Wine has become Vermeil’s passion
people that are serious in wine that you’re serious.”
Before heading to Tamber Bey, which last year was within a quarter mile of the most damaging wildfire in California history, Vermeil had been at Frediani Vineyards near daybreak. He can be found there many mornings this time of year, absorbing what he calls an “ongoing education” from friend Jim Frediani as Frediani oversees the family livelihood begun more than 100 years ago.
“I learn something different every day I’m out here,” Vermeil said.
Vermeil being Vermeil and wanting to be hands-on, sometimes he’ll drive a tractor to help move the boxes of picked grapes with VERMEIL stamped on them.
Vermeil being Vermeil, once ranked by the NFL Network as the second-most inspiring coach in league history behind Vince Lombardi, he’ll greet several pickers by name.
“You’re getting stronger, Marcelino, you’re getting stronger,” Vermeil tells a man who has worked there some 35 years as he hoists and lugs a 40-pound box and hurries to get on to the next.
Vermeil being Vermeil, he gets sentimental about the influence of Frediani’s parents in his life and his relationship with Frediani, whom he used to babysit. And the two share the laughs that timehonored friends know best.
“People ask, ‘Do you own a vineyard?’ No, but I’m part of one,” Vermeil said while riding alongside Frediani on the site where Vermeil’s great-grandfather once owned 40 acres.
A lot like dad
Most of what people know about Vermeil’s origins center around the fiendish work ethic infused in one way or another by his father, Louie, a mechanic and sprint-car racer who once told Sports Illustrated of his fascination with the idea of working 24 hours straight — and fulfilling it.
Louie Vermeil’s penchant for working into the wee hours in his backyard auto-repair shop compelled Frediani’s father, Gene, to dub it the “Owl Garage” — where for a time a caged owl served as a mascot.
Vermeil often helped in the shop, learning to do tune-ups and brake jobs, rebuilding engines, etc. Along the way, he became skilled enough to do mechanic work in the summers when he was a high school coach and develop an ability to restore race cars — something he took on anew when he retired from the Chiefs.
Along the way Vermeil was both blessed and burdened by how his father drove him while seldom offering praise. It’s not hard to trace that to Vermeil’s trajectory in a coaching life marked by how demanding he was of players as well as the deep relationships he had with many, not to mention his frequent shedding of tears before his teams and in public.
Vermeil took over the woeful Eagles in 1976, when they had traded numerous prime draft picks for the next three years, and coaxed the team to the Super Bowl in his fifth season. And then he retired two years later, citing the then-newfangled term of “burnout.”
“I made that word popular,” Vermeil said. “I allowed my passion for the game to become kind of an obsession. I just couldn’t turn it off. It was ridiculous, but that was just me: OCD and compulsive guy.
“I always sort of felt I wasn’t doing a good enough job, so you keep pushing yourself harder. I allowed it to overpower me.”
After more than a decade in broadcasting, Vermeil felt called to coach again when the Rams reached out in 1997. He whisked an organization that had 36 wins in the seven years before he took over to a Super Bowl victory three years later and retired again days after that.
He had done what he always wanted to do, after all, and his kids wanted him to step down and come home. But Vermeil was back in the game a year later with a man he couldn’t turn down, Peterson, with whom he had worked from Los Angeles to Philadelphia.
Vermeil’s 2003 Chiefs went 13-3, only to lose one of the organization’s patented playoff heartbreakers, 38-31 to the Colts.
Beyond the postseason debacles ahead for the Chiefs, that 2003 season also offered a harbinger of what was to come for Vermeil: When Morten Andersen “looked a little nervous” to Vermeil as he prepared to try a late 35-yard field goal against the Raiders, Vermeil pulled him over and said, “Morten, you make this thing, I’ll give you a bottle of my Bryant Family Vineyard (that is) impossible to get.”
Andersen made the kick for a 27-24 win to earn the approximately $500 bottle of wine. But the NFL interceded, saying that performance bonuses outside of contracts weren’t kosher. Proprietor Don Bryant called Vermeil later that week, thanking him for the kind of marketing he’d never been able to get before.
Two years later, after a 10-6 team failed to make the playoffs, Vermeil retired from football for the final time as he came to feel “dull” when fatigued.
