Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie And Chardonnay

If you wouldn’t think of attending an Atlanta Braves game without your big, “We’re No. 1” foam hand and you have every Braves bobble-head doll since the team moved from Milwaukee, then Longball Cellars has a wine for you.

Starting Monday, you’ll be able to buy the latest in vino-tchotchke from Kroger, Wal-Mart and numerous other wine outlets. For $13 a bottle, you can wash down your peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jack with Cabernet Glavingnon, Chipper Chardonnay and McCann Merlot.

No, Braves pitcher Tom Glavine, third baseman Chipper Jones and catcher Brian McCann have not traded their baseball bats for vine pruning shears. But they have lent their names and images to a line of wines made by California’s Clos LaChance Winery & Estate Vineyard. The project is a part of a larger charity effort that involves more than 30 professional athletes, such as Boston Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez (Manny Being Merlot), Chicago Cubs legend Ernie Banks (Ernie Banks 512 Chardonnay) and former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Mario (Marino Estates, Vintage 13). Go to www.charitywines.com to see more players.

Proceeds from the wine sales go to local charities and the Major League Baseball Players Trust. “We are thrilled to be working with first-class individuals like Chipper, Brian and Tom,” said Andrew Graff, founder and president of Charity Wines, which launched the Longball Label in 2007. “Braves fans are among the best in all of baseball and we are elated to give them this unique opportunity to collect and enjoy the wines while also knowing that they are helping make a difference.”

Profits from Cabernet Galingnon will go to CURE Children’s Cancer; Chipper Chardonnay supports The Miracle League; and McCann Merlot helps the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research.

Graff and co-founder John Corcoran launched Charity Wines after several friends and family members were stricken by cancer and heart disease. Charity Wines is a philanthropic division of Massachusetts-based VinLozano [VinLozano IS CQ] Imports and has donated nearly $500,000 so far.

Since this is a column about baseball and wine (probably the top two pursuits in my life), I think it is somehow appropriate to pause here for the seventh paragraph stretch. And a one and a two…

Take me out to the vineyard.

Take me out to the vines.

Buy me some pinot and cabernet.

I’d be glad with a chilled chardonnay.

For its sniff, sniff, sniff the aromas.

If it smells like socks, that’s a shame.

For it’s red, white, and even rosé

In the ol’ wine game.

OK, so buying a bottle of wine to help out a charity may make you feel good, but would you want to do more with it than putting it next to your autographed picture of former Braves catcher Biff Pocoroba? Like maybe even drink it? Nobody is pretending that these wines have any special provenance. Manny Being Merlot does not taste a whole lot different than McCann Merlot. These are generic California wines and they taste like it, which is to say, they’re not bad. Could you buy the same for four or five dollars less? Probably.

But if cost vs. quality is the first thing you think about when you talk about wine, you missing out on a lot. Enjoying wine often has more to do with where you are and who is next to you than with the cold, objective evaluation of fruit flavors and balanced acidity. “Special” bottles of wine, more often than not, are markers for extraordinary events, rather than cult cabernets or rare bottles from Burgundy.

Here’s a scenario that I hope will be played out in a downtown baseball stadium in the near future (perhaps even in late October). You toss a bottle of Chipper Chardonnay in your grocery basket and pop it open with your baked chicken dinner that night. After the dishes are washed, you sit down with your glass of Chipper, turn on the TV to find that the Braves are down by two in ninth inning with your wine’s namesake coming to bat with two men on. You look at the hay-colored liquid in your glass, then look up at the screen to see Chipper belting a walk-off home run into the right-field bleachers.

Was it the wine or was it Chipper? Do you want to take that chance that it wasn’t the wine? And even if you rationalize that there can’t be any game-winning, magic mojo in your glass along with the pleasant flavors of citrus, apples and vanilla, your connection with baseball, the Braves and your wine just got a bit stronger.