Singer-songwriter Pink, also known as Alicia Beth Moore, has what she calls a “dirty little secret”: an organic vineyard in Southern California.
After finishing a tour in Australia about a year ago, Pink and her husband dedicated their time to finishing a winery, the last piece of a four-year project cultivating a vineyard that’d been inspired by the couple’s visits to wineries around the world.
Between performances and touring around the world, Pink took online courses in winemaking. “I started at the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET). I would get off stage and be, like, oh, I have a test,” she says. “I loved it, especially the [online] videos.”
Pink’s 25-acre estate includes Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec, Grenache, and Grenache Blanc, though she says they’re taking out the Malbec. “We’ve worked with it for three years and it’s not blowing me away. The Cabernet Franc next to it is blowing me away. So we’re replanting,” she says.
The singer, who’s sold more than 60 million albums around the globe, seems to find equal satisfaction under a pair of headphones picking grapes. “I got my brand new Beck album, I got my earphones, and I went out and spent days pruning,” she says.
At the end of the 1990s, when she first made her way into the music scene, Pink put Châteauneuf-du-Pape on her first “rider” because, as she says, it was the wine that made her fall in love with wines. Little did she know at the time, Châteauneuf-du-Pape was a region and not a producer, as she thought.
Now she says the wine on her “rider” is contingent on the local style. This year she’s hoping to branch out into British wine.