CJ McCollum Is CRUSHING IT
With wine the NBA’s drink of choice, the Portland Trail Blazers star is using his proximity to Oregon’s best vineyards to develop his palate—and his own label.
months at Disney World Resorts. Armed with cases of not only his own label but plenty of other bottles, the 29-year-old McCollum became the bubble’s unofficial sommelier. Quite the change for a guy who less than a decade prior didn’t have much interest in drinking wine at all.
When heattended Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, McCollum and his girlfriend, Elise—now his wife—weren’t exactly wine aficionados. “I didn’t really like the taste of it,” McCollum says. “My palate wasn’t developed yet.” After they turned 21, Elise’s parents gave the two abottle of Merlot, and aseed wasplanted.Duringtheirsenioryear, it grew a little, primarily at Elise’s behest. “We’d go out to dinner and I’d order a glass and he’d go, ‘Okay, I’ll have what she’s having,’” Elise says.
That changed after the Blazers drafted McCollum10thoverall in2013.The6-foot-3 guard from Canton, Ohio, headed west to live in a city that’s near one of the country’s great Pinot Noir–producing regions, and he would eventually take full advantage.
Across the Willamette River from the Moda Center, where the Blazers play their home games, RingSide Steakhouse has been around since 1944. It’s the kind of place where even the mashed potatoes are madewithlobster,bartenderswear bowties and the wine cellar’s inventory stretches to nearly 1,000 labels. After home games, McCollum would regularly cozy up to the RingSide bar, either with a teammate or by himself. In his second season as a pro, he was still new to wine, open to suggestions and happy to chat with his server about what he should drink. He had an affinity for laid-back, lighter-bodied selections, and one day in2014 hecameacrossWalterScott on the list and thought he’d give it a try. It proved to be an epiphany.
“I’ll never forget it. It shook my outlook onwineandwhatthevinescouldproduce,” McCollum says.
When he drank the Walter Scott Pinot from the Eola-Amity Hills sub-appellation about an hour outside Portland, he was taken with the smooth, elegant character of a wine grown in volcanic soil. His curiosity became an obsession. “That was when I started filling up my cellar, started understanding regions and started watching Netflix documentaries and going down a rabbit hole,” he says, dressed in a crisp whiteThomBrownedressshirtwithitssignature red, white and blue grosgrain armbands. His in-home cellar now has around 600 bottles, and he’s looking for additional off-site storage as his collection grows. He has stocked up on his birth-year bottles from Adelsheim, some Screaming Eagle, a 1985 Chateaux Margaux and some “Super Tuscans,” including selections from Solaia. Yet his heart is firmly planted in Oregon.
Early in his journey, McCollum became a fixture at tasting rooms in the area and joined so many wine clubs that his house was inundated with bottles all at once, to the point that he had to work with vineyards to stagger deliveries.
In the Oregon wine country, he found a group of people willing to feed his inquisitiveness. “There’s not a sense of proprietary information here. I think everyone is very giving with what they’ve learned,” says Adelsheim winemaker Gina Hennen. “I’ve not really come across that in any other wine region in the world.”
Hennen herself came to wine as an outsider, leaving a career in micro-electronics engineeringandreturning toOregon,where she went to college, to pursue a passion for winemaking. She loved applying her science background to something other than computer processors, instead turning grapes into wine while also embracing the artistry that couldn’t be governed by science.
For McCollum, the community drew him in as much as the wine. “Meeting some of the somms, winemakers and people who love wine the way I love basketball, it was this whole new world that I was exposed to,” he says with a reverent laugh. “There’s a lot of parallels between sports and people in the wine industry
“It shook my
outlook on wine and what the vines could produce.”
because you want to perfect your sport, but itnevertrulyhappens.Yougetreallygood at it, but there’s still some things that you may notknow.Wineisasimilarthing,where you can learn a lot and still not know anything.”
The Blazers celebrated the team’s 50th anniversary in 2020, and to commemorate the milestone, the club partnered with Adelsheim for apair of limited-edition wines. Intheprocess ofmakingthem,Hennen and her colleagues heard that McCollum was interested in the wine business— and even in making his own someday—so they approached him about a partnership. Neithersidewantedsomehands-offlicensing agreement.
“Weweremuchmoreinterestedtowork with someone who really wanted to learn the process and to work with us, and not justputhisname onit—someonewith areal investmentandstake inwhatthey’redoing,” Hennen says. She found that dedication in McCollum, who, like so many other NBA players, is determined to use his platform to build a business that will survive well past his playing days. In Adelsheim, McCollum saw a winery that would collaborate and teach him all aspects of the enterprise.
He visited the winery multiple times, touring the facilities and walking the vineyards, located about 30 miles outside of Portland. “It was like a crash course—a Wine 101,” McCollum says. “I always tell them to explain things to me in layman’s terms so I can understand, but then also give me the wine lingo you’d normally use with your peers.” It all led to a tasting at Adelsheim’s wine lab, to really suss out McCollum’s palate.
