The PGA Tour is beginning its 2016 season this week with the FRYS.COM tournament in Napa, California. It’s being held at the Silverado Resort and Spa, one of my favorite places in the world. (But it’s not like I’ve been all over the world.) They have two golf courses there, and this tournament is on the North Course. We also used to play a Senior Tour tournament there on the South Course. Napa Valley is such a lovely place, especially this time of year, with rows and rows of vineyards bordered by rolling hills dotted with many oak trees. Johnny Miller and his wife Linda liked it enough to live there for several years. In fact, their house was located just on the other side of a small pond next to the 10th green on the North Course.
Billy Casper (recently deceased) and I have the distinction of being the only PGA Tour pros who ever won PGA Tour tournaments on both the regular Tour and the Senior/Champions Tour at the same venue, and it was there at Silverado. Both of us won the regular Tour tournament on the North Course and the Senior Tour tournament on the South Course. I won the first Kaiser International Open Invitational in 1968 by one stroke over Dave Marr and the Transamerica Senior Golf Championship in 1994 by defeating Japan’s Isa Aoki on the first extra hole in a playoff. Billy won in 1971 and 1889. The latter was his last win on the Senior Tour.
Napa Valley is the most successful wine district in the U.S. Many people like to vacation there, if only for a weekend. Napa’s wineries have many winetasting tours for the public. If you’re into sipping those smooth delights–that “wine, wine, wine that clears the mind”–that’s the place to go do it.
I’m not exactly a connoisseur of fine wines. When I eat at a restaurant with friends or relatives who like to drink wine with their meals, I usually order Beringer’s White Zinfandel. There, I said it! Now everyone can rag on me about it.
That’s what fellow Christian friend and PGA Touring pro Don Pooley did to me once at Napa on the Champions Tour. I think it was 2001, the first year Don became eligible for the Champions Tour. One evening we attended a wine tasting event hosted by Beringer’s at their winery in St. Helena, next to Napa. Beringer’s Vineyard is the oldest continuously operating winery in Napa Valley. We were talking to the owner of the company and standing beside a table that had open bottles full of their finest, and therefore most expensive, wines. Pooley was really into it, sampling them as we were talking to the owner.
Then Don said to me, “Zarley, what’s that you’re drinking?” I answered excitedly and loudly with a big smile, “Beringer’s White Zinfandel.” Then Pooley really went off on me about how I was missing out on drinking Beringer’s prime wines, and for free no less.
I turned to the owner and said, “Tell this bozo what brand you make the most money off of.” He said to Don, “Kermit’s right. White Zinfandel is by far our biggest seller.” Indeed, their website says right now, “during the late 1990s, Beringer Wine Estates ranked as the top seller of premium wines in the United States, controlling more than 14 percent of the domestic market and deriving the bulk of its sales from its Beringer White Zinfandel brand.”
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