Ask any hockey player about his sophisticated wine palate, and his tooth-less smile will say it all.

Over the last 20 years, hockey culture has shifted from one of beer drinkers to one of wine connoisseurs. In one of those strange-but-true phenomena, the toughest sport in the world now prefers a good cab over a Bud Light.

“That’s all we could afford was beer,” Bruins president and NHL Hall of Famer Cam Neely said with a laugh about the drink of choice during his era.

Times have changed. Now making more money and possessing more refined tastes, the days of swilling beers after practice or a game have come and gone, replaced by sips from expensive bottles at pricey road dinners. A popular destination for traveling players during the season is Barberian’s Steak House in Toronto. The family-owned restaurant boasts one of Canada’s largest wine cellars, with over 15,000 bottles. Owner Arron Barberian is a huge sports fan and has witnessed the cultural change in the hockey world.

“With bigger contracts players can afford finer things, and they started eating at finer restaurants, and all of a sudden fine wine became a thing,” Barberian said, adding that the influx of players from all over the world has made the scene more cosmopolitan as well.

Social media has changed the landscape, too. Players would rather be “seen” in public with a glass of wine rather than pounding beers. Fitness also plays a role. They would rather drink lesser amounts of higher-quality libations than chug pints of empty-calorie beer during the season.

Barberian also believes there’s an on-ice reason for the shift.

“I don’t see many players drinking to get drunk anymore,” Barberian said. “When there was fighting in the NHL, and the injuries were different, I think some of the guys drank away their pain. We used to see some players come in here and get hammered. It wasn’t pretty.”

Some of it is a change witnessed across the larger culture. Just as the three-martini business lunch has become a relic of a bygone era, so has the three (to-six) beer hockey lunch. It used to be that players would finish morning or early afternoon practice and go straight to a local bar. Now, players have all the amenities at the rink. They’ll eat as a team, before home and road games, and the meals are prepared under the watchful eyes of the team nutritionist.

“We used to go to the Ground Round or Fridays,” said former NHL player and current scout Kevin Stevens, who is sober now after grappling with substance abuse issues. “There would be 15 of us and we would have lunch, but the whole culture has changed. It’s all good. It’s more of a business now. They still have their fun, but we were making $150- $200,000 and thought we were doing pretty good.”

The Montreal Canadiens’ Jeff Petry is your typical hockey player, a grinder from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He never thought of himself as a wine guy, but that changed when he began his NHL career with the Edmonton Oilers. When he went to dinner with some older teammates, they’d order a bottle; Petry would politely decline a glass. But once he tried it, he was hooked, by the drink as well as by the production process. In fact, during the 2010 Olympic break, he took his wife to Napa for the first time.

“I’ve been back two times since then,” he said. “It’s just my happy place out there. Good food, good wine, I find the end product great, obviously, but when you go to the smaller wineries and you talk to the winemaker and owner you start to learn a lot about what actually goes into it. It’s actually amazing.”

In that regard, west coast teams are spoiled. Not only for the terrific weather, but many of the world’s best wineries are a saucer pass away, as San Jose Sharks forward Logan Couture can attest.

“I wasn’t a wine guy before (coming to San Jose), but when you do, you kind of have to,” he chuckled. “Napa’s right there and every team comes through at least once a year, right? We do a wine event, our team does, and we get to meet a lot of people who own wineries. (Brent Burns) has a lot of great connections up in Napa, whenever we get a couple of days off a lot of guys make the drive; it’s only two hours.”

Many former players are known for their taste in wine. Once a hobby, retired goalie Cam Ward now owns a winery, as does Wayne Gretzky. But, if there was a Stanley Cup for wine connoisseurs, one player would raise it each year.

“Mario Lemieux comes to mind,” Barberian said. “He’s one of the great collectors. The most sophisticated guy in sport, as far as wine, is (former MLB pitcher) Orel Hershiser. He really knows his great wines and is a great wine connoisseur. In hockey, it’s Mario. He stands head and shoulders above everybody else. Marty Brodeur is a great wine drinker and great guy, too. Wayne drinks some good stuff.”

Gretzy promoting his WG Estates No. 99 wines. (Rick Eglinton/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Stevens was a longtime teammate of Lemieux’s during their respective careers with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the late 80s and early 90s.

“He has a huge wine cellar,” Stevens said. “He would have a beer, but he liked wine. The best thing about (today’s game) is you go out of town, hang at the best restaurants, eat, have a couple of glasses of wine, go to bed and then play a game. It’s pretty good. It was different back then but this is a good life for these guys.”

That more measured style isn’t just a generational shift. It’s a result of a hockey culture that prioritizes taking care of one’s body at all times. Players put extreme effort into maximizing their bodies as performance machines; why wreck that work with a 12-pack of Natty Lite?

Players are tested often for their body fat index, so sporting a beer belly is not exactly conducive to a long career.

“Beer is way fatter than wine, so you’ve got to watch out,” said Bruins forward David Pastrnak.

“I go with a lot more wine in the summer because that’s when you don’t burn so much, so the beer is way heavier for you in the summer,” Pastrnak said. “During the season I definitely have a couple of beers (rather) than a glass of wine, but in the summer I have wine with sparkling water because it’s way lighter.”

Mark Recchi, a three-time Stanley Cup champion with the Penguins, Hurricanes and Bruins, told Patrice Bergeron if he wanted to extend his career then he should start drinking more wine.

“Absolutely,” Recchi said with a laugh. “I’ve been telling him that for 10 years.”

Many of the players today drink popular wines, or label wines, as Barberian explained, but their knowledge doesn’t always get an A-plus.

“They love the big California wines, but their level of sophistication isn’t there around Burgundy and Bordeaux. They tend to drink some fancy Italian wines, the labels that are well known, the premium Napa wines,” he said.

The most expensive bottle Barberian sold to a player cost $4,000, which was a ’61 Bordeaux to honor his father’s birth year.

“That name will remain anonymous,” Barberian said.

The wine cellar at Barberian’s. (Joe McDonald photo)

Barberian remembers once a non-English speaking Maple Leaf rookie accidentally purchased a $900 bottle of wine while dining at the restaurant because he couldn’t read the menu.

“My staff was excited to open this fancy bottle of wine,” Barberian remembers. “He kind of gulped and paid the bill and it wasn’t until seven or eight years later when he told me the story. He said, ‘I was pointing to the $50 bottle of wine.’ His English is much better now and I’ve bought him many great bottles of wine since.”

That kind of mixup is by no means a unique situation. Pastrnak recalled, somewhat sheepishly, that most he’s spent on a bottle of wine was at an auction for fellow Czech NHL player Jakub Voracek of the Flyers, whose sister has Multiple Sclerosis.

Pastrnak began bidding on an expensive item, one he believed was a high-end bottle of champagne. It was only after he won the bid that he realized he’d spent $3,000 on a 13-liter bottle of wine.

“I was like, “Oh, my God. I thought it was champagne.’ It was kind of by mistake but it was for a good cause,” Pastrnak said with a smile.

How did that $3,000 bottle taste? Pastrnak will never know. He didn’t get the chance to drink it, to share it with friends, to tell fellow hockey-playing wine aficionados how good it was; the cork was accidentally opened, and the wine went bad before Pastrnak could get a sip.

The Athletic’s Sean Gordon contributed to this story.

(Top photo: Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images)