ONE, ALECIA MOORE, is a winemaker
and vigneron. She grows her grapes
on 25 acres of vines in Santa Barbara
County. As fellow local winemaker
Chad Melville of the acclaimed Melville Winery says, “It was
funny meeting Alecia—we’re the same age; we have girls the
same age; we both had dads named Jim; our moms were both
nurses. It’s really weird. But she’s really dedicated, and her
approach really jibes with mine.” He adds, “I knew this wasn’t
just going to be some celebrity wine brand.”
That’s because the other woman is P!nk: superstar pop icon,
given to belting out hit songs while flying acrobatically on wires
over thousands of screaming fans. (And on key, by the way; no
auto-tune for this singer.)They’re the same person—Alecia Moore
is P!nk—but today, at the Thanksgiving dinner she’s throwing
for her friends, it’s the winemaker who’s running the show.
Along with chef Robbie Graham-Wise, of course. A lean
Englishman in his fifties, Graham-Wise has made a career
cooking with rock stars: Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Morrissey.
But he’s been cooking for Moore for 10 years now, and they have
a kind of food-wine mind meld going on. The menu today—
turkey smoked over oak barrel staves with red wine gravy,
creamed corn grits, a red cabbage salad with baked cherries
and sliced apples, and more—they came up with together. Still,
Graham-Wise says, “It’s really all about showing off the wine.”
By 3 p.m. Moore’s guests are down by the lake at the palapa—a
kind of thatched-roof pavilion with no walls. It’s an excellent
location, given Santa Barbara’s benign climate, for a lakeside
Thanksgiving dinner. It’s also a frequent site for epic games of
beer pong, “with Home Depot buckets and Wiffle balls,” Carey
Hart, Moore’s husband, says. The group is a city-and-country
combo: first, L.A. friends like actor Kerri Kenney-Silver and her
husband, Steven; Grant Breding, who oversees retail at LACMA;
and Reina Hidalgo, a choreographer and dancer in Moore’s
band. Then there are local wine folk: Chad Melville and his
wife, Mary; Alison Thomson, Moore’s assistant winemaker; and
Moore’s vineyard manager, Ben Merz, and his wife, Kim. A light
breeze wafts the scent of smoldering sage bundles through the
air. Music—“Bad Luck” by Neko Case, “Pa’lante” by Hurray for
the Riff Raff, “Timshel” by Mumford & Sons—also floats through
from the outdoor speakers at the house above.
When the first course, a salad of shaved fennel and celery,
goat cheese, and pickled grapes from Moore’s vineyard, arrives,
people have already started opening bottles of Two Wolves rosé.
Made with Grenache from her vineyard, it’s crisp and refreshing,
full of bright strawberry-raspberry notes. “If I were going to say
something about Thanksgiving,” Moore says, getting everyone’s
attention, “it’s that it ought to be an ode to the Native Americans
that really own this land.” You get the sense she means not just
her land but all the land across the USA; there’s a general murmur of agreement around the table. A few moments later, glass
of wine in hand, she’s talking to Ben Merz about her last tour:
“We had this two-and-a-half-minute video we’d play, which
was sort of me from 19 to now, and it mentioned Black Lives
Matter, and I’ve got all this diversity on stage with me—black,
white, female, male, gay, straight. One show, out in the audience,
there’s this bearded motorcycle guy looking really put upon by
all this. And next to him is this gay guy in rainbow spandex ...
and by the end of the show they’re both having a great time
dancing together! That’s what music does, and what wine and
food do, too.” She pauses, wiggles, and looks irked. “This chair
is broken—Carey Hart! Do you have any superglue?”
Hart, who’s giving their two-year-old son, Jameson, slices
of apple, calls back, “No!” To Jameson he says, “Straight off the
tree, bud.”
“Apple!” says Jameson cheerfully.
“What kind of a man are you?” Moore says.
“A man who doesn’t use superglue. I weld things,” says Hart.
To Jameson: “Yeah, bud. That’s right. Apple.”
With the turkey, which is stunning, surrounded by roasted
squash, corn, and sweet potatoes, Moore pours her 2016
Cabernet Franc. “It’s my star,” she says. The wine lives up to
that. Intense and layered, it’s ample proof of Chad Melville’s
comments earlier: Moore isn’t just a celebrity name attached
to a wine brand. Whenever she’s on her property, she’s out in
the vineyards working, and during harvest she’s in the winery
full-time, tasting, punching down the caps on fermenting tanks
of grapes, making blending calls. Alison Thomson, her assistant
winemaker, supplies some technical knowledge from a UC Davis
degree in enology. She’s been here from the start, working side
by side with Moore, and says, “It’s really cool to come up with a
whole new program. What are we going to do? Rosé? Sémillon?
It’s like, let’s just try stuff! Alecia loves to experiment. And the
vineyard is amazing—the Syrah we have planted down there is
some of the best Syrah I’ve ever worked with.” (Side note: Chad
Melville’s Syrahs are some of the best in the state, and since
that’s who Thomson worked with prior to meeting Moore, she
knows whereof she speaks.)
Before dessert, Moore stands up and pings a glass with her
knife. “I want to take a vote!” There are 18 people around the
table, and she wants to know which of her wines they feel is the
food-friendliest. Rosé? The Cab Franc? The Cabernet Sauvignon?
The vote splits evenly, and Moore looks mock-aghast. “Sixsix-six? Great. So basically we’re channeling Ozzy Osbourne.”
Everyone’s drinking and eating, everyone’s having fun, and
feelings of thanks for all this—friends, food, a beautiful day—are
in the air. Moore playfully recalls another Thanksgiving; her
worst ever, she says. “Me and Carey were in our early twenties, living in Sherman Oaks, and his dad shows up at 10 a.m.
with three bottles of Patrón. Downhill from there.” The meal
ended with a food fight involving mashed potatoes and sweet
potatoes. The turkeys themselves were frozen (“I was like 22;
no one told me I had to thaw them”), the dog ran off with a
turkey leg, a cigarette left on an oven mitt set the bedroom on
fire, and eventually Moore ended up trying to slash the tires on
Hart’s F-250 truck with a kitchen knife because she was pissed
off at him, landing in the hospital with 13 stitches in her hand
“because that’s my lucky number.” Finally, at 11 p.m., everyone
ate. “And we’ve been together 17 years now,” she adds sweetly.
Hart shrugs. “My family’s Irish. At our Thanksgivings, by
3 p.m. someone’s crying and someone’s bleeding, and by 5
everyone’s happy again.”
Today, no one’s crying or bleeding, and everyone is very happy
indeed with the final pairing, which is the Two Wolves Petit
Verdot, an intense but brightly tart red, with Moore’s own sweet
potato pie. Does the pairing work? She wants to know. Down
the table, Kerri Kenney-Silver says, “It’s unexpected and weird
and funky and awesome.”
Moore looks happy. “Some things just work,” she says. “Sort
of like a 39-year-old butch female in a tutu flying through the
air singing love songs to children.”
“Forty-two sold-out dates in Australia,” Reina Hidalgo says.
“Hey, cheers to that!” Moore replies, raising her glass.
I love them so cute and real! 
