Star Trek licensing has been branching out to new alcoholic ventures over the last two years, starting with the first steps into bourbon, vodka, and scotch through Silver Screen Bottling Company in 2018 — and now, the franchise is moving into the world of wines, thanks to the family heritage of one starship captain you may have heard of.
Wines That Rock kicked off their first Star Trek wines last month, tying into the marketing launch for Star Trek: Picard — where we find retired Jean-Luc Picard working at his family’s vineyard in France in the late 24th Century, living a quite life away from intergalactic politics.
The company’s first public appearance for their Trek wines was at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas — the site of this month’s annual Star Trek convention — and we caught up with Wines That Rock’s Spencer Brewer to talk about these new wines.
TREKCORE: So you are here debuting two new Star Trek wines – including one from the famous Château Picard, the vineyard owned by Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s family in the Star Trek universe. Can you tell me a little bit about this product?
SPENCER BREWER: When they created the Jean-Luc Picard character, they made it important to the character’s backstory that he and his brother came from a vineyard, and as you saw in the trailer the whole Star Trek: Picard series starts in the vineyard.
Little did they know [when they wrote “Family,” where the vineyard was introduced] that there is an actual Château Picard in Bordeaux, France that had been there for three generations making a cru Bordeaux.
For 20 years CBS has tried to negotiate and make a deal to sell the wines, but it never worked out for a lot of different reasons. We got involved, got the license to sell Star Trek- branded wines, and we started working with Château Picard — the estate in Bordeaux — and the [wine] authorities in France. Over a period of five to six months, we came to agreement as on what was going to be on the front of the label.
CBS sent us over the digital file of the actual label that’s on the front of the [prop wine bottles] Star Trek: Picard so that we could correct a few words on the front to make it compliant [with France’s bottling requirements], but aside from those very small changes, this is the same paper, the same font, the same color – everything – that’s on the show.
TREKCORE: And is this something where you hear the show is happening and seek out the license, or was in the works prior to Star Trek: Picard and its vineyard-themed trailers?
BREWER: We got the license before Picard, and first we were going to start with creating a Cardassian kanar. We were asking ourselves: are we going to come out with a Klingon bloodwine? What are we going to do first? And then CBS told us that if there was any way for us to get the Château Picard — because that’s the holy grail — and they hadn’t been able to get it worked out with the vineyard up until that point.
That’s when we decided to change our focus and work on the Château Picard, to see if it was even possible… and it took a month and a half for us to even get the winery to agree to talk to us about the project. They weren’t interested, because it takes a long time to be designated a cru Bordeaux in France and they didn’t want to put a starship on their bottle.
When they finally realized we were trying to be honorable, do the right thing, and work with them on the label, and that this is real – then they got it and became very excited to work on it.
TREKCORE: Do you think that’s because of your company’s history of working with wine?
BREWER: Our main company is called Wines That Rock, and we’ve created wines for the Rolling Stones, Sting, The Grateful Dead, Woodstock, Pink Floyd, 50 Shades of Greg, Cirque de Soleil, NPR Wine Club, Turner Classic Movie Wine Club, Virgin Wine Group, and KISS, among many others.
[Château Picard] saw that we really honor the brand, and because we come from intellectual property backgrounds, it was really important for us to show them that we’ll protect your brand and honor what they wanted it to be. We’re not here just to slap a label on a bottle.
We want it to be as authentic as they are. With a lot of the bands we work with, we’ll get the band members into the winery to make the wine with us. When we did the Downton Abbey series, for example, we ended up selling the wine in that the butler was actually serving at [Highclere Castle, where that series was filmed.]
TREKCORE: For those oenophiles who might be reading this, can you tell me a little about the wine itself?
BREWER: This is a cru Bordeaux. It’s slight in style, very elegant as a wine. It’s 85% cabernet and 15% merlot. It’s been aged in oak for 18 months before it even came online. This is a 2016 vintage, which we’ve now sold out of. We’re now going to run into the 2017.
This bottle is really good to drink now, but it’d be fantastic in ten years. A lot of people have been buying one to put on the shelf, and a couple to share with their friends. Right at the very top on the back label we quote Jean-Luc Picard [from a deleted scene in Star Trek: Nemesis], “They say a vintner’s history is in every glass. The soil he came from him. His past and hopes for the future. So, to the future…”
TREKCORE: The Chateau Picard is only one of the wines you announced…
BREWER: We’re going to come out with a lot of different products over time, but for now we also created a United Federation of Planets Special Reserve Old Vine Zinfandel. It’s in a very elegant bottle that looks very futuristic. There’s nothing else around here like this.