Hennenmadeeightsampleblends from various barrels of 2018 vintage that were starting to take shape but were far from finished. As McCollum sipped each glass blind, he described their characteristics before sliding his preferences to one side. The trio he chose were the only examples made from vines planted in volcanic soil, the particular style he’d sought out since he had drunk that Walter Scott Pinot.
“He had interesting things to say with all of them, but he really gravitated toward certain wine styles,” Hennen says. “He was looking for more pristine red fruit and the elegant structure that you can often get from volcanic soil in the Willamette Valley. It was attention-grabbing. I was immediately aware of how invested and how serious he was in developing a wine.”
After consultations with McCollum, Hennen got to work selecting barrels from three contiguous vineyards in the Chehalem Mountains—Boulder Bluff, Quarter Mile Lane and Bryan Creek—to blend into the final wine. All three grow Pinot Noir in volcanic soil, but each contributes a different characteristic. From Bryan Creek she drew on the taut and structural qualities of the grapes as the backbone of the wine. Because up to 25 percent of Quarter Mile Lane is fermented whole cluster, the tannin of the grape is accentuated, giving the wine its subtle grip. Boulder Bluff provided rich, plush textures and deep red-fruit qualities. Thewineagedfor 10months inFrench-oak barrels, with only 26 percent new, so as not to overwhelm the subtlety of the Pinot.
The team had atasting together to finalizetheformula,andthen it wastime towait. “That’sthescarypart,”McCollumsays.“I’m tasting awine that’s not done yet, so I’ve got toput myfaith inGina.I’mputting myname on this, so Iwant to make sure it’s right.” In the meantime, he dived into other aspects of producing his first vintage, speaking with people outside Adelsheim as well—such as
Lloyd Davis of the Sonoma winery Corner 103—to get advice, including on adding some personal touches to the branding. McCollum created a name that nods to his birth year and the street he grew up on in Canton,designed alabelwith ananthurium, Elise’s favorite flower, on it and planned marketing efforts around the wine’s rollout.
McCollum mapped out the release in his head more than a year in advance and targeted a date in September 2020, to avoid conflicts with the basketball season. “We had a black-tie affair [planned], events where we’d raise money for charity and a lot of other ideas for a rollout where I’d be present in Oregon,” he says.
Covid-19 scuttled any dreams of a big gala. But the entrepreneurial McCollum saw adifferent way hecouldshowtheworld what he’d been up to.
TheNBAbubble was asocialexperiment we won’t likely ever see repeated. Beginning in July, four months after Covid-19 had abruptly put a halt to the season, a collection of some of the world’s most famous athletes isolated together at Disney, where contact with the outside world was so verboten that one player had to spend an extra 10 days in isolation because he stepped out of the resort’s bubble long enough to accept his Postmates food order. No one was leaving; no one was getting in.
Without friends or loved ones allowed until August 31, after the second round of the playoffs had begun, the only companionship the players, team staff and league officialshadforeightweeks waseachother. The isolation was taxing, but for McCollum itaffordedhimtime toblockoutthedistractions surrounding an NBA player’s life off the court. “We’ll never forget that bubble experience,” McCollum says. “It’s the only time in my life where I had one responsibility. You don’t have to worry about tickets. You don’t have to take pictures or sign autographs. There are no appearances. You just play basketball and then you sit. And it’s almost like you sit in stillness.”
The players had to fill all that downtime somehow. There were cards games, people fished on the resort’s lake, Miami Heat forward Jimmy Butler became a barista and sold coffee for $20 a cup, and there was wine. Lots of wine. The bubble turned out to betheperfectplacefor McCollum topromote his new label.
Oenophiliahadbeensweepingthe NBA for a few years. The league’s superstars, fromLeBronJamesandChrisPaul toSteph Curry and Carmelo Anthony, transformed wineappreciationinto asharedpassionand astatussymbolamongtheirpeers.“Now,no longer are people impressed by your finan
cial portfolio or how big your house is,” actor Gabrielle Union, who is married to retiredMiamiHeatstarDwyaneWade,told ESPN in 2018. “Nobody talks about square footage. Nobody talks about cars or jewelry or whatever. It’s who can bring the best bottle of wine.”
Bubble life was no different. Players and coaches arrived in Orlando with prized bottles, and whether they were unwinding after games, having dinner or just relaxing, gatherings revolved around wine. “If it was my off day, I’d get the ice bucket and the bubbly by the pool, and I’d send some to other players and they’d send something back,” McCollum says. “We had some elite grapes there. One night, Dame [Damian Lillard],Melo [Carmelo Anthony], Terry [Stotts, the Blazers’ head coach] and ourtrainerGeoffClarkhadsomeheavyhitters over dinner, including a 2014 Screaming Eagle.”
McCollum’s teammate Melo had a giant wine refrigerator delivered to his suite (“Let’s just say this wasn’t a 12-bottle fridge,” McCollum remembers with a laugh), but the lengths McCollum went to became stuff of legend in the bubble—and even surprised Elise. When ESPN reported that McCollum kept his room at a crisp 60 degrees to safeguard the wine he’d shipped to Orlando, Elise couldn’t believe it. “He hates the cold. I’ll walk into his hotel room inMiamiandit’ll be 80 degrees,” she says. “I