Wine-making new outlet to fuel Vermeil’s passion
CALISTOGA, Calif. — Nearly 82 years old now, Dick Vermeil still possesses that commanding Buzz Lightyear voice, ageless aura of vitality and sheer need to work.
So walk into Vermeil Wines’ Calistoga Tasting Room during the harvest season, and chances are you’ll be greeted by its namesake. Because Dick Vermeil is Dick Vermeil, and he isn’t merely lending his name to some detached celebrity wine operation.
The now-10-year-old business is a direct reflection of the former Eagles, Rams and Chiefs coach, after all, so he is compulsively obligated to focus on the details. Part of that is being an amiable host, albeit one who jokes that he’s a terrible businessman in one sense: “You wouldn’t believe how much wine I give away,” Vermeil said, laughing.
Much of that generosity goes toward charity fundraisers, but some of it takes place on the premises. An instant after entering you might suddenly have in your hand a pour of, say, Jean Louis Vermeil Cabernet Sauvignon, named in honor of both his father and great-grandfather.
(Obliged to partake for crucial column research, it can be said with conviction — but a perhaps unsophisticated palate — this and other samples were tremendous.)
Vermeil first bottled the JLV Cab with On The Edge Winery in 1999, when wine-making still was a hobby as he was about to coach the Rams to a Super Bowl victory. The two distinct adventures in his rich life remain entwined here: The walls are adorned with memorabilia from his ancestry on these very streets — and abroad — and his coaching life.
At any given time, someone will wander in from places he coached, and sometimes he’s asked, “You’re not related to Coach Vermeil, are you?”
On this day, as it happens, former Royals great George Brett is here with his childhood buddy Jim Obradovich, a former NFL player. Brett called just that morning to say he was in the area with his wife and friends. Never mind that the tasting room was closed that day — Vermeil told Brett to come on over and then kept the door open for anyone else who approached.
After Vermeil showed Brett his Chiefs wall, he was back behind the counter playing sommelier as Brett went into endorsement mode as if filming a commercial: “Dick, we’ve been to some really expensive vineyards, and your stuff’s just as good as theirs at one-third the price! This is unbelievable!”
Soon, a group enters and tells Vermeil it’s from Philly, where he is forever revered for taking the Eagles to the 1981 Super Bowl. Moments later, in comes another group, including a man wearing a Chiefs cap. As Brett welcomes them with tomahawk chops before heading over to shake hands, Vermeil asks, “Come on in. What would you like?”
One could see a similar scene, reflecting Vermeil’s sphere of influence, a night later in the Napa Tasting Room filled with visitors from Philly, St. Louis and Kansas City. Vermeil’s guests there included Geri Walsh, the widow of Vermeil’s friend and coaching great Bill Walsh — whom Vermeil says would have entered this enterprise with him. Also on hand is former Chief and current wine concierge Eddie Kennison, who is conducting “R&D,” as he put it on Twitter.
Like some other Chiefs of that era, Kennison said Vermeil and his wife, Carol, “stimulated his interest” in wine at meals they hosted for players.
Sharp as ever
Maybe Vermeil could pass for 20-plus years younger even without this in his life.
He is as sharp and quick as ever, and even with two artificial hips he is in constant motion and hasn’t lost any strength in his weighttraining regimen since he retired from the NFL for the (presumably) last time with the Chiefs in 2005.
But Vermeil undoubtedly is stimulated by the business, a reminder of the importance of engagement as we get older. And while he and his wife live most of the year outside Philadelphia, Vermeil basks in these weeks he spends in the homeland that still courses through him.
“You just get that inner feeling, ‘This is where you belong, that’s where your roots are,’ ” said Vermeil, who grew up in the house he was born in, which had been the summer home of his great-grandparents and also where novelist Robert Louis Stevenson once lived.
So one could say Vermeil is aging like a fine wine, but the cliche isn’t true of all wines any more than it’s inevitable for any person, especially one so defined by a career that both exhilarated and consumed him. Instead, this time and place in his life reflects a unique blend: his heredity and heritage of generations of familymade wines, his singular persona and simple human nature.
We all need a reason to be, what the French side of his FrenchItalian ancestry would call “raison d’etre,” and some of us need it more than others.
So Vermeil is immersed in this and as in his element as he ever was in football, which is why at times this labor of love echoes his coaching work ethic more than Carol might prefer.
“This is a marvelous sense of purpose for him, and he needs it — we all do when we step away from these vocations,” said former Chiefs general manager Carl Peterson, one of Vermeil’s four principal partners in an organization that includes limited partners in former Chiefs Trent Green and Todd Collins and childhood friend Don Luvisi — from whose vineyard Vermeil Wines makes a zinfandel.
Noting Vermeil’s infectious enthusiasm as he travels the country doing wine tastings and wine dinners, Peterson added: “He needs this to take some of the energy that he has so much of. I analogize it to (him) coaching again.”
Serious about wine
As such, Vermeil is the face of the operation made by co-winemakers Andy Jones and Thomas Brown — in whose presence at the Tamber Bey wine-making facility the other morning Vermeil called “the Tom Brady of the Napa Valley.”
“I’ll take it,” Brown said, smiling.
Working for many Napa Valley wineries the last 16 years, according to Town & Country magazine, Brown has produced more than 25 wines that have received a perfect 100 score from such prominent judges as wine critic Robert Parker and Wine Spectator.
Having Brown and Jones join a label that already has distinguished itself with various awards and grades, Vermeil said, “tells