The NBA Has a Drinking Problem. It’s Burgundy.

Forget Champagne in the locker room. The NBA’s drink of choice has become considerably more complicated—and probably needs decanting in a particular wine glass.

Over the past two decades, wine has quietly become part of basketball culture. Players swap bottles, visit vineyards, debate vintages and develop the sort of opinions about Burgundy that can make otherwise reasonable people unbearable at dinner. And few have carried the corkscrew quite as enthusiastically as Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James and Jimmy Butler.

Carmelo Anthony was early to the party.

While playing for the Denver Nuggets in the 2000s, Anthony began seriously exploring wine at a time when, as he later recalled, there wasn’t much of a wine culture around basketball or in his wider community. Soon he was pulling friends including LeBron James and Chris Paul down the rabbit hole.

And wine is nothing if not a rabbit hole with expensive snacks.

Anthony eventually went from drinking it to making it. With longtime business partner Asani Swann Benjamin, he founded VII(N) The Seventh Estate, launching with Oath of Fidelity, a 2017 Châteauneuf-du-Pape made with Rhône winemaker Stéphane Usseglio. More significantly, Anthony and Swann have talked about creating greater representation in an industry that hasn’t historically been famous for its diversity.

If Anthony helped pour the first glass, LeBron James brought the megaphone.

LeBron’ enthusiasm for wine is now almost as well documented as his enthusiasm for being extremely good at basketball. Very possibly an understatement as is that beard. He's so much into wine he brought his own bottle of Napa Valley's Opus One to game 4 of the playoffs in 2024. Talk about a respect flex.   

In 2017, he posted a bottle of Jordan Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon on social media and interest in the wine surged. Months later, members of the Cleveland Cavaliers visited Mayacamas Vineyards in Napa, touring the cellar and peppering the winemakers with questions.

That distinction matters. This wasn’t simply very rich men ordering very expensive bottles because they could. They were curious. They wanted to understand regions, producers, vintages and why one Cabernet tasted completely different from another.

In other words, they had become wine people. There was no going back.

Jimmy Butler has fallen similarly deep into the cellar. He has spoken about wine’s seemingly endless capacity for discovery—the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who has confidently learned the difference between Bordeaux and Burgundy only to discover that Burgundy alone may require several additional lifetimes.

That curiosity might explain why wine fits basketball culture surprisingly well.

NBA players spend careers obsessing over tiny details. Foot placement matters. Angles matter. Repetition matters. One small adjustment can transform the result. Winemakers, contemplating soil composition and whether picking grapes three days earlier altered an entire vintage, can probably relate.

There’s also something refreshingly un-wine-like about the way NBA players talk about Wine and we're here for it. Bottles are shared. Recommendations travel between teammates. Knowledge gets passed around. Nobody appears particularly concerned that enjoying wine requires permission from someone wearing a tastevin.

The league eventually caught up with its players. In 2024, the NBA named Kendall-Jackson its first official wine partner, formalizing a relationship its players had been cultivating for years.

But Anthony, LeBron and Butler have arguably done something more interesting. They’ve helped take wine out of the hushed tasting room and put it into contemporary culture—alongside sneakers, music, fashion and food.

They haven’t made wine less serious.

They’ve simply demonstrated that drinking it doesn’t have to be and that's what we're all about.