QUEENSRŸCHE singer Geoff Tate spoke with Furyrocks.com recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Tate: "Touring was my introduction into wines. I’ve toured 36 counties around the world and had the opportunity to try a lot of different wines. I found that I had a real fascination with wine, the wine growing areas as well as what makes a good wine. Over the years I started collecting and trying different wines. Out of that, I met a lot of wine makers, attended a number of tastings and barrel tastings. In the process I met a wonderful wine maker, Holly Turner and her husband Andy. We became friends and over many glasses of wine, they started to ask me, “if I was to make a wine, what would it be like?” In describing that, we got jazzed and decided to make a signature series wine. We tried to find the right combination of ingredients. The combination that really got to me was French styled Bordeaux. Last year our 1st vintage, Insania Red (the ‘07’s) came out, and now we’re getting ready to release our 2nd red vintage and just last week we released our first white - Insania White!"

I understand you will be debuting in a movie?

Tate: "Yeah, Pray For Light it’s a psychological horror thriller in which I play the psychotic killer. It’s a great role and well written. The producers approached me and asked me if I would be interested in the role and asked me to do a screen test. I flew out to Seattle and met at a hotel for the screen test. I must say it was rather an unnerving experience. Your put in a hotel conference room and then asked to read and act out the script in front of a few people being videotaped. There are no props, no costumes and only bad lighting. They actually thought I was a stage actor since all my movements were go big…I guess that comes from playing big arenas (laughing). It will start shooting in March of this year."

Tell me more about the new Queensryche LP?

Tate: "All I can say about it right now is that it has a very strong social commentary. It’s a conceptual LP and musically; very different from anything we have ever done before. It’s the record we have always wanted to make and due to circumstances haven’t been able to do. Now in our careers we can finally make the record we always wanted to make. It’s a completely self indolent record. If people think we’ve gone off the deep end on other records, they will really be surprised this time."

Read the entire interview here.