Has Eric Wareheim Made the First Celebrity Wine That's Actually Good?

The comedian has spent the last three years collaborating with winemakers in California—now he just needs to convince everyone else to take the stuff seriously.
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Comedian Eric Wareheim recently posted a picture to Instagram of three bottles of rosé, sans label, nestled into a packing shell. “That’s a lot of piss;” one commenter wrote. “That sweet pisssss,” said another. One fan congratulated him on a “fantastic vintage of your own piss.”

Considering the fact that Wareheim—who co-created Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and plays Arnold on Master of None—spent about a year posting photos of wine and calling it piss, the jokes aren’t much of a surprise. (He once posted about drinking rosé with friends, claiming it was a way of rehabbing from piss.) But this was a wine he’d made—the result of years of work—so the jokes were harder to stomach.

“Every day for almost a year I posted about piss,” Wareheim says. “Now it’s this year and I’m putting out my own wine and, fuck, everyone thinks I’m a joke.” With the wine finally bottled, he’s got to somehow convince the world he’s serious.

Wareheim wasn’t always a wine guy. “Eight years ago, I was drinking whiskey and Colt 45,” Wareheim says. “When I was young, I drank boxed wine and I thought it was disgusting.” But the success of Tim and Eric afforded him access to higher-end eating and drinking. He and his friends began hitting up Beverly Hills wine tastings, where they made no effort to blend in. “My friends and I couldn’t just go to an event,” he says. Instead, they dressed themselves entirely in pink and sported “those pink drink holders that grandmas wear around their necks.”

Around that same time, Wareheim met Bay Area winemaker Joel Burt through mutual friends. They quickly bonded, and Burt acted as a sort of wine mentor for Wareheim. The comedian's relationship with Master of None co-star Aziz Ansari—one of the best-known #foodies in Hollywood—also enabled his love of food and drink. Eventually, the pair’s culinary excursions began inspiring future plot lines. “We went to Sicily together, and half the stuff we did in real life made it into the show,” Wareheim says. It also helped him better understand what he was drinking.

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Stateside, they befriended chefs and sommeliers. They frequented renowned wine spots like The Four Horsemen in Brooklyn, Rebelle in Manhattan, and Night Market in LA. “I knew him at first as this really tall guy who liked wine.” says Kris Yenbamroong, chef-owner of Night Market in LA. “Servers would walk up to me all excited that I knew him because they loved Tim and Eric, but I’d be [excited] to see Eric because when you find a kindred spirit with wine, you want to hang out with them as much as possible.” A wine nerd had officially been born.

Three years ago, Wareheim and Burt officially agreed to joined forces, calling their venture Las Jaras Wines. Wareheim’s learning curve was, to put it gently, steep. “I’d ask, ‘Hey, Joel, could you tell me what’s going on up there?’” Wareheim says. “And then he sends me an email and I’m literally looking up every other word and I think, holy shit, I better do some reading here.” So he did his homework, visited growers in their vineyards, participated in harvest, tasted countless samples, and consulted on blending the wines. He became slightly obsessed; “he would live at the winery if he could,” Burt says.

From the outset they’ve been a small, lo-fi operation. To control costs, they’re leasing vineyards instead of buying land and renting bottling operations only when they need them. California’s recent drought also limited their selection of well-known grape varietals. “We’re some small potatoes, so all the grapes went to the big boy wineries,” Wareheim says. But Las Jaras acquired enough cabernet grapes to make 2015 and 2016 vintages, then leaned on a lesser-known grape—carignan—for the rest of their bottles. “We wanted to do something different and weird,” Wareheim says. “That’s sort of the idea of our company.”

The pair is focusing on natural wines—wines made with minimal intervention, and little to no additives like sugars and sulfites. “At first I was turned off by natural wine. It was too ripe and light,” Wareheim remembers. “And then this whole shift happened where you realize you can drink two bottles of this stuff and you don’t get hangovers. It keeps you up instead of slamming you down like some big red where your palate is exhausted.”

It doesn’t hurt that natural wine is enjoying an upswing: natural wine bars are some of the trendiest places you can drink right now; LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is a partner at The Four Horsemen, where the Master of None episode "First Dates" is set. Wareheim describes the movement as “kind of the punk rock winemaking.” It’s a little scrappier, and a little more DIY, and therefore more appealing to a guy whose comedy career had a similar start: The New York Times once described Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! as “outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell.”

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“We came out here as these brats from Philadelphia coming into LA—a place where we didn’t fit in—and said, ‘Hey, here we are, we’re directors now,’” Wareheim says of his experience with Tim and Eric co-creator Tim Heidecker. His entry into the wine world has been similar: Take a thing you like, and throw yourself into making it, despite any lack of experience.

Aside from the fact that making wine—particularly natural wine—is an incredibly challenging endeavor, Las Jaras faces a somewhat rare disadvantage for natural winemakers: consumers know that most celebrity wines are pretty bad. (Ever tried a bottle of Mike Ditka merlot? We don’t recommend it.) The issue didn’t really occur to Burt when he partnered with Wareheim: “We began before Master of None, so Eric’s celebrity is a little different [now] than when we started to make this,” he says. Now, they have to convince the market that they’re not just putting a famous comedian’s name on a bottle of vintage piss.

The show itself might help them out: food and drink play a prominent role in both seasons, which makes the idea of Wareheim-as-wino a little easier to swallow. (Last week, Las Jaras also got an Instagram endorsement from Bon Appétit’s wine editor, Marissa A Ross.) Their first wine will be a rosé coming in early summer and their first red, released this fall, will be a throwback for Tim and Eric fans: it’s called Sweet Berry Wine, a reference to a sketch wherein John C. Reilly is supposed to be reviewing bottles for a local news segment. Instead, he gets shitfaced, proclaiming his love for “sweet berry wine!” as he chugs glass after glass. It’s certainly a better name than anything piss-related, and if Las Jaras is lucky, their customers will experience similar levels of enthusiasm.


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