Is fine wine the NBA’s new status symbol? Pro basketball players are ditching shots of Patrón for bottles of Cabernet, showcasing their more sophisticated sides. “It’s a different NBA, for sure,” says Draymond Green.

Is fine wine the NBA’s new status symbol? Pro basketball players are ditching shots of Patrón for bottles of Cabernet, showcasing their more sophisticated sides. “It’s a different NBA, for sure,” says Draymond Green.

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.

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“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 Cavaliers power forward Kevin Love, too. When David Griffin, the Cleveland 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.”

Sydel Curry, left, Ayesha Curry the sister and wife of Warriors player Stephen Curry, debut their new wine: Domaine Curry Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2015 Sydel Curry, left, Ayesha Curry the sister and wife of Warriors player Stephen Curry, debut their new wine: Domaine Curry Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2015 Photo: Naomi Filipelli Photo: Naomi Filipelli Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close How fine wine became the NBA’s new status symbol 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

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 Watson, who with his father-in-law, Jayson Pahlmeyer, is a partner in D Wade Cellars, a label they launched with the Miami Heat star in 2014. The brand was originally envisioned to exploit Wade’s popularity in China; he has a lifetime contract with the Chinese apparel brand Li Ning.

Getting into the growing Chinese fine-wine market is helpful, but a partnership with Wade also represents the potential to earn another crucial customer base that’s woefully underrepresented in the wine world: black Americans. “It’s an opportunity to bring wine to a new marketplace, especially to an African American marketplace,” Watson says of the D Wade brand. “If we have an ability to educate a broader demographic about California wines and Dwyane can be an ambassador of that — that was the goal from the beginning.”

The Warriors management is complicit too, forming a partnership with a high-end Napa winery for the first time this year. Silver Oak Cellars will be creating a special-edition bottle of its 2014 Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon with Warriors branding, to be sold exclusively through the Warriors email list.

“You have a really active list there,” says Silver Oak marketing director Ian Leggat. “It makes a lot of sense for us and for the Warriors. We see a lot of Bay Area customers who are at the leading edge of wine tastes and are also really dedicated sports fans.” The partnership also involves rights to “content development,” which might involve, for instance, producing a video of coach Steve Kerr at the winery, says Leggat. And Silver Oak wines are likely to receive prominent placement at Oracle Arena.

Silver Oak has long been connected to the basketball world: Duke head coach Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski has called Silver Oak’s Cabernet Sauvignon his “girlfriend.” And in 2015, Lebron James and Draymond Green bet two cases of Silver Oak on the outcome of the Michigan State-Ohio State football game. When Green’s alma mater, Michigan State, prevailed, James made good on his wager by sending him 24 bottles of 2010 Silver Oak Napa Valley, more than $3,000 worth of wine.

“The competitive nature of wine appeals to these guys,” Griffin says. “They’re really intrigued by finding the smaller winery that’s doing the best stuff that nobody’s heard of.” Sure enough, after years of posting photos of well-known Silver Oak and Colgin on Instagram (often with the hashtag #vinochronicles), lately LeBron James has posted bottles from under-the-radar Napa wineries like Burly and Carte Blanche.

“LeBron, Carmelo, Chris Paul would all have these parties, and they would vote at the end about who had the best bottle of wine,” says Sparkloft Media account manager Dustin Hawes, who ran social media for the Portland Trailblazers from 2009 to 2014. “They do it to send a subtle message to their teammates.

“It’s like going out and buying a new pair of sneakers,” Hawes continues. “But wine has grown into one of the bigger status symbols.”

How did this all begin? Nearly everyone interviewed for this story traces the NBA’s wine obsession to one point of origin: legendary San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.

“Pop is somebody who’s really into players broadening their horizons, reading things they wouldn’t normally read,” says Griffin. According to him, Popovich, an investor in Oregon’s A to Z Wineworks, was the first NBA coach to instate mandatory team dinners when on the road. Players from other countries, like France-born Tony Parker, would be instructed to pick out bottles from their homeland to share with the team. That introduced the players to great food and wine — and also brought them closer together.

The team dinner tradition “has now really proliferated around the league,” Griffin says. “Kerr learned it from Pop and brought it to Phoenix, and I learned it from Kerr and took it to Cleveland.” Does every team do it? “Those of us who are winning do,” laughs Griffin.

Team bonding, he insists, is not a trivial matter: It translates to better chemistry on the court. And now, much of that bonding is happening at restaurants where players are competing over who can order the coolest bottle of wine that his teammates haven’t heard of.

As the coach of the USA national basketball team, Popovich’s influence expands beyond the Spurs roster to the NBA’s elite. Coach K, the Silver Oak diehard, was also a USA basketball coach. It’s certainly possible that a player like LeBron James could have been indoctrinated into fine wine through his time on the Olympic team (he has played on the team 11 times).

