Pearl Jam’s signature wine, Home X Away, completely sold out just twelve minutes. The release of the band-sanctioned vino was produced by Mark McNeilly of Mark Ryan Winery and Trey Busch of Sleight of Hand Cellars.
The 450 limited-edition sets each came with four bottles featuring a variety of different labels designed by PJ’s art crew which depicted imagery of skylines of different cities including Seattle, Missoula, Chicago, and Boston. These cities depicted on the bottles have an underlying theme as Pearl Jam will be traveling to each city on their upcoming Home X Away tour.
Each box, which contains four bottles, sold for $150 and raised nearly $67,500 for Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy Foundation. The band decided that proceeds from the wine would help benefit their non-profit PJ’s Vitalogy Foundation, which focuses on issues such as community health, the environment, arts and education, and social change. The wine is a Syrah/Cabernet blend and been said to have notes of “layers of ripe cherries and black plums, some tobacco, toasty mocha notes, and graphite characters.” Mark McNeilly has named several of his wines after Pearl Jam songs and Trey Busch’s winery is named after the band’s 2000 album Binaural.
McNeilly told Wine Spectator “I think that if we can work with Pearl Jam and find some new arenas to talk about philanthropy and talk about people’s responsibilities toward charity, you can kind of open people’s eyes and let them know everybody has a responsibility to help everybody else.” He continued, “Trey and I have met [Pearl Jam] band members over the years at different things, and we have worked with them a little bit with some of their charities, but it’s just fun to be pulled in a little bit closer for a great cause.”
The main focus of this year’s Seattle “Home Shows” is raising money to alleviate the city’s homelessness and affordable housing crisis. PJ’s will be selling another 50 cases of the red blend wine at their Ethan Stowell show in Seattle on August 8th, 2018. The red wine is a Syrah/Cabernet blend which features 90 percent Syrah and 10 percent Cabernet. The restaurant where the band will perform will sell the wine by the glass during a fundraising dinner on the night of the Pearl Jam concert.
Although the signature wine, Home X Away, is currently unavailable, there are other alternative non-Pearl Jam labeled bottles of the same wine. A similar wine is called Underground Wine Project Idle Hands Red. This alternative bottle has favorable tasting ratings and even the unofficial Vedder seal of approval.
