The five-time NBA champion, Hall of Famer, and winningest coach in league history didn’t just love wine — he weaponised it.
Last Updated: October 2026
When the San Antonio Spurs reached the NBA Finals this past June for the first time since 2014, the story was all about Victor Wembanyama — the generational seven-foot-four phenom who dragged the franchise back to relevance, and who beat the Thunder in a Game 7 classic on their own floor to get there.
But I kept thinking about the guy who wasn’t on the bench anymore.
Gregg Popovich — five championships, a Naismith Hall of Fame jacket, and more wins than any coach in league history — suffered a stroke in November 2024 and never returned to the sideline. Mitch Johnson took the team on an interim basis, and in May 2025 the handover became formal: Popovich stepped down after twenty-nine seasons and moved upstairs as president of basketball operations. Johnson guided the Spurs through that remarkable playoff run. But the culture Johnson inherited? That was all Pop.
And a surprising amount of it was built over wine.
The Napa Bug
Popovich caught the wine bug around 1970, back when a bottle from a good cellar cost a few dollars and tastings didn’t run $100 a pop (see what I did there). Fresh out of the Air Force Academy, he moved into an apartment in Napa with Michael Thiessen, an Academy basketball teammate a year ahead of him, and Thiessen’s wife Nancy. The two of them hadn’t been especially close at school. That changed in California.
In their spare time, hunting what Thiessen later called cheap fun, they worked their way through places that were about to become legendary — Stony Hill, Mayacamas, Ridge up in the Santa Cruz Mountains — and made pilgrimages to Corti Brothers, the Sacramento grocer whose wine buyer was quietly educating half of Northern California.
It stuck. By the time Pop became an NBA head coach in 1996, he wasn’t a casual wine drinker. He was a collector, a student, and — as his players would discover — a man with a plan.
The Wine Dinners That Built a Dynasty
When Pop took over the Spurs, he began building something nobody in professional sports had at that scale: a standing tradition of team dinners on the road, wine at the centre of them.
They weren’t compulsory, exactly. ESPN’s reporting describes invitations for staff as a given and invitations for everyone else as coveted, with a gentle gravitational pull one person called peer pressure. (“Sometimes, you just want to get a Shake Shack burger and go to the room.”) Whenever the schedule allowed, the Spurs would stay the night after a road game and fly out the next morning — not for the rest, but so they could eat together first.
Pop did the homework himself. He triangulates his research, examining the wine list and the menu before a reservation is made weeks, and sometimes months, in advance. It is all but impossible to arrive before him. He turns up early to make sure everything is in order — at one dinner asking that the reds be opened so they’d be ready by the main courses — and he raids his own cellar to fill the gaps, handing bottles to staffers to carry in.
One detail tells you most of what you need to know. Steve Kerr has pointed out that Popovich’s own table seats six, deliberately: small enough that the conversation stays whole and nobody splits off into a side discussion.
In the Bay Area the destination became Seven Hills, a sixteen-table Italian place in Nob Hill. The connection is better than the legend — a Cavaliers staffer who had previously worked for the Spurs recommended it during the 2015 Finals, and the room has been hard to book during NBA events ever since. (Cassie and I love that spot. Kudos, Pop.)
In Sacramento, things got out of hand in the best possible way.
A twenty-nine-year-old named Jeremy Threat, then general manager and wine director at Spataro Restaurant & Bar, had read up on Popovich’s tastes in Wine Spectator and decided to build a list worthy of the visit. He called a friend with a deep cellar, who turned up with roughly 120 bottles worth about $50,000, and from those Threat assembled a fifty-four-wine list: a 1990 Château d’Yquem, four vintages of Masseto, two of Ornellaia.
Popovich ordered ten bottles over dinner, then bought ten more to take with him. Spataro’s corporate office flagged the night as a probable computer error. “It shows you sold about $15,000 to $20,000 worth of wine at the end of the night,” they said, “and you’re not even open then.”
Threat’s verdict on the coach, having watched him work a list against professional sommeliers: “He was as knowledgeable, if not more knowledgeable, than the majority of them.” He went on to the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group.
The Il Gabbiano Move
The dinners weren’t only indulgences. They were infrastructure — and the proof came on the worst night of Popovich’s professional life.
Game 6 of the 2013 Finals. The Spurs were twenty-eight seconds from the title when Ray Allen’s corner three forced overtime and took it away from them. Popovich had already arranged a celebration at Il Gabbiano, on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. He sent the team anyway.