It took us a thousand different bottles over six countries to choose this bottle. We went to 80 different wineries, tasted 200-300 wines, grabbed about a dozen that worked, and then did a blind tasting panel. This particular wine is from three different old vine zinfandel vineyards in Dry Creek Valley and Russian River Valley in Sonoma County, California.
The hardest part about this project was finding someone to bottle this because it won’t fit on any bottling line. This is hand bottled, hand numbered, hand labeled, hand corked, and hand foiled. There are six processes involved with every single bottle of this wine.
The wine inside is just exquisite, because if this is going to be served at Federation banquets and treaty signings, it has to look elegant and cool, but the wine has got to hold up to the vision of what it is.
On the back label, it says: United Federation of Planets, founded in 2161 by an alliance of humans, Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites, the United Federation of Planets has long recognized the core principles of mutual cooperation and the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
And that’s how we start this whole thing out – we’re honoring the Federation.
These two wines [Château Picard and United Federation of Planets Special Reserve] that we came out with when we first announced [were being sold as a two-pack] collector’s edition. We made 1,701 of them with hand numbered bottles on the back. Those sold out in nine hours. The whole amount we came out was 250 cases each – those sold out in 23 hours.
Now we’re coming out with the second release of both bottles. People can go online our Star Trek Wines website, and both products will be coming back into the country in a couple of months. We’ll be shipping the second version in the fourth quarter of this year.
The only other thing that’s going to be coming out this year is we have this wooden etched box that holds six of the bottles from Château Picard that is made there in France. That will be a special collector’s edition package.
TREKCORE: Will we see see the UFP Reserve wine in Star Trek: Picard as well?
BREWER: Well, we made up three bottles and CBS had them sent to the Picard prop master — we’ve been told it’s been on set in a few shoots already, but we don’t know if it’ll actually be seen on screen, or left on the cutting room floor.
You never know what’s going to happen. We all hope they’re going to be in the shots, and if it makes it [on screen], it legitimizes the effort and the provenance of the bottle.
TREKCORE: It sounds like the response to the first two wines you have put out has been extremely positive. What else do you have in the works?
BREWER: We know we’re probably going to do the Klingon bloodwine. There have been two or three that have come out in the past [from other companies], but the wine was not good in any of them, the labels were not great, and they were served in just normal bottles.
We would need to work really hard on finding an amazing bottle, because the original one was a silver oil can. We’re going to have to come up with a bottle that Klingons would really want. We’ve already picked the wine; we know where it’s from and what it’s going to be. All I can say is that it’s an amazing wine.
The second one is my dream, which would be to do the Cardassian kanar. We did research on this for six months so we know where the factories were [that made the bottles that appeared on Deep Space Nine], who made them, which variations were on each series because it was shown two or three times. There’s only one that is the real thing, and the last one of those came off the line in the early 1970s at a factory in Spain. They were also made at the time in Italy.
We’ve found three factories that will make them, but we have to make 20,000 bottles for them to start the process. That is extremely expensive, so we have to make sure it’s the real deal before we go further.
We don’t know yet what the second one is, we will probably do the Klingon bloodwine as one of the next ones. But we’re not exactly sure what the other one will be.
TREKCORE: Bajoran Spring Wine would make a nice white…
BREWER: Yes! We found out that [the screen-used] bottle only holds 600 ml, which is illegal to sell in the United States. So we have to go down to 500 ml or up to 750 ml. That means we have to have the bottles made from scratch – another minimum order of 20,000. So again, it’s a high bar.
TREKCORE: Well, the response to the first round of releases seems to have gone over well with fans.
BREWER: I appreciate it. It’s been a lot of fun and a great process. I grew up watching Star Trek in the 1960s and we’ve all been fans, so when we did this we made wines that we wanted to drink and collect as fans, and that’s where it came from.
The new Star Trek wine offerings are available for online purchase now through StarTrekWines.com, with the Château Picard priced at $60 and the UFP Special Reserve priced at $50 per bottle — each are expected to ship before the end of the year.