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[url=http://www.getalifealready.com/cpf/archives/f1_t23.shtml]Willets - Scroll Down Here To December[/url]
]mlbaseballtalk
Dec 28 2005 05:17 PM
Sideways With Seaver
From the 12/28 Dinning section of the New York Times
]Warming Up in the Vineyard, Tom Terrific
By ERIC ASIMOV
Published: December 28, 2005
CALISTOGA, Calif.
WITH a cup of hot coffee, Tom Seaver took an early morning stroll recently through his secluded three-acre vineyard on Diamond Mountain just south of this rustic Napa Valley town. As he stared at the cabernet sauvignon vines, which had just been harvested of grapes the day before, he said, a sense of sadness and loss came over him.
"It was the weirdest feeling, like postpartum depression - I'd never had that feeling before," he said, looking at leaves now yellowing in the cool air. "There are 3,980 plants, and I've named every one of them."'
Almost 40 years have passed since Mr. Seaver first took the mound at Shea Stadium, back when the Mets were baseball's hapless losers. He led them to their first World Series victory in 1969 and won 311 games in his 20-year Hall of Fame career. Today, he's a little over his playing weight and more weathered in the face. The boyish Tom Terrific features are still there, but he wears a pair of pruning shears on his belt rather than a glove on his hand.
The intensity that fueled him on the mound now is focused on his hillside vineyard, 800 feet above the valley floor and framed by towering redwoods and the twisted, sculptural lines of manzanita trees. The 2005 harvest, to be released in three years, is the first vintage of what will, despite his reluctance, be called Seaver.
"I wanted to keep my name off of it, so the wine could make its own name," Mr. Seaver recalled. "My daughter said, 'Dad, you're not living forever. Your grandchildren will be running it one day. You're putting your name on it.' "
Tom Seaver is not the first celebrity to be drawn to the wine business. Some are born to it, like Gérard Depardieu, the French actor who came from a winemaking family. Others, like Francis Ford Coppola, the director, and Greg Norman, the golfer, are wine-loving entrepreneurs who have become serious businessmen.
Many, like Carlos Santana or Joe Montana, lend their name or marketing prowess to raise money for charities. And some are simply inscrutable, like Bob Dylan, who has signed his name without explanation to Planet Waves, a red wine made by Le Terrazze in the Marche region of Italy.
But few take as much pleasure as Mr. Seaver in the gritty, callous-building, hands-on labor of raising grapes.
With only three acres planted, Seaver wine will be a small business, which fits with the desire of its proprietor. Mr. Seaver predicts the first vintage will yield about 450 cases - 5,400 bottles - the equivalent of one of the smallest of Napa's cult wineries.
While plans for distributing the wine have not yet solidified, Mr. Seaver is already putting together a mailing list of potential buyers who he thinks will appreciate his efforts (GTS Vineyards, Box 888, Calistoga, Calif. 94515).
"I had a guy in New Jersey say, 'I'll take everything you have,' " he said. "That's not why I'm doing this. It's part of sharing the joy of creation."
The glamour of the wine business, the slick image-building that has made Napa Valley a synonym for a pseudo-Mediterranean Eden known as "the good life," holds little interest for him. For Mr. Seaver and his wife, Nancy, the idea of going out for a meal means not being seen at French Laundry but rather grabbing a sandwich in Calistoga with his dogs or maybe driving the pickup down to St. Helena for breakfast at Gillwoods.
"I must confess, my heart lies in the vineyard," he said. "This is where the physical stuff is."
Not that the Seavers are rubes or hermits. They live in a sleek contemporary house that practically fades into the hillside, designed by Kenneth Kao, a Boston architect. Its ruddy steel posts and copper roof mimic the color of the manzanita trees and redwoods, while the beige shotcrete walls seem to merge with the stony white of the soil. Inside, antiquities and colonial woodworks coexist happily with Bauhaus furniture and modern art. There's a wine cellar, of course, a vegetable garden and a greenhouse for Nancy, who is a serious gardener. But for sheer take-your-breath-away beauty, nothing compares with the spectacular, panoramic view of the northern Napa Valley, with Mount St. Helena looming in the distance, and Three Palms Vineyard down below.
When the Seavers first saw the land in 1998, it was 115 acres of trees and brush. "If you stood here, you couldn't see 15 feet," he said, standing behind the house, overlooking a terraced garden. "We never knew. The view exploded on us."