He rearranged the tables himself. He ordered the food and the wine. He stood at the door and greeted every single player as they came in, and then he worked the room for hours.
“I had never seen our team so broken” –Gregg Popovich
That’s Tony Parker. Brett Brown remembers Popovich saying one word to the room: “Family!” Chad Forcier, then an assistant, called it the most amazing display of leadership he had witnessed.
The Spurs lost that series in seven. They came back the following June and dismantled the same Miami team in five.
One former player, speaking anonymously, put the logic of the whole tradition plainly: “To take the time to slow down and truly dine with someone in this day and age…” Danny Green was more direct about what it bought them. “Dinners help us have a better understanding of each individual person.” Pau Gasol, who had seen a few locker rooms by the time he arrived: “I haven’t been a part of that anywhere else.”
The Château d’Yquem Obsession
If there is one bottle Popovich wants most of all, it is Château d’Yquem — the Sauternes from Bordeaux that most people save for a once-in-a-lifetime occasion. Pop doesn’t save it. He drinks it, and he drinks it at the end of the meal.
George Lobjanidze, a sommelier at Spruce in San Francisco between 2016 and 2019, put the pattern at “nine times out of 10, he would end with d’Yquem.” On one visit Popovich worked through a half-bottle of the 1990 alongside a burger — though not quite the burger you’re picturing, since this one came topped with seared foie gras and truffle. The sweet-and-savoury logic is the same one that puts Sauternes next to a wedge of Roquefort.
He doesn’t always reach for it. After a bad loss, ESPN noted, he has been known to wave it away.
I don’t know that he doesn’t know more about wine than he does about basketball.
That’s P.J. Carlesimo, his former assistant, and the double negative is doing exactly the work he intended. Popovich’s office at the Spurs’ practice facility looks not unlike a wine cellar, bottles scattered across it and cases stacked in the hallway outside. Boris Diaw, who won the 2014 title in that building, once came across a format of d’Yquem he reckoned was an Imperial — eight bottles in one piece of glass.
In early March 2022, Château d’Yquem’s estate manager Lorenzo Pasquini and LVMH’s Mathieu Jullien were in the United States showing the 2019 vintage. They detoured to San Antonio to meet the coach, and brought him a bottle of the 1949 — the year he was born. “For us, truly,” Pasquini said, “managers like him are very much an inspiration.”
Bobby Stuckey, the master sommelier whose Colorado restaurants have hosted Popovich more than once, needed six words for it: “They’re the perfect human-wine pairing.”
Pop’s Own Label: Rock & Hammer
Here’s the part most people don’t know. Popovich doesn’t only drink wine. He makes it.
Rock & Hammer is a Pinot Noir produced at Rex Hill, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The arrangement runs on two levels: the label is Popovich’s own, and he has been an investing partner since 2006 in A to Z Wineworks, the company that owns Rex Hill.
Production runs to about forty-five cases a year — five hundred and forty bottles, which is less than a decent restaurant pours of a house red in a month. It has never been sold commercially.
So how do you value something nobody can buy? In 2013 a single bottle of the 2011 reached the secondary market and went for $760.
In 2024 a complete vertical — every vintage from 2005 to 2017 — came up at ShuttleCork, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s annual fundraiser in Kansas City. It was billed as a once-in-a-lifetime lot, and for once that wasn’t marketing. Worth noting: no vintage after 2017 is publicly documented, so whether Rock & Hammer is still being made is anyone’s guess.
And more than fifty years on, Popovich still has the first bottle he and Michael Thiessen ever bought together.
The Legacy
Pop stepped away from the bench, but his fingerprints were all over the Spurs’ run to the 2026 Finals. The dinners may have evolved under Mitch Johnson. The culture underneath them — sitting down, breaking bread, pouring for the guy next to you — is Pop’s playbook.
The Knicks took the series in five and claimed their first title in fifty-three years. But somewhere in San Antonio, you can bet Pop was already working out where to take the team to dinner next season. And you can bet the reds were already open.
Like this piece? You might also enjoy our deep dive into baseball players who make wine — from Tom Seaver’s Diamond Mountain Cabernet to Dave Roberts’ Red Stitch Wine.
Have a Pop wine story of your own? Drop us a line at hello@thewinescribes.com.
