Remember when basketball players were heroes and there were no scandalous court cases and egos were kept in check and you wore your Lakers 3-Peat shirt with pride? (Man, I loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.)
I'm not going to pretend I know a lot about basketball. I don't even watch it anymore. And I'm not exactly the biggest sports fan. But it does seem to me that things have changed, and the game is showier now, less "gentlemanly" -- kind of like the way many of today's wines are: big, brash, muscular, in-your-face.
So it's interesting that Larry Bird has a wine. Called Legends, the wine is a collaboration with Cosentino. And it has a basketball on the label. I picked up a bottle of the Legends 2004 Merlot at the last Merlot in May tasting. (It's like this unspoken rule that after a tasting is done, whoever is pouring can trade any leftover wine with another winery. Cosentino traded us for a bottle of our 03 Merlot, and I ended up taking home the Legends.)
I wasn't sure what to expect. Would this be a huge, alcoholic fruit bomb? Or something entirely different? Would the wine even be good, or are people just riding on Larry Bird's name for sales? I mean, what kind of wine does Larry Bird even like to drink?
We opened it last night with dinner. Immediately, I got lots of strawberry on the nose. In the mouth, the wine was fairly light-bodied, much lighter than I would expect from Merlot, which led me to believe that it was made to be more of an "elegant" type of wine rather than a huge red monster (alcohol was only 13.5 percent, which was nice). Unfortunately, I probably should've waited at least another year to drink the Legends, or used a decanter (both of mine need a serious cleaning) because it was very, very young and still very tight. (We haven't even released our 04 Merlot yet, so I'm surprised that this wine was already available last May.) Also, I wanted a longer finish than I got and a tad more complexity. Still, it was decent. And I had fun tasting it. And that's what really counts, right?
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No, what really counts is that I never wore a Lakers 3-Peat tshirt. I wore a Bulls one . . . twice . . .in the 90s. Which, if anyone remembers was better than the Lakers' 5 titles in the 80s. Did anyone also notice that my boys are tied for 9th overall (out of 30) so far this year? And 3rd in the East? Word.
And I'm guessing the only reason marketing guru MJ doesn't have his own wine is because Jordan winery has already been around since 1972 in Sonoma . . . thus the name is already taken.
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