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Associated Press
Mr. Seaver in 1969, pitching for the Mets.
Forum: Wine and Spirits
Seaver grew up in Fresno, Calif., in the heart of the Central Valley, where his father was in the raisin business. Once, at the height of his baseball career, his brother-in-law asked him what he was going to do when it was all over.
"Off the top of my head, I said, 'I want to go back to California and raise grapes,' " he said. "I didn't know that much about it, except that's what I wanted to do."
That dream waited until their two daughters, Sarah and Annie, were out of college and the Seavers were ready to leave the renovated barn in Greenwich, Conn., where they had lived for 30 years. They settled on the appropriately named Diamond Mountain, a district known best for the tannic, concentrated cabernet sauvignons produced by Diamond Creek Vineyards.
Mr. Seaver had originally wanted to plant a vineyard close to his house, but Nancy preferred that the trucks and other vineyard equipment be out of sight. So he bought a couple of tree-covered slopes that face south and southeast, exactly the sort of land that winemakers dream about.
On the recommendation of Rusty Staub, his former teammate and a longtime wine lover, Mr. Seaver hired Jim Barbour as his vineyard manager.
"He said, 'How the hell did you find this? This is what people are searching all over for,' " Mr. Seaver recalled about Mr. Barbour's reaction to the vineyard's location. "It's pure luck that my wife said no."
He said he is not in the business for the money. He will not say what his investment has been other than that it will be seven years from the initial planting before the first bottle of wine is sold. But if the wine is good and people are willing to pay, say, $60 or more a bottle, a business like this can certainly be profitable.
Mr. Seaver discovered wine in his college days at the University of Southern California. But what really sparked his interest, he said, was a series of bicycle trips he and Nancy took in the off-seasons through the great wine areas of France and Italy. Ask him to name a memorable bottle and he says: "We were riding in Burgundy and we stopped at a farm. We asked if we could taste their wine - it was just small production. You buy a couple of bottles, put it in your bag and have it with dinner that night. There's nothing like it."
He allows that he particularly likes zinfandel. In fact, when it came time to plant his vineyard, he imagined it would be with zinfandel, at least until he raised the question with Mr. Barbour, who gently reminded him that Diamond Mountain was cabernet country.
"I wanted to do a zin, and Jim said, 'You have a place like this, you don't grow zin!' I said, 'Yes, sir!' "
The cabernet vines were all planted by 2002, and Mr. Seaver has been out there each step of the way, learning from the vineyard workers the delicate arts of pruning and trellising.
"Step by step, the learning process has fascinated me," he said. "I walk with them and it's like being in a classroom."
Mr. Seaver hired a winemaker, Thomas Brown, who also makes Outpost zinfandels, wines that Mr. Seaver has long admired. Mr. Brown will make the wine using the Outpost facilities. It didn't hurt that Mr. Brown's great-uncle is Bobby Richardson, who used to play second base for the Yankees.
As Mr. Seaver walks his property he seems to know every inch of terrain. He's mentally mapped the location of each tree that's caught his fancy, marveling at the way a manzanita has gnarled and arced its way out of the shadow of a Douglas fir, or at the aroma of a bay tree.
"You're in awe of the stuff," he said. "You realize how small you are, and in the sense of time, too."
If baseball brings out the little kid in a man, so apparently, do trees and vineyards. "The day he found this property he got poison oak climbing trees to see the vista," Rusty Staub said. "He's so locked into that vineyard. It was really a genius thing on his part."
Mr. Brown characterizes the wine, which has only recently completed its initial fermentation, as extreme. "It's a wine that seems to have a lot of baby fat," he said. "It's super, super dark and just very, very dense." Most likely, he said, the 2005 will not be bottled until the spring of 2007 and not released for another year after that.
Mr. Seaver said the only direction he's given Mr. Barbour and Mr. Brown is to do the best they can with what the vineyard offers. "I don't care about quantity, and I don't care about making the best wine in the world," he said. "I just want to make the best wine we can from that vineyard."
ScarletKnight41
Dec 28 2005 05:21 PM
Now I know what I'm buying for my parents for Chanukah 2008 - a bottle of Seaver wine (says the woman who bought them Nolan Ryan beef this year). |
Does this refresh your memory?
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