Soccer star Beckham gets ID’d. Waiter refuses to serve him wine.

Source: Reuters. Book tells Beckham’s LA story: from star to unknown. By Claudia Parsons. April 14, 2009

Do soccer players like wine? The answer is “yes”, if you go by David “Bend it like” Beckham, soccer superstar. Last year he bought a vineyard for his wife, Victoria, and hired laborers to produce “Chateau Posh” wines, which are not intended for public sale, but rather for personal consumption.

Now, a new book about Beckham tells all, including the story of how Beckham got carded and was refused wine service when he failed to produce an ID.

From the article:

The Beckham Experiment,” by Sports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl, features interviews with 33-year-old Beckham and other major figures in Los Angeles Galaxy, the soccer team he joined in 2007 after a stellar career in Europe.

Anecdotes include an occasion when Beckham was denied a glass of wine because he could not produce an ID document for a U.S. waiter who did not recognize him…

–S.S.

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Sports fans, are you ready tooooooooo rumble, um, swirl?

Source: CNBC SportsBiz blog. Shaming Rights and Time to Wine? by Darren Rovell, Feb 12, 2007.

U.S. sports fans are ready to swirl and sniff! Baseball fans can certainly tell you – in recent years, lots of ballparks have started serving wine and other higher-end food & drink fare. This article is two years old, but the trend is continuing.

According to the article:

Nielsen found that wine consumption among U.S. sports fans was up $14.60 in 2006 to $81.40 per household. The highest spending fan, believe it or not, was in households with at least one fan of the LPGA ($125). Tennis fans came in second ($111.90) and PGA fans finished third at $109.40 — spending for them actually went down in 2006 by some 30 percent. The biggest gain was among NFL fans who spent more than 60 percent more on wine this year than last year. An NFL fan household now spends $94.30.

— S.S.