’s even a movie that documents his efforts, Blood Into Wine [http://www.bloodintowine.com/].) Don’t be distracted by the rocker’s attention-seeking theatrics (the vineyard’s named “Merkin”) and focus instead on his impressive red blends, many of them using Italian and Spanish varietals.
Table Mountain Vineyards, Wyoming
Come to cowboy country for the experience, Dunn warns, rather than the wine—for now. Bold experimenters such as Table Mountain Vineyards are only beginning to figure out how to use the rich land for grapes. This particular winery emerged when the resourceful son of a longtime farming family vowed to save its smallholding with an inventive repurposing of the land. Alongside his sister Amie, Patrick Zimmerer won seed money from a local contest after presenting his ambitious business plan to open a winery; the first grapes were grown in 2001, and wine was produced three years later. “Walk in to the tasting room on a Friday afternoon, and there will be five old cowboys—maybe 75, 80 years old— sitting in what looks like a VA hall, drinking wine, rather than whisky or beer,” Dunn says, “In wineries, there’s none of that [baloney] red state-blue state. Wine is such a unifying thing.”
Miletta Vista Winery, Nebraska
St. Paul is a town “somewhere between where the f--- am I, and get me the f--- out of there” in rural Nebraska, says Dunn. It’s also home to one of the country’s unlikeliest wineries, one that Dunn visited after a tip from a sommelier. He was staggered to learn that white wines from the area had bested better-known rivals in a tasting competition in Sonoma. With sandy loam soil and temperatures that can vary between -10 and 90-plus Fahrenheit, winemakers Mick and Loretta McDowell turned to the Brianna grape, a cold-climate Muscat hybrid created by Elmer Swenson, nicknamed the godfather of cold-climate grapes. “It’s a very, very popular grape in the Midwest, which has a tropical flavor, sort of pineapple-mango, to it,” Dunn explains, “But you can’t let it stay on the vine too long or it starts getting this oversweetness to it.” Try some at its best in the couple’s award-winning dry white, Solace.