Vintage performance: what’s behind NBA stars’ wine obsession?

LeBron James and JJ Redick's podcast contains in-depth basketball analysis - and plenty of oenophilia. They're not the only ones around the league

LeBron James could have chosen anything as a hobby to shepherd him into early middle age. He could have started collecting vintage cars or investing in startups or flying planes; he could have gotten into Texas-style barbecue and joined the massed ranks of American males who index their self-esteem to the quality of their smoke rings; he could have launched an alt-coin; he could have become a Roman Empire guy, a pizza geek, an amateur rancher, or a whisky bore. Instead he has developed a passion for wine. Nowhere is that passion on fuller display than in Mind the Game, James's new show with JJ Redick, which sees this colossus of the boards dissect - in sometimes bewilderingly wonkish detail - the great plays and tactical trends of modern basketball while pouring a series of fabulously expensive wines for the pair's on-screen delectation.

James, of course, is the perennial adult of American sport, an athlete who had the body of a man when he was still a boy and arrived in the NBA with all the elements of his mature game - the vision, the piano hands, the speed in transition and bulging power through the paint - seemingly already perfected. So it makes a rough kind of sense that he's chosen scholarly, contemplative, grown-up oenophilia - the most responsible form of adult irresponsibility, a pastime that educates while it intoxicates - as the signature off-court diversion of his twilight years in the NBA. The king of the court is now the king of the wine influencers.