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How Jimmy Butler Built One of the NBA’s Most Impressive Wine Collections
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- How Jimmy Butler Built One of the NBA’s Most Impressive Wine Collections
(Avery Hall)
This story is from an installment of The Oeno Files , our weekly insider newsletter to the world of fine wine. Sign up here.
Great athletes have been known to remember the minute details of games in the distant past with uncommon clarity. NBA star Jimmy Butler can tell you to the day when he first had a sip of wine, what it was, and who he drank it with. In the years since, he has grown his collection to about 11,000 bottles, including 7,500 in a custom-designed cellar at his off-season home in San Diego. Currently with the Golden State Warriors, the Tomball, Texas, native has played across the league for the past 14 years but prefers to spend his downtime in the vineyards of Europe, especially Bolgheri, Bordeaux , and Burgundy—though he does plan to spend more time Napa now that it's just a drive from his new team.
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Butler has the most interesting oenophile origin story we have ever heard. While many other wine lovers can be vague on the details of what first brought them to the fruit of the vine, the Olympic gold medalist answers with certainty. "I can tell you the damn day that I started drinking wine," he tells Robb Report . "I started drinking wine on September the 14th of 2013." The occasion? Butler's 24th birthday, but it was far more than just a celebratory bottle. "On September the 13th of 2013, Mark Wahlberg was in Chicago shooting Transformers, and you know, he does travel with the entourage, it's not just a show," Butler says. "They contacted the Chicago Bulls because they wanted to play basketball at the practice facility, so he comes in, he looks at all the pictures on the wall of the headshots of the players, and to this day I still don't understand why he chose to play basketball with me."
After shooting hoops, the actor invited Butler to visit the movie set the following day. "The next day was my birthday, so I show up on set and he yells 'Cut,' comes over, gives me a hug, we start throwing a football around, and he says, 'Come to my trailer real quick.' So, we get into his trailer and he pulls out the Rimowa wine case, the one that holds six bottles, and he pulls out a bottle of 2010 Sassicaia . So, this is the very first wine that I ever had, so I'm biased. I am so biased; Sassicaia is my favorite, I mean, come on, the very first time you ever drink wine in your life happened to be on your birthday, with the Mark Wahlberg," he continues. "He opens the bottle and asks me, 'Jimmy, do you drink wine?' And I'm not going to lie to the man, I was like, 'No,' and then the dude from the Bulls nudged me and said, 'Motherf****r, if Mark Wahlberg asks if you drink wine, you drink wine.' And I was all, 'Okay, yeah, I don't mind it.'"
Butler's home wine cellar is an impressive one.
The next bottle on the docket was Château Lynch-Bages 2010, and Butler enjoyed the experience so much that he went to his local Binny's the next day to pick up a few bottles, which didn't go exactly as planned. "So, when I go into the store, they know who I am, but they don't realize I don't have a max contract," he says. "They just see NBA player and they think I'm making 10 billion dollars, which I don't, or I damn sure didn't at the time." As the cashier rang up his purchase, the sticker shock hit hard. "You have to realize I've never bought wine, I've never drank wine, and the total came up, and I was thinking, 'Man, just put that stuff back and let me go home.' I had no idea how expensive the wine I was drinking was or how expensive that habit would be to this day." He pauses and adds, without any traces of regret, "But that's where it all started."
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Fascinated with the beverage that had just entered his life in a big way, Butler began studying wine to fill in the blanks on different varieties, the best regions, finest vintages, and the stories behind the bottles. "It's all so interesting, but there is not enough time in one lifetime or even 10 lifetimes to figure out everything," he says, pointing out that within two years of that first sip he had become a collector.
Remaining grateful to Wahlberg for sharing not just wine but his passion for it, Butler enjoys exposing others to the bottles in his cellar. "Whenever I have these wine dinners, I like to share my wine with people who don't get the opportunity to drink wine like this," he says. "Not only that, it will give them a memory like, 'Man, I don't know what that bottle was, but I can remember every single conversation we had while we were drinking that bottle or what year it was."
In addition to teammates, Butler regularly opens bottles for his trainers, old friends from high school, and college students who help with his workouts. With a deep cellar that includes every vintage of Sassicaia and bottles of several favorites going back to 1940, Butler can create memories with a single pour: "I ask, 'Hey, what year were you born? What year did you graduate high school? What year did you graduate college? What year did you do this?' And alright, that's the bottle we're going to drink, I've got the perfect one for you, boom, boom, boom." Butler is doing more than just trying to impress people; he is interested in sharing the passion he has for wine. He does it "just so they can get a grip on how I feel every time I open one of these bottles and it's a special year for a special occasion."
Butler also has an affection for a different beverage.
While his cellar runs deep in Sassicaia and Bordeaux labels like Lynch-Bages, Château Margaux, Petrus , Lafitte, Montrose, and "that other one where I got the big bottle, Cos d'Estournel," Butler enjoys other categories as well, including bottles from Australia, Spain, and South Africa. He's not much of a white-wine drinker but likes Château d'Yquem, and during a trip to Argentina he learned about Château Cheval Blanc's sister property, Terrazas de los Andes, and went on a Malbec tear for several months. "I was in Argentina for All-Star break, I was in Buenos Aires, we were going to all the restaurants, and I was like, 'Hey, I need this wine, I need this wine, can you all show me some good Argentine wines, please?' And my mind was completely blown," he says. "I started buying all Argentine wines for six or seven months straight."
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Just as he "blames" Wahlberg for getting him into wine, Butler says it was his former Philadelphia 76ers teammate (and current Lakers coach) JJ Redick's fault that he developed a taste for Pinot Noir and started collecting Burgundy as well, which he first got into on a trip to the region. "In Burgundy, there's really nothing else to do unless you want to go to Dijon and try some mustard," Butler says. "It was like, you're just sitting there and you've got nothing but time, opportunity, and space, and you're just talking and going through bottles on top of bottles." Comparing it to Bordeaux, which he feels is much heavier, Butler enjoys the lightness of Burgundian Pinot Noir. "In Burgundy I just kept getting a second and third and fourth wind to just keep going," he says.
Although wine is just a hobby for him, albeit a serious one, he has ventured into the business side of one of his other passions, coffee. He launched his Bigface coffee brand in his hotel room in Orlando during the 2021 NBA bubble and now has a brick-and-mortar café in Miami's Design District. While he hints that more may be coming overseas sometime soon, he's purposely mum on details. Butler believes wine and coffee have a lot in common both in their conviviality and the wide variety of expressions available. "When I tell you that wine is something that can be shared with everybody, so can coffee. When I tell you that you can have some incredible conversations over wine, same thing can be had with coffee," he says. "I get to have incredible stories and conversations and memories that are being built through coffee and then we can double back and do it again at night over a glass of wine or two." Short of visiting Wahlberg on set and sipping Sassicaia in his trailer, that sounds like the perfect day.
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