I wrote a recent post on a long time music celebrity, Boz Scaggs who now has his own wine brand. In the article I explained how I was curious to find out if Mr. Scaggs had his own winery or was in the now common category of custom crush client. The reader responses I received were very positive. Many people were interested to hear other similar follow up stories. What other celebrities have gotten in on the wine game? This was a simple search to get an initial list of celebrities with wine brands. Not surprisingly there are many with an interest in wine and winemaking. Among them are actors Sam Neil and Dan Aykroyd, musicians Dave Matthews, Mick Fleetwood, and Olivia Newton John, and several from the sports arena, Joe Montana, Mike Ditka, Mario Andretti, Peggy Fleming, Greg Norman and Arnold Palmer. My next step to fully satisfy my curiosity about their level of involvement in the industry came from going to what is known as the Public COLA Registry on the TTB’s site. (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) Once there I only needed to fill in one box, the product description with in most cases just the celebrity’s name to get a complete list of labels that had been given approval. From that list you can look at the detailed information of the winery that bottled it. This is where I found my answer in regards to whether or not each celebrity actually owns their own winery. In most of the cases they do not, the winery name that was listed was one that I was already familiar with as an established facility with its own wine brands. From the list of celebrities listed above only four of them have an actual physical winery that you can go visit. They are: Sam Neil, Mario Andretti, Peggy Fleming, and Dave Matthews. All the others that were listed are either in a partnership with the bottling winery, or are a custom crush client at an established winery where they have their wines made and bottled. For anyone with an interest to find or purchase wines from the celebrities mentioned I would recommend doing a simple web search for their name followed by the word “wine” to then be lead to their website with all that information. For those interested in doing some wine label research here is the link to the TTB registry: https://www.ttbonline.gov/colasonline/publicSearchColasBasic.do

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