What was Merkin Vineyards Old Town?
For five years, the most persuasive argument for Arizona wine in Scottsdale was made nightly on Stetson Drive, by a restaurant owned by the frontman of one of the biggest rock bands on earth.
Merkin Vineyards Old Town opened in 2019 as the Scottsdale outpost of Maynard James Keenan’s Verde Valley wine empire. Keenan — the voice of Tool and A Perfect Circle — has spent over two decades on an improbable second career: planting vineyards around Jerome and Cottonwood, building Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars into the state’s most famous wine operation, and treating desert viticulture as a mission rather than a hobby. The Old Town room was that mission’s embassy in the Valley.
The rules of the house were absolute: everything poured was 100 percent Arizona-grown. No California safety net, no imported by-the-glass hedge. The kitchen backed the wine with housemade pasta and a menu that leaned on produce from Keenan’s own Verde Valley gardens and orchards — a farm-to-table claim with an actual farm attached.
Eating there was disarmingly unpretentious. The room was casual, the prices moderate, and the celebrity owner a presence in philosophy rather than decor — no gold records, no merch-table energy. When the lease ran out in April 2024, the embassy closed and the operation went home to the Verde Valley, argument intact.
How the Arizona argument was served
The flight was the format. The house existed to prove Arizona wine has range, and the flights were the proof structured as a tasting menu — whites with real acidity, reds with desert-grown backbone, and the occasional bottling that upended whatever you assumed about grapes and cactus sharing a latitude. A single glass told you one fact; a flight made the case, which is why regulars steered every first-timer that way.
The pasta led the food order. The kitchen’s identity was the osteria model: pasta made in-house, sauced simply, changing with the seasons and with whatever the Verde Valley gardens were shipping south that week. When the menu named a vegetable, it had likely ridden down from Keenan’s own dirt — one of the few Scottsdale rooms where the agricultural claim was literal.
The neighborhood set the rhythm. Stetson Drive sits in the Fifth Avenue and waterfront district, so the compact room inherited the Scottsdale ArtWalk crowd on Thursday evenings and the general Old Town wave on weekends. Weeknights got you the staff’s full attention — worth having, because the servers poured context with every glass and could map your palate onto Arizona’s regions in a sentence or two.
The exit ramp mattered most. The retail side let you leave with bottles, and the smart move was buying whatever surprised you. Arizona wine still isn’t on most shelves; for five years, this was Scottsdale’s supply line.
A rock star, a desert, and the long game of Arizona wine
The deeper story here is one of the strangest and most successful acts of place-making in Arizona history. When Keenan started planting vines in the Verde Valley, the phrase “Arizona wine” was a punchline with a tasting fee. He kept at it through skepticism, wildfire seasons, and the slow arithmetic of vineyards, and along the way did more than anyone to will a legitimate industry into existence — tasting rooms revived downtown Jerome and Cottonwood, other growers followed, and the state’s wine regions earned real critical respect. The Old Town room, opened in 2019, planted that flag in the middle of Scottsdale’s dining district, where the stakes and the foot traffic were highest.
The location choice was pointed. Stetson Drive sits in Scottsdale’s gallery-and-waterfront quarter, historically a neighborhood of imported taste — French rooms, California lists, whatever the resorts poured. Dropping an all-Arizona wine bar there, near neighbors like Kazimierz World Wine Bar with its globe-spanning cellar and the chef-driven rooms of the old Cowboy Ciao corner, reframed local wine from novelty to genre. Scottsdale had seen Arizona wine championed before — FnB famously built its list around the state’s bottles and put Arizona winemaking on the national map — but Merkin brought something FnB couldn’t: a supply chain and a spokesman with global name recognition, arguing the case to walk-in traffic seven days a week.
The ending was undramatic, which is its own kind of statement. In April 2024, after five years, the lease ran out and the operation consolidated back to the Verde Valley rather than chase another Old Town storefront. No scandal, no failure — Scottsdale rents did what Scottsdale rents do, and Keenan’s attention returned to the vineyards themselves, where the wine is made and the tasting rooms still pour.
The honest assessment: Arizona wine still carries variability, and purists could find bottles on that list that argued against themselves. But that was precisely why the place mattered — it refused to curate away the state’s rough edges, betting instead that the hits convert you. Tourists arrived for the Tool connection and left, more often than they expected, with a case of the Verde Valley in the trunk. That conversion — curiosity in, believer out — was the whole model, and for five years on Stetson Drive, it worked.