The Jimmy Butler wine collection, NBA star and personal friend Carlos Alcaraz

Jimmy Butler is an atypical NBA star. Throughout his sports career, dilated since he is already a 35 -year -old veteran with 14 campaigns behind him in the best basketball league in the world, he has always had a hard -kind reputation, a stereotype that does not fit, a priori, with his particular tastes. For example, he likes tennis that He has become a personal friend of Carlos Alcaraz Following a tournament in the United States where he wanted to see the Spanish tennis player in action. Since then, we have seen him in the stands in several important games encouraging the Murcia, who has even invited the box where he has his trusted team. But it is not tennis the most peculiar fans of Jimmy Butler, who these days look for the NBA ring with his new team – Miami said and signed half season by the Golden State Warriors of Stephen Curry – but the passion he feels for the world of wine, which has led him to have a private collection with more than 11,000 bottles. Above all, of French and Italian wines, with which he entertains his friends and guests when he is in his residence in San Diego, where Save about 7,500 bottles in a private winery spectacular.

These details have been shared by Jimmy Butler in a report with the media of his country Robb Report, which has been able to sneak into the basis of the basketball in California, precisely land of wine also, and state in which he now plays for the first time in his sports career Butler, which before reaching the Bay of Oakland, in San Francisco It was the star of the Chicago Bulls and the Miami Heat, team that captained a final of the NBA, the year of confinement (2020), which his team lost to the Lakers of LeBron James. Between both stages – six years each – also played a season at the Minnesota Timberwolves and the Philadelphia 76ers.

If yours is not the NBA, you may not know Jimmy Butler, harmed at the media level for being contemporary with one of the best generations of basketball players in the worldwith the aforementioned LeBron, James Harden, Kevin Durant or Stephen Curry, now Butler’s partner in the Warriors, among others. For this reason, and because it is important to place its journey in the League, we have summarized the curriculum of Jimmy Butler before confessing you – he has done, actually – where his passion for wine comes from. History has no waste.

The Hollywood star that “hooked” Butler to the wine

It was the year 2013 when Carlos Alcaraz’s now friend lived an experience that changed his life: Not drinking wine began to collect bottles from the best wineries on the planetmaking its private collection, with 11,000 bottles, in just over a decade.

That year, the NBA player was the young star of the Chicago Bulls. On September 13, one day before his birthday, Hollywood actor Mark Wahlberg was in the city of the wind rolling Transformers. The actor and his entourage contacted the Bulls – according to the version shared by Jimmy Butler himself in the aforementioned interview – to play in his team training facilities, choosing Butler himself to play a game with him.

Wahlberg invited Jimmy Butler to the filming set, and at a break he took him to his trailer – the private housing of the film stars in the filming – to invite him to a glass of wine. That wine was a 2010 Sassicaia, the first one who tested the basketball player and his favorite although he has later tried many more.

It is a wine from the Tuscan region that occurs at least with at least 80% of Cabernet Sauvignon and 20% of the red grapes typical of this area of ​​Italy rich in vineyards. In the private collection of Jimmy Butler, all the vintages of this Italian Dop Bolgheri wine are present, which gives name of a city located south of Livorno. A butler’s favorite wine bottle does not fall from 300 euros And, if it is one of its best vintages, you can shoot until the four figures are comfortably exceeded, as can be checked with a simple wine search in the Spanish market. Apparently, Jimmy Butler has between 500 and 600 of this wine in his power in his luxurious housing on the outskirts of San Diego.

Sassicaia, however, is not the only bottled jewel that keeps in the spectacular winery of its private mansion Jimmy Butler: also He is a great Burgundian wine fanFrench region in which he has even enjoyed holiday periods that he has taken advantage of to cultivate this passion for the oenology that processes by “guilt” of Mark Wahlberg – Bolgheri also visited in 2018.

According to Robb Report’s report, in the NBA star collection there is also some bottle of first -harvest burgundy wine and, among its Burgundy, it has oddities dating from 1940 onwards. Of the first, his favorite is the Château Lynch-Bagesa wine whose bottle is around 170 euros in our country although Jimmy Butler’s favorite, from the 2010 vintage, has a much higher market price.

There are also no other of the best French wines in their collection, such as Château Margaux, Petrus, Lafitte, Montrose or Château Cos d’Esournel, A burgundy wine that the NBA player took home in Magnum version – “Big Bottle,” in his textual words. Too bad not knowing the vintage of your purchase, since the price varies greatly depending on it.

We do not know either, although he confesses that he has them among its 11,000 bottles of wine, which Spanish wineries are represented in the Jimmy Butler collection, which also has bottles of wine produced in emerging markets such as Australia and South Africa.

With them, depending on some personal detail, delights and honors their guests. He confesses it in the pages of Robb Report: «I ask them: ‘Hey, what year did you be born? What year did you graduate from the institute? What year did you graduate from the university? What year did you do this? ‘ Well, that is the bottle that we are going to drink, I have the perfect one for you, bum, bum, bum! ‘«, He says.

Time will say if, as other sport stars have made, he invests in vineyards – Napa’s Californian valley has it now a little more than an hour by car from San Francisco – Jimmy Butler. At the moment, he has done so in other of its great gourmet passions, coffee. Butler has opened the first store in The Bigface, which combines cafeteria with clothing store. He has done it in the Design District, a city in which he took roots as a player of the Heat, where he stroked the NBA champion ring that resists him.

Do what does in the future in the world of wine (and coffee) Jimmy Butler, and wins or not a NBA champion ring, it is clear that throughout his career as a professional basketball player he has tuned his personal taste. If ten years ago he made a giant aquarium of almost three tons in the shape of RadioCassette Retro in his house in Chicago, it is now news for having one of the most spectacular (and elegant) private wineries in the world in his home on the outskirts of San Diego.