P!nk's Two Wolves Wine
Calling all freaks, chicas and badass mammas!
Scout and I were sitting in Corkbuzz, a balsamic-drizzle type of wine bar in Union Square. We flipped to the last page of the menu: “How is this, um, Two Wolves?” I asked, as if I had just stumbled upon the international superstar’s red wine.
“Oh, made by P!—” the bartender stopped himself, swallowing that verbalized exclamation point, not wanting to further humiliate us. We needed mercy. We needed privacy.
An older woman sitting next to us was trying to pay for her several glasses of wine, but was worried her card wouldn’t work because she had just changed her name. She was on the run, I imagined, and I figured she was probably a P!nk fan.
Two Wolves Wine is very discretely a celebrity brand. Case in point: P!nk signs off all copy on the Two Wolves website — which includes a lot of her own blog posts — as Alecia Moore, her God (who is a woman) given name.
Two Wolves takes its name from an old Cherokee proverb. P!nk is not Cherokee but her vineyard is NEXT to a Native American reservation (not Cherokee) which has to count for something.
In the titular proverb, a man is speaking to his grandson: “A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.” One wolf is evil, the other, good.
The evil wolf, if I may close read for a second, represents P!nk the pop star. The ego, the false pride. Celebrity has subsumed P!nk. As the social critic Lady Gaga said on Replay, “you monsters torture me.”
The good wolf, thus, represents Alecia the bright-eyed Pennsylvania girl. As P!nk has explained, Alecia, the private self, got snagged on an aerial silk somewhere twenty years into stardom: “[P!nk] was my nickname but now it’s not ours anymore, it’s just how everyone knows me.”
“Which wolf will win?” the child asks the grandfather in the proverb. “The one you feed.”
Two Wolves Wine is her way of feeding Alecia. This is P!nk unplugged. The vines do not know about your collaboration with Lily Allen.
I genuinely believe P!nk may be the celebrity most involved in her wine. She says she makes at least one visit a week to the vineyard. I think realistically she comes up once a month and the vineyard manager gets a call from her five minutes before and is like ugh guys she’s coming…
There are several stories as to how P!nk got her nom de plume. One is that bullies at summer camp pulled her pants down and her face turned pink with embarrassment. The other is that her best friend (evidently a gay guy) had never seen a “vagina before so he asked me if I could see it, so I showed it to him and he said 'It's pink!’” So he started calling her Mr. Pink, after Steve Buscemi’s character in Reservoir Dogs (okay maybe he is straight).
It makes sense that, either way, P!nk got her name by exposing herself. P!nk, by Missundaztood (2001), cemented a persona of “girl who smokes under the bleachers and fashions a shiv out of her lipstick.” She was the badass of the TRL bunch, physically fighting with Christina on the Lady Marmalade set and shading Britney in her lyrics. She and the Indigo Girls brought down George Bush singlehandedly on “Dear Mr. President.” P!nk has the aesthetic of a punk — she says ‘fuck’ a lot, has ugly hair — but filtered through the nespresso pod of an A&R exec. Nevertheless, “Get The Party Started,” “So What?”, these are some of the greatest pop songs ever recorded.
P!nk now looks like if Jojo Siwa got 13 Going On 30-d. Whereas other pop stars love to go through eras, P!nk has been doing the same schtick for 20 years. We have forgotten to pick her up from the adult contemporary lane and her songs now are so drippily earnest. Her latest album TRUSTFALL is violently fine. It’s actually so easy to write a P!nk song. The chorus goes like this: 🎶 I’m a perfect mess and I’m dancing in the dark 🎶 I could give this to P!nk right now and she would hand me 1,000,000 dollars.
I think P!nk’s listenership is women on the brink of bankruptcy and furries. P!nk once was asked about some fan base names. Her response: “humans, people, underdogs, friends.” Human hive rise!!!
P!nk got into wine in the mid-2000s ago after her manager sent her a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. P!nk went hard: she took wine chemistry classes at UC Davis (go freaking Aggies) and bought an 18-acre organic vineyard in Santa Ynez in 2013, whose first vintage premiered in 2018. Her estate covers Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec, Grenache and Grenache Blanc.
Scout and I shared a bottle of 2020 Graciano [Graciano, I learned, is a grape from Rioja and not Teresa Giudice’s youngest daughter]. Look, it was very much Mamma wine. Full-bodied, low-acid, super jammy; warm notes of cinnamon and clove were rounded out by pepper and oak. It wasn’t bad wine, it just wasn’t for me.
Corkbuzz got just two allotments of the wine, and the bartender explained to us that P!nk intentionally sold to the wine bar because they’re owned by women. He then readily admitted he had no idea if this story was true.
We couldn’t finish the bottle so we gave it back to the bar for everyone to try. “That couple is leaving this for us!” the bartender said, genuinely excited, to every employee who walked by. Other Humans are out there, you just have to look.
In the immortal words of P!nk, RAISE YOUR GLASS!
Honored to be featured. I'd like the readership to know that I found the dominant flavor of the wine to be "tingly."