Il Gabbiano Wine List

[Jovanna Ponder]

Onestep inside Caf Gabbiano, and you know this is not your typical Italian restaurant. Yes, it does serve classic Italian cuisine, and yes, there are some vines and empty wine bottles as part of the dcor. However, Caf Gabbiano is more.

In addition to their extensive wine list, Caf Gabbiano also offers full bar service for pre or post dinner cocktails. The waitstaff is very friendly, attentive and accommodating. On one occasion, we had a slightly longer-than-expected wait for the food, but the staff responded very professionally.

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The server is speaking to a man named Jeremy Threat -- and from the tone in his voice, something is clearly amiss. Threat hustles back to the main dining room of Spataro Restaurant & Bar, an Italian restaurant in Sacramento, California, that has been overrun by the San Antonio Spurs. Players, coaches, management, ownership. All are seated along a handful of long, rectangular tables. The room is pin-drop silent. Some 40 pairs of eyes are trained on Threat, the venue's 29-year-old general manager and wine director.

Threat explains himself. He explains how hours earlier, when he had learned that the Spurs might be coming in, he'd recalled a Wine Spectator magazine feature that had listed many of Pop's favorite wines. He explains how he'd called a nearby friend who possesses a deep cellar, how his friend had hauled in about 120 bottles worth roughly $50,000 in total, how Threat had built the list that Pop now holds of 54 wines: the legendary 1990 Chateau d'Yquem; the acclaimed Masseto in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001 vintages; the iconic 1994 and 1995 Ornellaia.

Popovich is incredulous. "You've got to be kidding me. Really?" Then he orders 10 bottles. And when they arrive, the coach transforms into a happy sommelier, bounding about the room, pouring for everyone. "You've got to try this!" At the end of the night, he buys another 10 bottles -- to go.

By the next morning, Threat's life has changed forever. He just doesn't know it yet. All he knows is that the corporate office of the restaurant group is on the line. "I think there's an error in your computer," one of the owners tells Threat. "It shows you sold about $15,000 to $20,000 worth of wine at the end of the night, and you're not even open then. What happened?"

A few days later, Threat's star begins to rise. Word spreads. He's interviewed by the local paper. Guests begin pouring in, asking for Popovich's list. And within a couple of years, Threat will go on to work with the acclaimed Thomas Keller Restaurant Group. There, he'll engage with some of the biggest wine connoisseurs on the planet. But he will never forget the impact of Popovich: "He was as knowledgeable, if not more knowledgeable, than the majority of them."

IN SUMMER 2013, before an NBA Finals loss to LeBron James and the Miami Heat, Gregg Popovich is asked about his coaching legacy. "What's my legacy?" he quips. "Food and wine. This is just a job."

He's kidding -- but he's not. As much as Popovich knows about hoops, he really knows food and wine. "I don't know that he doesn't know more about wine than he does about basketball," former Spurs assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo says. Popovich scouts restaurants and wine lists as obsessively as he might any opponent. Before games, in his office, he can be found watching the Food Network. Sommeliers and restaurateurs claim to owe their careers to the man.

"You can't say enough about the man," says Rick Minderman, store director of Corti Brothers, a gourmet grocery store and wine shop in Sacramento, where customers directed to the store by Popovich will often come in and say, "What does Coach buy?"

Over the past few decades, Popovich has sliced a culinary trail across America -- one curated in private, if not in secret. He's patronized the finest restaurants, spent millions of dollars, left countless four-figure tips, turned himself into a first-order oenophile. He's forged fast friendships with the nation's premier gourmands. And all to a singular purpose. As one source close to Popovich says, "It's a passion for him, but it's also a tool."

In the NBA, the Gregg Popovich meal is the dining room where it happens -- a roving retreat through which the Spurs have forged a team culture that's the envy of the league. But for those in the league who've not secured the invite, Pop's legendary dinners remain shrouded in mystery and no small amount of fascination.

And so it was that over the past 18 months we talked to dozens of NBA and college coaches, current and former NBA players, team executives, chefs and sommeliers, all to answer a question: Why does Popovich -- the NBA's all-time winningest coach and architect of a two-decades-long basketball dynasty -- care so damn much about dinner?

BORIS DIAW STRIDES the sideline after a Spurs practice, armed with a burning question. He approaches Steven Koblik, a friend of Popovich's since his days coaching Division III Pomona-Pitzer College, where Koblik was the team's academic adviser.

