Pearl Jam Wine Sold Out Super-Fast
And the proceeds went to a good cause.
Brian Rasic
Good news and bad news for oenophilic Pearl Jam fans. The good news is that the seminal grunge band and its non-profit Vitalogy Foundation teamed up with a couple of Pearl Jam-loving Washington state winemakers to release a box set of wine with labels designed by the band. The bad news is that the wine sold out in 12 minutes, according to the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin. That’s got to be less time than the band takes to sell out a stadium.
To be fair, stadiums – including Seattle’s Safeco Field, where this week the band will perform its first hometown concert in five years – often seat tens of thousands of Pearl Jam fans, and the wine release was very limited in quantity. Only 450 box sets were produced. So it’s probably not all that surprising that -- even though there was a limit of one box per purchaser -- alerting the band’s newsletter subscribers was all it took.
Still, even more casual admirers of Eddie Vedder and co. may be interested to know about the “Home x Away” Pearl Jam boxed set, which sold for $150 (no Ticketmaster surcharge). The custom-printed box contains four bottles of the Underground Wine Project’s 2015 Idle Hands wine – 90 percent Syrah, but combined with 10 percent Cabernet Sauvignon. Each bottle features a Pearl Jam-designed label evoking one of the cities the band is hitting on its 2018 tour: Seattle (“Home”) plus “Away” cities Chicago, Boston and Missoula, Montana.
Proceeds from the sale of the wines, like Pearl Jam’s sold-out Seattle concerts, aka “The Home Shows,” will be donated to alleviate homelessness.
The vintners behind the project, Mark McNeilly and Trey Busch, of Mark Ryan Winery and Sleight of Hand Cellars, are identified on the project’s web page as “lifelong Pearl Jam fans.”
But you probably could have concluded that anyway, based on their suggestion that the rich, oak-barrel-aged wine, which, they say, “offers up layers of ripe cherries and black plums, some tobacco, toasty mocha notes, and graphite characters,” pairs beautifully “with ‘Corduroy.’”
Probably flannel, too.
Photo: Brian Rasic / Contributor, GettyImages
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