NBA star turned wine connoisseur, Carmelo Anthony, announced the launch of a global wine estate brand, VII(N) – The Seventh Estate, according to Haute Living.
Anthony’s venture into the wine business comes after he previously did a YouTube series “What’s in Your Glass?”
“My goal is not to rush, and to be here for a long time,” he shared in his cover story with Haute Living. “This is not something that can happen overnight. My goal is to get it right, make as few mistakes as I can, but make mistakes, because that’s how I’ll learn. I know that to start, it’s not going to be perfect. It may work, it may not, but that’s the wine game. My goal is to build a community in the wine space where we can interact with one another. We can talk, we can laugh and joke, we can sell wine, we can drink wine, and taste wine. My goal is to build my house. I’m going to build the Seventh Estate,” Anthony said.
Melo’s interest in the wine business is to bring more people of color into winemaking.
“For so long, Black winemakers haven’t gotten a fair shake; they haven’t gotten their shot. I’ve tasted some great wines by winemakers of color, and nobody’s really doing anything substantial in that lane. So that was a goal that we talked about constantly from the beginning, about what we want this brand to be and that was the first thing that came to mind. We have to support winemakers of color. We have to support smaller vineyards. We have to support these people who are really out there, hand and feet, picking and going into the fields all day long because they don’t have the resources to build teams and distribution.”
Carmelo Anthony, NBA Player
He continued: “I’m trying to bring eyeballs and awareness to a lot of these smaller winemakers, and winemakers of color at that, so I’m just creating a platform that maybe can jumpstart a lot of these smaller vineyards and give the winemakers grants. That may be phase two or three of our launch down the line, but it’s definitely something that’s on the drawing board for us.”
As with Anthony’s other branded projects (StayMe7o), VII(N) includes a reference to Anthony’s playing number, 7. The cuvée name, Oath of Fidelity, is a tribute to François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian general and revolutionary who led Haiti’s fight for independence from France in the 18th century; the oath refers to the promise Louverture, a hero of Anthony’s, asked his soldiers to take: to support freedom at the risk of their lives. In June 2021, Anthony was honored as the NBA’s inaugural Kareem Abdul-Jabaar Social Justice Champion.
