When Premier League icon David Silva decided to turn his passion for wine into a winery in his native Gran Canaria, he knew whom to call.
The former Manchester City player approached his friend Jonatan García, the winemaker behind Suertes del Marqués on the neighboring island of Tenerife, about starting a winery together. At first, García hesitated. He had spent years building Suertes del Marqués and wasn’t sure he could give another project the same attention. The timing helped convince him: Silva’s vineyards in southern Gran Canaria were harvested a month to six weeks earlier than García’s in northern Tenerife. García could finish picking and making wine on one island before starting again on the other, moving from one harvest to the next rather than splitting his attention between the two.
Silva is far from the first athlete to bet on wine. The category is littered with failures, from the Ontario winery that carried golfer Mike Weir’s name into receivership owing him more than a million dollars, to footballer Andrés Iniesta’s Manchuela bodega, which has lost money nearly every year since 2010. Even athletes who made it work—golfer Greg Norman is a prime example—did so mostly by licensing the name.
It matters that Silva was no stranger to wine, and gave García room to shape the project his way, from choosing the vineyards to building the winery. For García, it was a chance to take what he had learned over two decades in Tenerife and apply it anew, from scratch. No man is an island—or, in García’s case, not just one.
