Golfer Cristie Kerr excels in the wine business, too

Kerr Cellars

LPGA Tour legend Cristie Kerr has mastered the fairways. At 48, she’s a 20-time winner and has victories in two majors. But she’s also long had a passion for the wine business. While playing in a tournament at Napa, California in 2000, she started learning all about wine, its history, geography and production. It triggered an obsession. Now a Level 1 Sommelier and founder of Kerr Cellars, Kerr says she’s studying for her next level of wine education, which is to become a certified specialist. She still competes on the LPGA Legends Tour, as well.

While conducting a dinner-and-wine pairing at Aviara Golf Club near San Diego last week, Kerr said that the golf and wine industries “are both equally super competitive. They’re ever-evolving, ever-changing. You have to read the landscape making wine just like you have to read the landscape playing golf. It’s a living, breathing thing. You have to read the conditions, and use your gut instinct. Some winemakers, all they go is off of formulas and scientific pH and acidity, all that kind of stuff. But our winemaker at Kerr Cellars, Helen Keplinger, is an artist. She'll make gut game-time decisions during harvest and she's never failed. It's amazing. So there are a lot of parallels between wine and golf, and obviously it can be very different as well. What's interesting to me is that once you start learning about wine, it becomes obsessive. And once you start learning about golf, it also becomes obsessive yet you realize how little you actually know about golf. It's kind of a never-ending quest to pursue perfection.”

For Kerr, the transition from the intense focus of professional golf to the social atmosphere of the wine world has been a welcome change of pace. In the peak of her career, she preferred a solitary, "inside the ropes" mentality to maintain her competitive edge. "I never wanted to see people, talk to people – I was super intense," she admits. "Wine is the opposite for me. I can share stories."

While she still tees it up competitively, her body’s felt the toll of a lifetime on the course. Having undergone two knee surgeries, Kerr notes that her left leg has lost some of its strength. However, she takes a healthy approach to the grind of the wine industry. After being invested in by Constellation Brands nearly six years ago, her brand grew quickly, putting labels like Sonoma Coast Chardonnay and Napa Valley Cabernet into wide distribution.

And she’s also focused on the personal touch. Her Napa tasting room sees significant traffic and her wine club is also robust. However, she views intimate events, like this dinner at Aviara, as an engine for growth. "We haven’t made it through the woods in the wine business yet, which is why every little bit helps," Kerr says. "You do a dinner for 25 people, they tell 25 people, they tell 25 people... it all adds up. Inevitably, if we have 1,000 wine club members each taking a case a year, we're sold out. We're halfway there."

Whether she's working on advancing her sommelier level or selecting the barrels that will influence the next vintage of her Bordeaux, Kerr applies the same obsessive drive that made her a top golfer. From reading the landscape of a green to reading the ripeness of a harvest, the quest for perfection remains the same. It just tastes a little better now.