The "this" that Diaw is referencing, and the "that" Koblik is confirming, are what could generously be called Popovich's "legendary intensity" and less generously his "legendary withering disdain." You've seen it unleashed in team huddles, seen sideline commentators cower before its wrath. But for as long as Koblik has known Popovich, he's known this: Popovich could not be such a famous curmudgeon unless there were another side of him. A side expressed, quite often, through food.

How Popovich became like that traces back nearly five decades, to Napa, California, circa 1970, a mythical moment in American wine -- before President Richard Nixon took a Napa sparkling wine to his 1972 "Toast to Peace" with China's premier; before the 1976 Judgment of Paris competition, where, for the first time, California wines bested some of the top French wines.

Back then, Napa was a sleepy tourist destination filled with aspiring winemakers. And it was there that Popovich caught the wine bug, with help from Michael Thiessen. Thiessen, a year older than Popovich, had played basketball with Pop at the Air Force Academy and, afterward, migrated to Stanford Law School. A year later, Popovich would also head to California, to be stationed near Sunnyvale, two hours south of Napa.

The two weren't all that close at the academy, but that changed in California. Popovich moved into Thiessen's apartment, which Michael shared with his wife, Nancy. And in their spare time, in search of cheap fun, they'd visit wineries that would, in a few years, become world-famous: Stony Hill, Mayacamas, Ridge. They'd sip wines now considered some of the finest California has produced; back then, the bottles cost only a few bucks. They spent time at Corti Brothers, which is considered a birthplace of the gourmet food revolution.

A few years later, in 1979, the budget was lean when Popovich landed at Pomona-Pitzer, his first head-coaching job. But his players soon found there'd always be an ample team meal awaiting them in the dining hall on game day. And when they'd travel to food destinations like New Orleans or the Bay Area, they'd have at least one memorable meal together as a team. "It was important to him that, obviously, we were fed, but also that we had the opportunity to eat together," says Tim Dignan, who played at Pomona under Popovich.

They'd all go to Pop's apartment -- in an on-campus dorm -- to eat and watch game tape on VHS. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, Popovich and his wife, Erin, would cook meals for the players who'd stayed on campus. "They made us feel like family," says Aaron Whitham, another of Popovich's former Pomona players.

Popovich became "obsessed," says Dan Dargan, another ex-Pomona player, with the 1980s television soap opera "Falcon Crest," which depicted warring factions of families in the wine industry, set in a fictitious wine region based on Napa Valley. In Popovich's dorm, he kept a wine rack. At end-of-season banquet dinners, he presented bottles to staffers, explaining why that wine and its characteristics matched that staffer.

Today, those close to him say Popovich's office at the Spurs' practice facility looks not unlike a wine cellar: bottles often all over the place, cases stacked up in the hallway. And in Popovich's home, Thiessen says, resides the very first bottle the two purchased together.

IT'S THE FIRST round of the 2010 playoffs, and the Spurs are getting trounced by the Mavericks in Game 5 in Dallas. Typically, during the postseason, Spurs coaches convene in Popovich's hotel suite after games -- over a meal, of course -- to break down film. But during this blowout, Popovich turns to a Spurs official and tells him to call The Capital Grille; the whole team is coming in.

Before Game 6 of the 2013 Finals, Popovich prepares a title-clinching celebration at a favorite Miami restaurant, Il Gabbiano. But then Heat guard Ray Allen buries a miracle corner 3-pointer to send the game to overtime -- and the Spurs lose. "I had never seen our team so broken," Spurs guard Tony Parker says later.

Popovich is already on his way, making a mad dash in a private car to the waterfront eatery. Tables are rearranged -- the team will sit in the center, coaches nearby, a ring of family around them. Popovich orders food. He orders the wine. He sits at the head of a table, takes a sip of wine and gathers himself. As the team bus arrives, he greets every Spur who passes through the door.

Over the next few hours, Popovich works the dining room -- talking to players, rubbing their shoulders. "In terms of just trying to just hook everybody up to life support and resuscitate everybody, it was the most amazing display of leadership," former Spurs assistant coach Chad Forcier says. And though the Spurs didn't win that series, losing to the Heat in Game 7, they would destroy Miami the following June, in five games.

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