“The only regret I have in my career,” he said, “was I wasn’t able to hand the Lamar Hunt trophy to Lamar Hunt.”
Still, Vermeil retains a connection to the Chiefs. He is close to Andy Reid, whom Vermeil recommended to owner Clark Hunt in 2013 and nudged to take the job when Reid asked his advice. Like just about everyone else, Vermeil is intrigued with quarterback Patrick Mahomes.
“You can tell he has all the tools,” Vermeil said. “But what you don’t know is how he will be under the gun throughout the entire game, 16 games in a row.”
Back to the vineyard
With the pressure of football behind him, Vermeil’s wine-making roots soon beckoned in a new way.
Not that he didn’t have plenty to enjoy otherwise, with 11 grandchildren and projects such as restoring his late father’s 1926 sprint car to feature at the Calistoga Speedway (aka, “The Home of Louie Vermeil”), which took more than a year. Then as now, Vermeil had a heavy motivationalspeaking schedule and was deep in charitable work and endorsements.
All the while, though, he was gravitating toward the passion he’s sure he would have shared with his father if he were still here. It began with a trickle before Vermeil says he was convinced to go all-in in 2008 by Peterson, John Scarpa, Michael Azeez and family friend and winemaker Paul Smith and his wife, Mary Sue Frediani.
The venture brought Vermeil back home, where wines were a vital part of the community and as much a part of talk around the home with his father and mother, Alice, as football and cars and never-ending work. In Vermeil’s case, the vines went back at least this far: His Italian immigrant great-grandfather, Garibaldi Iacherri, served on the board of what became the Bank of America and founded one of the first local wine companies after feeling practically called to Napa for its resemblance to his home of Lucca, Italy.
Iacherri’s daughter married Albert Vermeil, the son of JeanLouis Vermeil, a wine lover himself who emigrated from France. Grandfather Vermeil made wines from Frediani grapes, and blends, aromas and vintage were prime conversation pieces for as long as Vermeil can remember.
In time, Vermeil developed a keen interest as he’d pick grapes and help his grandfather in the processing in the basement, where he moved wine from barrel to barrel based on the moons.
Vermeil probably had his first sips of wine when he was about 7 or 8, he said, and in the past he’s said he had a choice between wine and milk as a child. To this day, Vermeil consumes wine less for its alcohol than its taste and as simply “part of the meal, what you’re supposed to do.”
A little like football
Like coaching football, it turns out, this is what Vermeil was supposed to do. As he sees it, there are at least some parallels.
It’s all about surrounding yourself with good people, working hard and not being embarrassed to say “I love you,” as he’s quoted saying on his Vermeil Wines bio page. Moreover, even if Vermeil tells you he’s no wine expert, he trusts his instincts to distinguish what’s special from what’s not — sort of the way he did in picking quarterbacks, including Green, whose injury in St. Louis led to the improbable story of the muchdoubted Kurt Warner.
As he considered the similarities between choosing wines and quarterbacks, Vermeil thought of a story Warner likes to tell from one day at Rams Park just before Green was hurt.
“‘Kurt, there’s something about you that I like and I can’t wait to find out what it is,’ ” Vermeil recalled telling him. “That’s why he made the team. There were some coaches who wanted to let him go, (but) I didn’t want to let him go.”
Like sensing a good wine, Vermeil thinks he just had a nose for it.
“I don’t consider myself bright, but I’ve always been able to say, ‘This is my guy,’ ” Vermeil said. “Why, I have no idea. You could call it luck, but some guys would say you’ve got a feel for it.”
Meanwhile, just as he always felt he had to work harder to compete with the names in the game, Vermeil would never say “our wine is better than anyone else’s.” But he still plans to contend.
“If it tastes good, and you like it, it’s good wine,” he said. “And I don’t know if I’ve ever poured our wines for somebody who didn’t really respect it.”
Enough of resting on his laurels, though. That’s why one aspect of a growth plan is to move away from what he calls the “Vermeil World” decor in Calistoga to the more well-appointed look in the Napa setting.
While his name and footballoriented logo certainly have attracted visitors and business, Vermeil believes some of the imagery creates the perception their wines aren’t high end.
“And to this day, they are,” Vermeil said. “But you have to prove it.”
Same as it ever was — at least speaking for himself.