San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Baskets to bottles
How the NBA’s elite fell in love with Wine Country.
Draymond Green could have been training. He could have been on vacation anywhere — Bali, the Bahamas, the Amalfi Coast. Instead, the Golden State Warriors power forward chose to spend part of this summer’s offseason in Bordeaux, France, tasting some of the world’s finest wines.
“I really love wine, and I’m really into French wines — Bordeaux in particular,” Green says. After he and his girlfriend planned a visit to Paris in July, he didn’t hesitate to add on a side trip. “I can’t go to Paris and not go to Bordeaux!”
Sitting in the Warriors practice facility after a day of training camp, Green smiles nostalgically, remembering the trip. He recounts his visits to Petrus, Angelus, Cheval Blanc, Latour, Cos d’Estournel — some of the world’s most highly regarded wineries. And the most expensive: A case of 2000 Chateau Petrus sold at a September Sotheby’s auction for $51,660.
Green’s love of wine developed gradually, he says, initially because it felt like a healthier alternative to pounding spirits. “When you’re drinking wine you’re relaxing, kicking back, a glass or two,” he says. “It’s more than a young guy just trying to get hammered drinking. You outgrow that.”
Over time, though, wine has become something bigger than a wellness aid for him. “It became more of a hobby,” says Green, 28. “It’s more about actually tasting the wine, trying to figure out the differences in grapes, the difference between younger wines and older wines.” Fine wine and the NBA might have seemed like strange bedfellows just a few years ago, but today Green is hardly the league’s only oenophile. Carmelo Anthony travels with a six-bottle case of wine. Chris Paul is a fixture at Napa Valley wineries like
Colgin and Realm. Dwyane Wade has his own wine brand; so does Steph Curry’s family.
LeBron James is the face of this movement, swirling Burgundy glasses on his HBO show “The Shop” and posting to Instagram an enviable succession of bottles — Sassicaia, Quintarelli, Corison, Antica Terra. Green confirms that on a recent episode of “The Shop,” the red wine he and James were swirling in their glasses was Chateau Latour, though he can’t say whether it was James or his longtime sidekick Maverick Carter who brought the bottle.
“Wine’s really become a thing around the NBA,” Green remarks. Why? “I think more guys have started to tap into their bodies way more seriously than back in the day. A lot of guys just realize — it’s more about relaxing and chilling back, preparing for the next day, preparing to get better.”
In fact, “I think guys have become more sophisticated all around,” Green continues. “It’s a different NBA for sure.”
A different NBA. Increasingly, professional basketball players are more than just basketball players. They’re tech investors and businessmen. They’re activists. They’re on TV — not just to talk about sports, but to engage in hard-hitting discussions about what it means to be black in America. They’re personal brands.
Wine is simply the most visible emblem of this larger cultural shift. “These guys are evolving as men and in terms of how they want to be viewed by the general public,” says Travis Stanley, the Warriors’ former senior executive vice president of marketing and now the CEO of the Napa Chamber of Commerce. “They’ve settled down from the stereotypical way that people look at basketball players. They’re husbands and fathers. And I think wine has become a big part of that business and social society.”
If that basketball-player stereotype used to involve fancy Tequila and Lamborghinis, with wine it has taken a more cerebral turn in the arena of luxury goods. James, for example, “is a really knowledgeable wine drinker,” says Braiden Albrecht, winemaker at Napa’s Mayacamas, where the new Laker has visited multiple times. “He’s really interested in the process. He asks questions about how we get the barrels clean, why we don’t use new oak — his attention to detail is very impressive.”
“The player who’s most impressed me is Chris Paul,” says Paul Roberts, a master sommelier and COO of Colgin Cellars. “He’s come to visit Colgin with his wife. It was clear he understood not only wine, but also that he knows what he likes. He’s learned to trust his palate.” After the Houston Rockets point guard visited the winery, Roberts ran into him at Press restaurant in St. Helena, and saw that he had ordered a bottle of 2005 Colgin Cariad (currently $1,000 on the Press list).
Colgin is a favorite of Cleveland power forward Kevin Love, too. When David Griffin, the Cavaliers’ former general manager, recently ran into Love at training camp, Love urgently ran over to him. “The first thing Kevin wanted to show me was a photo of two magnums of 2007 Colgin that had just been shipped to his home,” Griffin says. “That’s the thing he wanted to talk to me about immediately. He takes incredible pride in this.” Right now Griffin and his wife, Meredith, who live in Sonoma, are helping Love and teammate Channing Frye organize trips to Wine Country with their friends.
All this affection from the NBA may appear like an answer to a prayer for elite wineries, whose customer bases have traditionally been overwhelmingly older and white. “Napa wineries would love to get their bottles in the hands of these guys,” says Stanley. “If an athlete like Draymond were to mention he’s at this winery or drinking this bottle of wine, they know what he’s doing for the brand.”
The California wine industry is cleverly capitalizing on the NBA’s wine craze — by trying to court players not only as customers, but also as business partners.
“Wine can be viewed as this elitist product, and a lot of basketball fans don’t have exposure to it,” says Jamie