San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE POP STAR WHO FOUND A NEW STAGE
Alecia Moore has been harboring a secret. You probably know Moore as Pink, the pop star. As a class of people, pop stars are not generally accustomed to being able to keep secrets, and especially not Pink, who since 2000 has sold over 16 million albums, had 29 songs in the Billboard Top 40 and had her personal life plastered all over the tabloids. So the fact that Moore has been able to keep her secret so effectively for five years is probably a testament to how outlandish it sounds: Even if you heard it, you might not believe it.
Her secret is that she is a winemaker. Five years ago, Moore and her husband, the former motocross racer Carey Hart, bought a 25-acre vineyard on a 250-acre property in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley, about 140 miles north of Los Angeles. They moved to the property, built a winery, and Moore took a five-year hiatus from releasing new music so that she could realize her longtime dream of making wine.
It has been one of the happiest and scariest periods of Moore’s life. “I’ve been in the public eye since I was 16, and this was the first time I ever had a secret,” she says.
And the scary part is just beginning. On Nov. 15, Moore releases her first wines, which she calls Two Wolves, to the world: a Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. (Sauvignon Blanc, skin-fermented Semillon and other blends will come out later.) She’s an anxious wreck. “Pouring my wine for people is the most painful part,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Hi, here’s my baby, do you think she’s cute?’ ”
It’s a lot for Moore, 39, to process, and she’s someone who has spent the majority of her life navigating the intricacies of superstardom.
Let’s be honest, it’s a lot for us to process, too. This is Pink. The woman who made a career singing about dating her high school teachers, about burning rubber and kissing ass, about being a nitty-gritty dirty little freak. Who named her son Jameson, after the whiskey. Who has a song called “Sober.”
Yes, that Pink. And now she’s asking us to square that identity with that of a vintner making edgy, herbal Cabernet Franc and skinfermented Semillon. Will people take her seriously as a winemaker?
“I know it’s going to be hard,” Moore says about the Two Wolves release. “Serious wine people look at celebrity wine brands and have this preconceived notion.”
She gets it. That’s why she’s not attaching the name “Pink” to any of her wines. This isn’t Pink’s; this is Alecia Moore’s. She doesn’t want people to drink her wines because they like her music. She wants people to drink her wines because they’re good wines. “One has nothing to do with the other,” she insists.
I suggest that, at first, that might be difficult for some people to accept. She smiles. “I like having to prove myself.”
There’s an obvious follow-up question when you hear that Moore is making wine, and she is quick to provide a definitive answer. No, she is not making pink wine.
There is a Two Wolves rosé, but to describe it as “pink” would be a stretch of the imagination. It’s pale, almost to the point of total translucence, more like a blanc de noirs than like a rosé. “Can you tell I was concerned about making a pink wine?” she laughs, sitting at a table outside the Two Wolves cellar as she swirls a glass of the 2017 cuvee, made from Grenache, which smells like an Easter bouquet and tastes like underripe strawberries. The wine’s color almost matches her hair, which right now is dyed an electric hue of blonde.
“I really like that lighter style of rosé,” she continues, naming Scamandre, a wine from France’s Rhone Valley, as her favorite rosé in the world. A confused fly is hovering inside her giant Burgundy-style Zalto glass; carefully tilting it, Moore provides the insect with an escape route.
“If she made a rosé called ‘Pink,’ she could make 10 million cases a year and sell out and be sitting on a big pile of money,” says Chad Melville, a reputable Santa Barbara winemaker who has served as a mentor to Moore. “But that’s not what Alecia’s doing.”
Here’s what she says she is doing: pruning vines, picking grapes, bottling wines by hand. Taking wine courses through the Wine & Spirit Education Trust and UCLA Extension. Visiting wineries she admires around the world — Chateau Pontet-Canet, Clos Rougeard, Antica Terra. Asking lots of questions of Melville and other winemakers around Santa Barbara County. And yes, in her spare time she’s on the road performing the 128 shows of her 14-month-long Beautiful Trauma” tour.
When Moore’s publicist first told me a few months ago that she is a winemaker, I cynically accepted that as a euphemism. Surely she’s not really a winemaker, I figured. I’ve interviewed several other celebrities who own wine brands, and I know the drill: Celebrity puts down the money, enjoys the vineyard views, lets others do the work. At most, the star weighs in on the wine’s final blend.
