Blood of Gods is a wonderful magazine that explores the intersection of music and wine. Wine has moments of ecstasy, and like heavy metal, there are wild myths, strange practices, and feuding personalities that give it character. So, it's not really strange that metalheads turn into wine fans, just a twist of fate. This magazine revels in the divine inspiration that comes from wine and heavy metal. No matter what interests the reader brings they will come away having learned something about the interplay between wine and the greater world. While I’m not a total metalhead, I do enjoy it, and writing for Blood of Gods allows me to explore some of my favorite subjects and interview interesting people.
This piece allowed me to sit down with Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir Wine Bar in Tribeca, New York City. It was a long rambling conversation that was very, very fun.
To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.
-Patti Smith
This is a meditation on punk rock, but it's also a reflection on what it means to love wine unabashedly, be moved by it, and turn that passion into something transcendent.
This is a conversation with a New York punk, not one of the ones you might know, but one you should. Friends and admirers are quick to point out that Paul Grieco and his wine bar, Terroir, changed the New York wine scene. And though Paul is too modest to say it, it's true.
We sat down to discuss punk music, winemaking, and where the two meet. The conversation lasted for hours but is presented here stripped-down, condensed, lightly arranged for clarity, and with a touch of self-mythologizing—as punk an interview write-up as there ever was. But, to quote Paul, "Hopefully, it'll make you feel something goddamn it."
Will Farley (WF): Let's just go for it right off the bat. Can wine be punk?
Paul Grieco (PG): I mean fuck, is wine punk? Wine has been with us every step of human existence. I view it as something very simple, as something primal. You take grapes and turn sugar + yeast into alcohol + CO2. Can it get any fucking simpler than that? Anyone could fucking do it, and I think that DIY attitude is part and parcel of punk.
WF: When I think about punk winemakers, I think of people like Taras Ochota (Ochota Barrels) and Abe Schoener (Scholium Project) who have done their own thing, exactly the way they want. Who's in your punk winemaker pantheon?
PG: I think it would be easy today to focus on the natural winemakers who are genuinely practicing a "less is more" approach, but for me, it's folks from the '70s, '80s, and '90s that were pushing at the establishment to get their shit known when the world of wine was relatively small: Angelo Gaja, Piero Antinori, Anne-Claude Leflaive, or even Robert Mondavi.
Fucking talk about punk, look at what Piero did with Tignanello. Maybe it's in the Italian philosophical zeitgeist to give the government the finger, but he comes along and is making good wine that sells, but says fuck it, that's not true Chianti. Chianti had become a commodity, and the wine itself was no longer true, so he said, 'I'm going to do only red grapes, you call it Vino da Tavola, and I don't give a shit.' That is punk rock.
Angelo took this small appellation that no one gave a shit about and made it into something. The most famous story of the Gaja family is that he took one of their top vineyards and grafted Cabernet onto the Nebbiolo vines. His father said darmagi or 'what a pity' in the Piedmontese dialect when he drove by the vineyard, which is what Angelo ended up calling the Cabernet.
Anne-Claude Leflaive in Burgundy with biodynamic farming took a grand, important estate and turned it on its proverbial ass. People thought she was out of her goddamn gourd, but look at where we are today. She's a rock star.
Robert Mondavi got kicked out of the family business, started his own thing, knocked on every goddamn door, and created new avenues to put his wine in perspective with wines from the old world; he had the DIY punk approach.
WF: You've talked about this before in other interviews, that some of your favorite bands went from playing rock clubs to arenas. Where does the burden of influence fit into this punk narrative or mythology—especially for regions like Burgundy or Bordeaux that are often prohibitively expensive for many new wine drinkers?
PG: I don't begrudge anyone's success. As much as bands like the Sex Pistols became cartoonish over time, when you look at the lyrics or see footage of the energy at their shows, you can see that they really had a reason for doing and saying the shit they did. It was punk. So, with wine, I have no issue with Ochota Barrels being recognized or with their wines climbing to $50,$60, $70 and being highly allocated and impossible to find. Does that make them any less punk?
Is part of punk a lack of success? Are the Ramones still one of the great punk acts because their first album took four decades to go Gold? Everyone who bought that album formed a band. The Clash's London Calling was massive. Are they any less banner bearers of the movement because that was one of the highest-selling punk albums? No. No, no, no, no.
Is Lalou Bize-Leroy, who grows Aligoté on one of the most expensive parcels of land on earth punk for growing that grape? She's getting an extraordinary amount of money for that Aligoté, but is she still punk, or is she part of the establishment?
