Kathie Lee bottles her enthusiasm
Her new wine line is a labor of love
Sitting down to a leisurely lunch with Kathie Lee Gifford means readying yourself for some rim shots. The kind she has been delivering since “I came out in the placenta.” And the kind she has been seemingly imbibing on air for nearly six years, since she and Hoda Kotb turned the fourth hour of Today into happy hour.
And often, those two kinds of rim shots, shtick and swill, mix. “Would you like to order some lunch?” she innocently asks her midday date. “Because we intend to get you drunk.” Ba-dum ching.
So it’s chardonnay-clear why Gifford would want to bottle and sell her well-documented (if “highly, highly exaggerated”) love for wine. Indeed, the key question is, “What took me so long?” she says, before breaking into song: “What kind of fool am I?”
Gifford is stationed in a Chianti-red vinyl banquette at Neary’s, her haunt for lunches of lamb chops and wedge salads for more than two decades. Parked on the table are two of her latest gifts to culture: Gifft chardonnay and a Gifft red blend. The wine, $20 a cork pop (er, screw top), launches Thursday.
But an unofficial tasting is afoot. And the stuff, grown and aged at the Scheid Family Wines vineyard in Monterey County, Calif. (she plans on donating 10% of the profits to charity), is darn drinkable, no lamb required. “I don’t like aftertastes, and I don’t like bitterness. I don’t like acidity,” says Gifford, 60. “I don’t want an interesting wine. I want an interesting novel. I want an interesting play.”
Gifford already has cultivated some fans among her famous friends. Kotb “loves” the red, as does Kotb’s small-screen predecessor in goading Gifford guffaws, Regis Philbin. “Regis doesn’t like wine. He drank three glasses” the other night, Gifford reports.
As natural as a union is between Gifford and fermented grapes, she does kvetch about “the image thing. Forty-five years in this business, I’ve done everything in the world but porn, but I’m known as the woman that starts drinking wine with Hoda at 10 a.m.
“The reality of it is this is my first sip today,” she swears. That glass in front of her on TV most mornings? “That sits as a prop basically, which says, ‘Come join the party.’ ”
Even though most of America is in on the joke, “I don’t want to be responsible for people drinking and driving. I don’t want to be responsible for people’s cirrhosis of the liver. I don’t want to be responsible for anything like that. I want people to use good judgment, just like I have to in my own life.”
As her companion puts rim to mouth yet again, Gifford can’t resist another rim shot — the verbal, vs. varietal, kind: “We’re certainly not encouraging people to start drinking wine at 10 a.m.” A beat. “Wait till 11:15. Kidding!”