Well, Moore does employ a team of experienced wine professionals at Two Wolves, like
viticulturist Ben Merz and assistant winemaker Alison Thomson. But although I can’t attest to what she does day-to-day at the property, she claims to perform certain tasks — like picking grapes and working the sorting table — that few winery owners in California perform themselves. (Did nobody tell her that she can still call herself a winemaker even if she doesn’t pick the grapes?)
More than that, though, in spite of my best attempts at maintaining skepticism, Moore speaks about wine in a way that convinces me she’s serious. It would be one thing for her to name-drop obvious status-symbol wines — the Dom Perignons or Screaming Eagles or Chateau Latours of the world.
But Moore is into Clos Rougeard, an obsession of the hipster sommelier crowd. Over lunch, she opens a bottle of Benanti Pietramarina, a Sicilian wine from the obscure Carricante grape — a wine you have to
know about.
Maybe what moves me the most about Moore’s wine sensibility is that I think I can tell that she’s nervous. I can sense that this — her vineyard, her wines, her standing in the local wine community — matters to her.
Today, Moore is driving me around the Two Wolves property in a Polaris off-road, pointing out the vines she replanted from Malbec to Cabernet Franc; her favorite block on the property, the tightly spaced Block 4; her preference for the C clone of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Lately, much of the buzz about Santa Barbara County wine has centered on Pinot Noir, but this warmer part of Santa Ynez is better suited to fuller-bodied Bordeaux and Rhone varieties. “The heat waves here can be gnarly,” Moore explains. “And we have really high pH here, so that’s something to contend with.”
This improbable journey began years ago at the bar of a Hilton hotel in Australia. “My aha wine was a Chateauneuf du Pape,” Moore says. She thought Chateauneuf du Pape was the name of the winery, not yet informed that it’s the name of a region in France’s southern Rhone Valley. When she found herself in Avignon later that year, she knocked on a woman’s door, asking if she knew where the Chateauneuf du Pape winery was. “Can you imagine?” she laughs now, amused by her younger self.
The naivete didn’t last long. “I’m a high school dropout, I never wanted to go to college,” Moore says, “but wine made me want to become the most devoted student.” She attended the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, a technical trade conference in Sacramento. She and Hart rode motorcycles from Los Angeles to Napa so they could attend Alexandre Schmitt’s seminars on wine sensory perception.
“I’d be on tour, and it would be, ‘Goodnight, Sydney!’ and then I’d run backstage to take my WSET course, still in my leotard,” she says, referring to the Wine & Spirit Education Trust. (Pink’s largest fan base is in Australia.)
Moore fell hard for Cabernet Franc, which she calls “my heart.” The variety is often blended with Cabernet Sauvignon, whose bold, fruity flavors and full body can overpower the more delicate, herbal-toned Cab Franc. She tears up as she recalls spending time with the late Clos Rougeard owner Charly Foucault.
“To me, it’s beauty captured,” she says of the grape. “It’s always green, but it’s always a different shade of green,” rattling off jalapeño, peppermint, sage. Cabernet Sauvignon, she says, is “Faye Dunaway, beautiful, classic,” but “Cab Franc is Carol Burnett.”
The idea of making her own wine lodged in Moore’s brain early. She and Hart came close to buying vineyard property in Healdsburg 15 years ago; she’s glad they didn’t. “Our marriage wasn’t ready for it,” she says. “We didn’t have kids. We weren’t thinking about 50 years from now.” She and Hart have been married nearly 13 years, but have spoken publicly about the fact that they nearly divorced in 2008. Their daughter, Willow, is 7; Jameson is almost 2.
It was Hart who first scoped out the Santa Ynez vineyard in 2013. “I called Alecia up and said, ‘The property’s great. You’ll either love or hate the house,’ ” he recalls. (She hated it: “It’s like Venice Beach threw up in the valley.”)
When Moore finally arrived to see the property, she burst into tears. The answer was instantly yes.
Despite what her brash, salty public persona might suggest, Moore describes herself as a “California crystal lady,” the sort of person who holds monthly, women-only moon ceremonies. (“It’s about letting go,” she says.) She believes in destiny. She says she has lived on American Indian burial grounds before, and saw the vineyard’s adjacent American Indian reservation as a very good omen. “This place is my spirit animal,” she says.
The vineyard, she decided, would be called Two Wolves, for the Cherokee parable about the oppositional forces of good and evil inside every person.