James’ Napa connections likely originated with his friends the Schottenstein family, billionaires from his home state of Ohio (and the benefactors of the basketball arena at Ohio State University, which counts James as its most enthusiastic fan). The Schottensteins own Mayacamas Vineyards.

“So you have a guy like LeBron, an elder statesman in the league, passing down his values, his love of wine,” Hawes says. “He passes that influence throughout the league. Then they have these team dinners. They’re taking wine tours before the season as a way to build team camaraderie.” Suddenly, it’s not just the older or retired players who are collecting wine — it’s the young players in their 20s, too.

“They all collect something,” Griffin says. “Everybody thinks these guys own a million cars. Damn near every one of them collects tennis shoes. But what’s now becoming more of the norm are the guys that collect wine. It’s becoming a thing. It’s been becoming a thing.”

Of course, wealthy people — a category that certainly includes professional athletes — have long enjoyed expensive wines. Roberts recalls his days working in Houston restaurants 20 years ago, when he frequently served Cristal Champagne to Shaquille O’Neal. (“Yo, little man, bring me two bottle of the Cris!” in Roberts’ recollection.) But until social media came along, nobody knew about it.

Before the advent of Instagram and Twitter, “the only coverage you got was on Sportscenter or the daily paper,” says Hawes. “The coverage was either about the game, or the player was in the news for something they probably shouldn’t have been in the news for.” No matter what, “they certainly weren’t going to write about a player’s hobbies.”

Now NBA players can broadcast their hobbies themselves. “They’re able to say, ‘This is who I am, this is my identity,’” Hawes says. “They’re in control of their media presence.” They can post about their family, their trip to Paris Fashion Week, their Halloween costume — and the wine on their dinner table.

Wine is a symbol of athletes’ newfound control over their own image, but that control has deeper implications beyond the ability to celebrate their hobbies. Consider how political the NBA has gotten — and how much commissioner Adam Silver has encouraged it. James campaigned with Hillary Clinton. Warriors coach Steve Kerr has condemned many policies of President Trump, mostly notably on gun control. The Sacramento Kings were among many NBA teams that headed get-out-the-vote efforts for this year’s midterms.

“It’s night and day when you look at the NBA compared to the NFL,” Hawes says. “Silver wants his athletes to take a stance.” He wants them to express who they are — as full, well-rounded individuals. In this respect, the evolution of wine culture in the NBA helps us track the evolution of NBA players themselves, from pigeonholed athletes to Renaissance men.

It helps us track the evolution of a culture of wellness within the league, too. “Wine represents a different way of taking care of your body,” says Adonal Foyle, who played for the Warriors for a decade beginning in 1997.

A wine collector since 2000, Foyle was doing yoga in an era when few players were even doing hamstring stretches. He was among the first Warriors to bring in his own physical and massage therapists, and he was also the older-brother figure who introduced many of his teammates to wine, recommending special bottles when they had dates lined up. (Retired since 2010, Foyle now keeps a nearly 900-bottle wine collection at his home in Orinda and has hosted more than 100 wine dinners at his home to benefit Bay Area charities, including his own Kerosene Lamp Foundation.)

Foyle sees the rising popularity of wine among basketball players as inextricable from the growing emphasis on health. “Around 2008, 2009, you started seeing guys get more involved with wine,” Foyle says, just as yoga and stretching suddenly became important. “Now everyone has nutrition coaches, cryo chambers, sleep trackers. They’re so much more attuned to their health.”

They’re also more attuned to their lives after basketball — and staying healthy is only one aspect of that. In a far cry from incidents like Antoine Walker filing for bankruptcy less than two years after retiring from a $180 million career, or Gilbert Arena’s claims of being penniless despite a $111 million contract, now players like Andre Iguodala are major investors in Silicon Valley startups. CJ McCollum, a journalism major at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, has a podcast and looks poised for a successful media career, should he ever leave basketball.

To those who have tasted wine with Love, Paul, James, Green and others, there’s little question that their interest in the intricacies of wine is genuine. But establishing a visible connection to wine also seems to provide a strategic advantage as these players build their celebrity off the court.

“It’s almost like golf used to be,” says Stanley. “People felt like you had to play golf because that’s where all the business deals were getting done. Well, now wine has become the center of that business culture.”

And Dwyane Wade, of course, is growing D Wade Cellars into a major wine business. “I love the game of basketball, but ultimately, there was a point in my career where I knew I had to think about my life after the game,” says Wade. “Wine is a big part of that.”

“Players know they can’t play forever, but there’s a loss of identity when they stop,” says Foyle, who is currently interviewing athletes about life after basketball for a book he is writing about transitions. “The search is finding identity beyond your sport.”

Draymond Green, for his part, does not rule out the possibility of getting into the wine business. Perched on a mat in the Oakland practice facility, he smiles mischievously when asked whether a side career in wine might be on his horizon. “It’s possible,” he says. “It’s definitely possible.”

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob