Dick Vermeil Profile

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HANK YOUNG

THE COACH FROM CALISTOGA

VERMEIL I In the world of pro football, his achievements are legendary, but Dick Vermeil’s heart has never been far from wine and his Napa Valley roots

BY STEVE STEVENS

n the summer of 1947, a 10-year-old Dick Vermeil was bouncing around with his younger brother in the cab of a lumbering flatbed truck. His father, Jean Louis Vermeil, was hauling wine grapes from vineyards at the base of the Palisades Mountains in the northeast Napa Valley, down Route 29 past the city heat of Oakland to San Mateo. His grandfather, Garibaldi Iaccheri, made wine there for his own winery, the Calistoga Wine Merchants.

The elder Vermeil would sometimes leave Dick and his brother at Grandfather Garibaldi’s house for a week at a time. The boys would work in the basement, picking through and crushing the grapes and moving wine barrels around. Vermeil remembers this time with his brother and grandfather vividly. “It wasn’t really that big,” Vermeil says of the basement, “but I can still smell the smells. It was good being there.” (continued on page 20)

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(continued from page 18) Much has changed in the almost 60 years since Vermeil and his brother were happily crushing Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay grapes in San Mateo. America has fought three wars and is in the midst of another. The Beatles got together and broke up. And Vermeil moved on from the depths of that cellar to achieve the ultimate fantasy of many a red-blooded American boy: winning the Super Bowl.

LEIGH MILLER

AUG-SEPT 2005

From Wine Country To The Super Bowl

From right to left: Vermeil; his friend and OnThEdge Winery co-owner Paul Smith; and OnThEdge vineyard manager and Smith’s brother-in-law, Jim Frediani.

tory; and for Vermeil, it couldn’t have gotten much better. So he decided to turn the page.

“I was ready to stop after that,” says Vermeil. He wanted to get back to his Napa roots and get his hands dirty in the wine business. But the game of football wasn’t through with him yet. This time, it was the wine business that came up a yard short.

“Blame that on Carl Peterson,” says Paul Smith, an old friend of Vermeil’s from Calistoga. Peterson, president of the Kansas City Chiefs and another longtime friend of Vermeil, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. And just like that, Vermeil was head coach of the Chiefs and out of the wine business before he was in it.

VERMEIL

It’s not easy to boil a man’s four-decade-plus career down to a couple of paragraphs, especially a career as storied as Vermeil’s. But as one of his close friends says, “football is one of his great passions, just after his family and just before wine.” Football is a driving force in Vermeil’s life.

After playing quarterback for San Jose State, Vermeil worked his way up through the California coaching ranks to become head coach of the tradition-rich UCLA Bruins in 1974. The high-pressure world of college athletics certainly could have beaten down a kid from Calistoga, an isolated rural town at the northern tip of Napa Valley. Vermeil had fast success with the Bruins, however, and moved on to the NFL, where he took both the Philadelphia Eagles and the St. Louis Rams to Super Bowls. Vermeil is one of only four coaches in NFL history to take two different teams to the big game. He won with the Rams in 2000, and even people who were watching mainly for the commercials remember the squirming-on-the-edge-of-your-seat drama of Super Bowl XXXIV. As the final seconds ticked away, the Rams’ Mike Jones tackled Tennessee Titans receiver Kevin Dyson inside the Rams’ one-yard line, preserving the win. The picture of Dyson’s outstretched hand clenching the football and wavering perilously close to the end zone as Jones dragged him to the ground is etched indelibly on the minds of screaming fans in bars and living rooms everywhere. It was a timeless moment in Super Bowl his-

“Wine Is In His Blood”

Though his hair has long been gray, Vermeil still has a quarterback’s physique, even at 68. In photos of Vermeil with his old wine buddies, one sees a confident California kid’s winning smile set in the rock-hard jaw of a football coach. In his public football persona, though, it’s hard to see his deep connection to wine. But in private pictures with family and old friends, Vermeil’s love for wine, winemaking and grape growing is more evident.

“Wine is in his blood,” says Smith, winemaker and part owner with Vermeil of a small Calistoga winery called OnThEdge Winery. Smith remembers Calistoga when it was still a wild farm town where kids carried guns (for hunting), worked on their race cars and drank a lot of wine. He was close to Vermeil, as were a lot of people. As Smith says, “There were only two real households in town where everyone hung out: the Fredianis [long time-time Napa vineyard owners] and the Vermeils.”

Going Home … Eventually

When talking on the phone with Vermeil from his office in Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium, it’s easy to see that wine is never too far from his mind. “Have you seen these wine cellar catalogues?” Vermeil asks incredulously. “I can’t decide between the 1,900bottle cellar and the 2,600-bottle cellar. If I get the 2,600 one, I’ll fill it up,” he says, sounding a bit worried at the prospect of such an investment. Indeed, Vermeil is no Scrooge when it comes to wine. In fact, the NFL once scolded him for offering his placekicker, Morten Andersen, a pricey bottle of Bryant Family Vineyards if he made a game-winning kick against the Oakland Raiders. Andersen made the kick, but before Vermeil could make good on the deal, league officials called it a prohibited “performance bonus” and nixed it.

“I just can hardly believe it,” Vermeil told The Associated Press in 2003. “We’ll have to wait until after the season to share a glass of wine at my house.”

These days, that glass would probably come from Vermeil and Smith’s OnThEdge Winery, so named because the winery sits high in the Mayacamas Mountains, just east of the Napa Valley-Sonoma County line and “on the edge” of Napa Valley.

OnThEdge produces a variety of wines, including Sauvignon Blanc, several Zinfandels, a Port-style wine and a Cabernet Sauvignon-based blend called Jean Louis Vermeil in honor of Vermeil’s great-grandfather and father, both named Jean Louis.

Although the praise comes from an unlikely source, magazine reviews of the wine have been quite good. Sports Illustrated columnist Paul Zimmerman (aka “Dr. Z”) wondered after tasting the Jean Louis why the coach didn’t offer Andersen a bottle of his own wine. “The $45 Vermeil Cab is better than the $200 Bryant,” wrote Zimmerman.

With OnThEdge, Vermeil is playing a backup role in the wine game right now, but that will change once he’s through with football. The vineyard’s roots run too deep for him to avoid them.

“As a little kid,” Vermeil recalls, “I remember sitting around the table and seeing the little red ring around everyone’s mouth from the wine. We would all have a little shot glass full of wine. Even the kids. That’s one of my favorite memories.”

Steve Stevens is The Wine Report’s associate editor.

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