At the time 2016 seemed like an eternity away,” says Phinney who agonised for months trying to come up with a name and label worthy of his long-awaited comeback.
“Like a child who only wants to do what he’s told not to do, I began to plot my return. In 2008 Phinney sold The Prisoner brand and agreed with its buyer not to make Zinfandel for eight years.
Finding his stride a year later, Phinney released his first vintage of The Prisoner, a blend of Zinfandel, Cabernet and Petite Syrah, in 2000.įeaturing a Goya etching on the label, the wine was an instant hit and grew to become an 85,000-case brand. It wasn’t an easy ride – Phinney lost a third of his crop after spraying sulphur late in the year, while a heat spike fried the morning side of the vines. This didn’t put longtime Zinphomaniac Phinney from making his first ever wine from it in 1999, of which he released 99 cases. With uneven ripening, high alcohol and a propensity to rot, Zinfandel isn’t the easiest grape to grow. “The model is always high up in the frame of every image. Shot over the course of two days, it took over 10,000 attempts to get a dozen Phinney was happy with. His initial idea of keying the word ‘Machete’ onto the car and shooting a machete-wielding model behind the wheel didn’t pan out. Inspired, Phinney set up a photo shoot with the cop car using Calistoga’s moon-like landscape as a backdrop. The word ‘Killers” had been keyed onto the side of the car. Behind the wheel was a postman with his arm hanging out of the window puffing on a cigarette. Spotting what he thought was a white police car ahead of him, as he got closer he realised it was an old cop car that had been resold. Phinney got the idea for the label while driving home from San Francisco one day. Rather than just one label, there are a dozen different labels for Machete – a red blend that makes a hero of Petite Sirah from Northern California, with supporting roles from Syrah and Grenache.
The sinister photo of amputated shop dummies was shot by LA-based photographer Greg Gorman, who used his Hollywood contacts to source dozens of old mannequins bound for the scrapheap, most of which were missing their arms.Īs is often the way with the creative process, Gorman took scores of photos but neither he nor Phinney were happy with the result until the mannequins were tossed to one side after the shoot and everything fell into place, on shot 540. Clothing, much like wine, evolves over time to reflect trends, nature and creative whims, yet the mannequins always remain static,” he says. “It got me thinking about mannequins and their purpose to serve as stylised representations of the human form to showcase clothes. In the case of Mannequin, made from Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscat from Sonoma and Atlas Peak, a song came first.ĭriving around with the radio blaring, Roman’s Revenge by Nicki Minaj came on the radio and Phinney was struck by the line: ‘You at a stand still, mannequin’. Phinney is often asked what came first, the label or the wine.
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