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Jalen Brunson had a question for T.J. McConnell, and it couldn’t wait until the end of the Knicks-Pacers game. So he asked it on the court, in the middle of play.
“Where the fuck is my wine?”
Five years earlier, in 2020, the NBA’s Orlando bubble brought together more than half the league to finish the season during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a byproduct of that close proximity, players across several teams often ended their nights drinking wine together. The gatherings were spearheaded by then-Pelicans guard JJ Redick, now the Lakers head coach, and CJ McCollum, who was on the Trail Blazers.
“The bubble was like summer camp for NBA players,” McCollum tells Front Office Sports. “It was 24-hour lockdown, essentially, where we’re around each other and you’re able to go to each other’s games when you’re not playing. Afterwards, it’s like hanging out in a dorm.”
But instead of tiny rooms littered with cheap beer cans, the participants—most of whom were older than 21—were staying in Disney resorts and drinking from pricey bottles.
The NBA is well removed from the odd shape of the 2020 season, yet the spirit of the late-night wine sessions lives through a bottle exchange that stretches across the league. It transcends rivalries and team loyalty. The swap also includes team attendants and coaches—and a select few members even get to trade with a certain Hall of Fame coach-turned-team-president in San Antonio.
Brunson caught onto the wine-exchange tradition when he saw a locker room attendant deliver wine to Knicks teammate Josh Hart from McConnell for the players’ quarterly exchange.
After Brunson’s trash talk on the court, McConnell started leaving Brunson bottles of wine, so he didn’t feel left out. Brunson hasn’t returned the favor, which means he’s not an official part of the exchange—and he’s even ribbed Hart for fraternizing with the enemy in his cross-team swaps. “Are you going to do that stupid wine exchange in the playoffs?” Brunson asked Hart multiple times throughout the regular season.
Of course Hart—and the rest of the wine club—did. He and McConnell are among the members of the NBA’s wine trade, a tradition that was born out of the camaraderie of the pandemic bubble. The wide-ranging wine swap has continued for a half-decade—but the ritual’s future is uncertain as young talent filters into the league.
In 1996, Gregg Popovich, the Spurs’ GM, named himself the team’s coach. He served wine at dinners to help develop chemistry among his players. Those outings are now considered legendary in NBA circles.
Carmelo Anthony is considered the first superstar oenophile after getting interested in wine while playing for the Nuggets in the mid-2000s. Team owner Stan Kroenke owns Screaming Eagle Winery and Vineyards. He hooked Anthony, who in turn, got his friends LeBron James and Chris Paul into it, too, as shown in their famous Banana Boat photo from 2015.
Hart, a rookie on the 2017–18 Lakers, recalls James bringing wine onto the team plane to share with teammates, explaining what they should be tasting. Today, multiple players have their own wineries and labels. McCollum launched his in 2020, as did former Cavaliers teammates Channing Frye and Kevin Love, who cofounded Chosen Family Wines.
The bubble only accelerated a growing trend. McCollum tells FOS he had roughly 500 bottles of Oregonian wine brought in, mostly his McCollum Heritage 91 label. Kings forward Doug McDermott tells FOS he remembers closing down Narcoossee’s, a restaurant at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort, which housed NBA teams in the bubble. Redick and McConnell opened more bottles in his room. Hart regularly joined them, along with McCollum, Anthony, and Russell Westbrook, forming the core of players who still regularly trade wine five years later.
“If there’s one good thing that came out of the bubble,” McConnell tells FOS, “it’s that we got to sit down and have some dinners and some wines.”
The formal exchange started shortly afterward. Two months after the bubble ended, the NBA began its truncated 72-game season in December 2020. The same players who drank into the early hours of the bubble started bringing their latest finds on the road to swap.
“With T.J., it was like, ‘Hey, this is what I’m drinking. I’ll bring you one,’” Hart tells FOS. “And he said, ‘O.K., perfect. You bring me one, I’ll bring you one,’ and it started from there.”
Hart, McConnell, McDermott, McCollum, and Cavaliers forward Larry Nance Jr. all regularly exchange wine with one another before their teams square off. Redick still participates as a coach; so does Magic coach Jamahl Mosley. Both Hart and McCollum regularly leave wine for Warriors coach Steve Kerr, a Popovich disciple.
How much does each player spend? It depends.
“I firmly believe that just because a bottle is $50 to $80 doesn’t mean you can’t find those hidden gems at that price,” McConnell says.
Over the course of an NBA season, McCollum estimates he leaves 75 bottles of wine from his own label, which retails for about $50. He says players regularly ask him in-game to ship them wine. “Someone will tell me, ‘You know I really like wine, you left it for [my teammate]—he actually doesn’t even take it seriously,’” McCollum says. “They’ll negotiate during the game and I’m like, ‘I got you next city.’”
Price point doesn’t matter as much to Nance, who swaps wine as cheap as Bonanza, a $20 cabernet sauvignon. “It’s killer,” he tells FOS. He says Caymus’s cabernet sauvignon, around $80, is “the general bottle of the NBA.” (Players who exchange with Redick know not to give him Caymus—he detests it. “It tastes like lentil soup,” Redick said in 2021 on his Old Man and the Three podcast.)
On a February episode of the Roommates Show, the podcast Hart cohosts with Brunson, Hart recalled an exchange with Redick last season after a Knicks-Lakers game in which he gifted the Lakers’ coach a bottle of Domaine des Lambrays Morey-Saint-Denis Cuvee Les Loups Premier Cru 2021, a French village wine that retails for around $200.
Redick, who has expensive taste, wasn’t impressed. “Huh,” Redick told Hart, “just a village wine?”
But the real NBA oenophile is Popovich. McDermott, who played three seasons for Popovich in San Antonio, said “it’s not common” to exchange with him. Popovich once left McConnell a bottle of Gaja, a rare Italian wine that typically retails for hundreds of dollars depending on its vintage.
Mosley—who regularly gifts players and coaches Orin Swift cabernet sauvignon, around $100—says exchanging with Popovich is a chore because his vast wine knowledge makes it hard to surprise him. “He’s tasted everything from every region, so you’re not going to wow him with a random one,” Mosley tells FOS. “You get him the best one you can find.”
While in the bubble, McCollum left Popovich some bottles of his own wine to try. He received a handwritten note from Popovich telling him he really liked it. Popovich also left McConnell bottles from A to Z Wineworks, an Oregon winery, in which he is an investor. McCollum still has the letter. “That was one of the coolest moments ever,” he says.
The wine exchange is a half-decade strong, but its future is uncertain. Most of the members are older than 30, and each player interviewed for this story said they’ve found their younger teammates to be less interested in learning about wine.
Both Mosley and McCollum, who now plays for the Wizards, are trying to plan tastings for their respective teams as a bonding experience. Perhaps it’ll get a few more players interested in wine—and the exchange.
But it’s also possible that the tradition may not endure simply because it’s impossible to replicate the experience in which it was forged. “Guys really bonded at the bubble over things like this because we didn’t have a whole lot of things to do,” McDermott says. “Other than play ball, occasionally play a round of golf and then at night we’d all kind of sit together and drink wine. I think we developed a chemistry off the court over a couple of bottles of wine.”
McConnell tells FOS he hopes the swap will continue beyond his and the other members’ playing careers. “But if it doesn’t,” he says, “it was a good run.”
