Yao Family Wines

Yao Ming, the Chinese basketball star who played center for the Houston Rockets, discovered wine through teammates ordering bottles on road trips and later launched his own Napa Valley label, releasing its first vintage, a 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon, in 2011. Yao worked with wine industry veteran Tom Hinde, who had spent 18 years as general manager at Kendall-Jackson, after other larger wineries wanted to market the project under their own name instead of Yao's.

The label sources fruit from mountain vineyards on Atlas Peak and benches in Rutherford, and critic Robert Parker called its Cabernets "actually brilliant," ranking the Family Reserve alongside the best of Napa Valley. In 2021, Yao Family Wines became the first winery in the world to release a wine paired with an NFT digital collectible, and Yao Ming himself, born in Shanghai, remains involved as a humanitarian, having founded the Yao Ming Foundation after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

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