So this is Flavortown. I’m at Guy Fieri’s house in Santa Rosa, California. The house is a relatively modest joint, as Guy Fieri places go. You’d never know it was his house. In fact, I drove right past it the first time, looking around instead for a five-story McMansion shaped like Sammy Hagar’s head. He bought the place in 1996, long before he became the Guy Fieri that all Food Network viewers know and some cherish. “When we bought this house,” he tells me, “everything was a shithole.”

It’s not a shithole anymore. Over the years, he’s gradually renovated and added a ton. He built a second house for his parents right next door. He bought a vineyard nearby, which is part of his brand-new wine business (and the reason GQ sent me here). He has two food trailers sitting in his backyard, one that houses a full-size Mugnaini pizza oven from Italy (“Burns at about 800 degrees—it’s pretty outrageous”) and one that houses a huli-huli rotisserie machine that can spit-roast 36 chickens at a time (“The chicken is—brother, lights out”). There are also two trampolines, a pool, a vegetable garden, a chicken coop…and Pops.

Lemme tell you about Pops, brother. Pops is the Fieri family tortoise. He’s a sulcata, the kind of lumbering beast you check out at the zoo because the tortoise exhibit is never crowded. Pops has his own pen on the property, although a massive hole in the wire is a stark reminder of all the times he has broken free (“We’ve had to hunt him down,” Guy says). And there’s an old, crusty hard hat sitting on the ground in the middle of the pen. The hard hat is Pops’s girlfriend. “He’ll hump that hard hat,” Guy tells me. “We’ll hear him. There must be a season or something, ’cos he gets goin’.”

What do you feed a tortoise?

“You know what his delicacy is?” Guy asks me, mischievously. “Hot, steamy, fresh dog shit. It is the foie gras of the turtle.”

And if you’re looking for a metaphor of how the food-and-wine establishment views Guy Fieri, it’s hard to top a man who feeds dog shit to slow-moving animals and calls it foie gras.

Guy Fieri makes wine now. His label is called Hunt & Ryde—named for his two sons, Hunter and Ryder—and this fall he will roll out three varietals, priced between $45 and $75 a bottle: a Pinot Noir, which he describes as a “bomb-ass Pinot,” a Cabernet blend, and a Zinfandel. He’s also preparing a sparkling rosé for next year, because “sparkling’s sexy. Everybody wants sparkling.”

And apart from a tiny “Guy” signature snuck onto the back label, which he says his colleagues and loved ones forced him to include, you’d never know that this was Guy Fieri product. There are no flame decals. No skulls. The Cabernet blend is not called KICKIN’ KAB. It won’t even be on the wine list at most Guy Fieri–branded restaurants. You'll probably only be able to get it at this website, which won't go live until sometime around Thanksgiving.

This is by design. Guy Fieri is no dummy. Despite the fact that his culinary empire has exploded—with formal involvement in 40 restaurants worldwide; three TV shows; five best-selling cookbooks, plus a sixth on the way; and a plum spot in every local grocery store’s condiment aisle—he knows that his name conjures a certain image, an image featuring many barbed-wire tattoos. “I just don’t want to distract from the greatness that’s going on,” he says, which is his immodest way of being modest about people’s expectations of his products.

Apart from a tiny “Guy” signature snuck onto the back label, which he says his colleagues and loved ones forced him to include, you’d never know that this was Guy Fieri product. There are no flame decals. No skulls. The Cabernet blend is not called KICKIN’ KAB.

For Fieri (it’s pronounced FEE-eddy), the winery is both a vanity project—”heirloom shit” that he can pass down to his children—and a somewhat risky toe dip into a fart-sniffing wine universe that, even on his home turf of Sonoma County, has not exactly been welcoming to him. Earlier this year, in order to move forward with plans to open a Hunt & Ryde–branded tasting room near his vineyard, Fieri and his team had to agree to 76 separate conditions from the county zoning board (the resulting document is one of those enormous NIMBY zoning applications that makes you groan the second you open the PDF). But the effort turned out to be futile. A public hearing was scheduled and more than a hundred people showed up to oppose it, some carrying placards that read “Keep Willowside Safe & Quiet: No to Guy Fieri.” One resident told the planning board that allowing the tasting room would be like “putting Disneyland in downtown Graton.” Noise studies were commissioned. Potential DUI arrest trends were studied with great intensity. Town-hall meetings were convened. Various objections were noted for the public record:

Neighbor Judy Tembrock: “The applicant has thought of everything except a place for his noise.”