From there it got scary. Moore had a vine-
yard; now she had to figure out what to do with it. The first year, 2014, she made some wine in the garage on the property. A local winemaker, Kira Malone, taught her how to measure sugar, alcohol and acidity — basic enology. “Here we were, running numbers, and I dropped out of high school before taking chemistry,” Moore says.
She cringes when talking about the crippling insecurity she felt upon her arrival in Santa Barbara — the conviction that the wine community would never accept her as a legitimate winemaker. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a winery scared to death they wouldn’t take me seriously,” she says, “and ending up crying in the parking lot because they were so nice to me.” (She cries a lot, it turns out.)
Chad Melville met Moore at an Easter party. As they were saying grace before the meal, Moore leaned over to him and whispered: “Are you Chad Melville?” He nodded, and she went on: “I’m going to say something really inappropriate.” She proceeded, according to Melville, to describe how much she loved his wines, “how perfumed and delicate and nuanced” they were.
“I was like, ‘Who the eff is this?’ ” Melville says, recalling the meeting. “I realized the reason she thought it was inappropriate was because it felt like someone interrupting her at lunchtime to ask for her autograph.” He didn’t know her music; he’s more of a Grateful Dead fan.
A friendship formed, and Moore took to calling up Melville whenever she had a question about her winery or vineyard: a stuck fermentation, a decision about which clone of Cabernet Sauvignon to plant. “She had a couple bumps in the road and would break down and start crying,” Melville says. (Again, she cries a lot.)
Melville understood many of her roadblocks as rites of passage. The first time Moore pruned her vineyard, for instance, resulted in a massive sunburn. “I was like, ‘Alecia, you’re such a dumb ass, everyone knows you have to wear a hat!’ ” Melville says, rendering “dumb ass” with obvious affection.
Eventually, he convinced Moore that she needed to hire an experienced assistant winemaker. In 2015 Melville invited her to dinner with Alison Thomson, a former employee of his who currently works for JCR Vineyard and makes her own label, L.A. Lepiane. “I thought it was just dinner — I had no idea it was an interview,” Thomson says. But she aced it.
If Moore is the starry-eyed dreamer of Two Wolves, Thomson is the pragmatic rule enforcer. “Alison tells me what the options are,” Moore says. Her desire to make wine with as little intervention as possible — native, ambient-yeast fermentations; no filtration — can make Thomson nervous. Moore always pushes to pick Cabernet Franc on the early side, when the grapes taste most like green bell peppers, and then leave the grape stems in the fermentation, which amplifies those peppery notes. Such a strong embrace of herbal flavors and acidity raises red flags for Thomson, a classically trained winemaker who studied at UC Davis.
As we sit by the pond outside the Two Wolves winery, Moore swirls her large-bowled Zalto glass full of Cabernet Franc. She sniffs repeatedly, as if studying the wine with her nose. “I’m not afraid of a little funk,” she says.
“That’s why Alison gets nervous — because you’re reckless,” Hart says.
Thomson interjects, diplomatically. “I trust Alecia’s palate,” she says. “I know she’s looking for balanced wines that feel alive.”
Moore grins, looking back at me. “I know just enough about winemaking to be dangerous.”
Her earlier inclinations may have been too extreme, Moore concedes. “I realized I don’t want to make a ‘cute’ wine — an overly green wine, just to be hip,” she says.
The wine in our glasses — the 2015 Two Wolves Cab Franc, the first release — is not overly green, though devotees of ripe Napa Cabernet might find it anemic. To me it recalls Christmas, fresh evergreen mingled with sweet spice. Fruit, not herb, fills the wine’s core, a juicy explosion of raspberry. The tannins have the tactile grip of velvet.
If there’s an opposite of the extracted, bubblegum-pink rosé that the world expects of Pink, the Two Wolves Cabernet Franc is it. It’s edgy, it’s subtle, it’s a little weird. More than anything, it’s a wine that participates in a conversation, a response and homage to wines that Moore has loved. Moore may feel nervous about revealing Two Wolves to the world, but her wine speaks with confidence, plainly announcing a stylistic identity. The fans who flock to stadiums to see Pink perform “What About Us” might not like it. But other people, like me, might.
She’s anxious, sure. But Moore is no stranger to the process of making something that lays bare her soul, then gritting her teeth while she waits for the fallout. “When the cat’s out of the bag, the cat’s out of the bag,” she sighs. “I just really hope people can understand that the wine isn’t a gimmick.”
The secret era has come to an end. Now a whole new, unknown scary part begins. “It’s bittersweet,” Moore says. “The past five years have been a really fun secret life.”