(GQ) - What's next from the chef known for flavors so bold it feels like someone's filming a slasher flick in your gut? Why, $75-a-bottle red wine, of course! But Guy Fieri isn't planting grapes just because he digs "bomb-ass Pinot." (His words, not ours.) He's after something much more elusive: respect. GQ heads to Sonoma for Flavortown's first wine tasting.

 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.