Neighbor Joan Fleck: “This project will be detrimental to my health, welfare, and comfort.”

Neighbor Clay Jackson: “A race car was fired up next door by the applicant’s staff with no warning. The noise very nearly seriously injured one of my show horses. This has happened a couple of times.”

Neighbor Toni Kovatch-Mercer: “My family lived across the street from the applicant’s residence. Guests would be loud, leave trash, and trample landscaping. All we could do was sell and move.”

You get the idea. These people weren’t simply protesting Guy’s wine room. They were protesting Guy, and the trashy clientele they assumed would show up to drink his wine. The tasting-room proposal was rejected. Fieri lost.

It’s safe to say that this would not have happened if, say, Alice Waters had tried to do something similar. And that is why Fieri can’t put his famed mug on a $75 bottle of wine and expect discerning oenophiles to buy it. No, for the first time in his career, he has had to be discreet. No tasting room. No name on the front label. No obvious indicators that your bomb-ass Pinot was produced by one of the most derided chefs in America. Fieri is betting a great deal of time (and money) that the quality of his wine will speak for itself, and that people who would never drink a Guy Fieri wine will be pleasantly surprised when they discover that they just have.

And I’m his first guinea pig. I get to taste the wine a month before anyone else. Will it be delicious? Will it be terrible? Will it have ribbons of peanut butter in it? Can Guy Fieri overcome his own BODACIOUSNESS and shock everyone by making a subtle, classy wine?

Let’s get into these bold flavors and find out.

Every good wine comes with a backstory, and Guy Fieri’s starts at his home. When I arrive, Guy is in his standard uniform: camo shorts, loud shirt, flip-flops, jewel-encrusted skull necklace. He looks like every Sublime fan rolled into one. Underneath his shirt, he has a huge scar running up from his belly button, the result of a horse bucking him off and stomping on him when he was 10 years old. The crushing impact tore a ligament off of his liver and bruised his heart. His parents ("hippies," as Guy describes them) were backpacking around Europe at the time, so a lawyer had to sign a court order as their proxy so that Guy could get the emergency operation needed to salvage his guts. “I was fucked up,” he says. “My mom was devastated.” Somehow he survived, and he’s been a resilient fellow ever since.

Before Guy and I can talk wine, he needs to drive Ryder, who is 8, to school. Ryder gets to pick which of his father's cars we take, and he chooses the yellow Camaro, the one with the license plate that reads RYDERSS. Years from now, when Ryder learns to drive, this Camaro will be his, just as the license plate has foretold. (Fieri has many other cars, each with its own vanity plate: FOOD FYT, CADLAQ, LIVFAST, BLKTRFL, etc.) But for now, the younger Fieri sits in the back as his dad guns the engine (mind the horses, Guy!), blasts some sweet tunes (“I love everything from Enya to Pantera”), and guides us at top speed through to Ryder’s elementary school. It’s gotta feel pretty bawse to roll up to school in a Camaro. I bet the other kids shit their Minecraft undies at the sight of it.

On our way back from school, friends and well-wishers spot Guy driving the Camaro and honk and chat with him at red lights. Guy whips out an apple and eats it while driving. When we arrive at his house after the dropoff, his wife, Lori, is there to greet us. They’ve been married for more than twenty years. He met Lori after firing a friend of hers, and she went to angrily confront Guy about it. They got married. The friend stayed fired.

Lori immediately notices that the Camaro’s engine is smoking.

“Why is it overheating?” she asks Fieri. “You didn’t smell that at all on your way?”

“No,” he tells her.

“Yeah, that’s totally overheating.”

Guy grabs a nearby fire extinguisher and rushes to do a quick diagnostic check of the precious Camaro. “Nah, that’s the oil seal. The car rides kinda low; we nicked the pan.”

The Camaro is out of commission. Bummer. However, being Guy Fieri means always having an extra muscle car handy when all the other muscle cars are in the shop. Thus we trade in Ryder’s Camaro (yellow with a black racing stripe) for a Corvette (black with a yellow racing stripe). Lori heads off in her car to get the family dog vaccinated against rattlesnake venom. And then Guy and I ride off again, in a low-slung hot rod that was born to take on highway entrance ramps. “This is a fast motherfucker,” he says.