WF: I love the idea of Madame Bize-Leroy as a figurehead of punk winemaking.
PG: If you and I were to pick up a bottle of the 2015 Tignanello, would it have the same revolutionary zeal from when I first interacted with it? Maybe not, and that's okay, but something about that wine is transportational and takes you to another dimension. Food doesn't often do that for you, with all due respect to Proust.
WF: My madeleine moment is definitely with a wine. I wrote about it in Blood of Gods a few issues back. The first time I had Paolo Bea's Sagrantino was sublime. It tasted like an impenetrable monolith. I sat and stewed on it. It was like a ringing chord, just sludgy, heavy metal.
PG: Ha. You're drinking that Sagrantino, and you're slowly beginning to headbang. It's a massive, heavy Tony Iommi Sabbath riff like War Pigs.
WF: I most often think about jazz when drinking wine, records like Miles Davis's In A Silent Way, but this was just so rock and roll, and as you've said, primal.
PG: If a wine comes across as dark and brooding and impenetrable on my palate, Bauhaus, it's fucking Bauhaus.
WF: That's what this magazine is all about, the interplay between things we love.
PG: I've been engaging with wine in some way, shape, or form for roughly 35 years, and I've yet to get bored. I learned on a trip to Italy in the '80s that with wine, I could still dabble in history, philosophy, religion, music, culture, and civilization. And it's what keeps me interested and motivated and still very much in love with wine this entire time.
WF: You opened Terroir in the mid-'00s, and I still hear friends talking about how you changed the way restaurants in New York (and beyond) think about wine. It's evolved into more a full-service spot than the original that Jon Bonné called "New York's ur-wine bar," and you, its "punk sommelier in chief." Was there a punk ethos involved in opening Terroir?
PG: For me, the first punk rock wine bar was Bar Veloce on 2nd Ave. I remember being a restaurant guy in the '90s, and that was the bar that showed the rest of us that we coud do it. It didn't require a lot of money, you could go into a space that no restaurant would have gone into previously, and you could make a life of this without doing fine dining. So when Marco and I opened up Terroir in '08 in 50 square feet, there was no way you could have done a full-service restaurant.
WF: Not to mention 100 wines by the glass.
PG: We never thought we were being different for the sake of being different. When we put together our first list, we did what we felt we should do. Numbers of selection don't matter shit to me but do I have 100 wines by the glass now? Yes. Did I intend to have 100 wines by the glass? 110% not. What is original about a wine program these days anyway? We're all doing the same shit.
We're honored that people choose to cross our threshold and submit themselves to what we do. But I also accept the responsibility that I have to pull you into our little cult. I've gotta make sure you're comfortable with that. I'm still in the hospitality business. I believe that the team that comes to work here buys into that.
WF: I think there's a shared choreography of entertainment in restaurants and music venues.
PG: Like with music, there's a bond between the band and the audience. Especially punk shows where band members jump into the crowd. That interplay is pretty fucking cool. But ultimately, what we do here is not done with the consumer in mind. Did a lot of the old punk bands give a shit if anyone loved their music? They did it for themselves. What we do here, maybe arrogantly, is for me and for my team.
WF: I think that's a punk attitude, but it resonates, clearly. We've talked a lot about the past, who are some of the punk up-and-comers?
PG: I think it would be easy today to focus on the natural winemakers who are truly practicing a "less is more" approach. I think it's people exploring new areas, where there is no history of winemaking, but I'd reserve the moniker for those making still wines with hybrid grapes in a place like, say, England, and I'd say the same thing for Quebec.
I'd say the same for regions where they've been making wine for a long time but got no respect. We can go to central Spain, which was once only a source of bulk wine, but in appellations like Manchuela Bodegas Ponce is taking Bobal and making it important. That's punk. Is a punk rocker in Spain the sherry house who's now making unfortified white wines? I think so.
WF: Or the winemakers reclaiming Marsala.
PG: Exactly.
WF: You heard it here first, Marsala is punk. So we know that winemakers can be punk, but can wine itself be punk?
PG: Is what is in the bottle punk? I guess it's in the eye of the beholder.
WF: There's some freedom in that.
PG: The entire world of taste is subjective, so I have no qualms jumping into it and making statements that are subjective. That's the freedom of taste.
WF: Choosing a side and planting your flag. I think that's pretty fucking punk. Maybe it's time to go find a good Marsala.
