Carlton McCoy's favorite ritual is one as old as human memory: Share a meal and a drink to more intimately understand a person or a place. That exercise is the framework of Nomad with Carlton McCoy which premieres this Sunday at 10 p.m. ET.
As a connoisseur of drinks by profession and nature, McCoy spoke with CNN about some of his most memorable sips. Take a look at what he said:
Lobos 1707 Tequila
Lobos 1707 is the joint venture of several famous figures in basketball, including LeBron James, but McCoy is closest with the premium tequila brand's founding partner, Maverick Carter. McCoy and Carter met some years ago while drinking wine with friends and discovered their paths had run close together but never crossed until that point.
He watched Carter fully immerse himself in Mexico's tequila culture to bring Lobos 1707 to market in 2020 and says it's been a "blessing" to see how his life has changed because of the beverage industry.
2017 Ink Grade Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon
This wine brand with winemaker Matt Taylor was the first that McCoy had been part of creating after investing in a vineyard, but at first McCoy was unfamiliar with the history of the land.
"I hadn't really heard of the vineyard," McCoy said. "And I started to do some research on the vineyard and found out that it actually had been developed in the 1870s. And it was part of this whole pre- and then post-Prohibition movement of building a wine industry in Napa Valley." Walking through the woods, he could still see the copper stills used to make hooch -- a homemade liquor -- when alcohol had been banned in the US.
"Having the opportunity to create a single vineyard estate wine from beginning to end from a very historical site like that -- very few people in the world get to do that," he said.
1996 Dalla Valle Pietra Rosso Napa Valley
When McCoy began dating his girlfriend, Maya Dalla Valle, who is, as he described, "an intimidatingly exceptional winemaker," both of his parents and her father had passed away. He knew they both understood that kind of grief, but he'd never asked her about it in depth.
When McCoy and Dalla Valle were out to dinner one night, she saw this bottle on the wine list -- it was a vintage her Italian father had made that was dear to him because it was the only one in which he used a specific grape from Tuscany, harvested in Napa.
Incredulous that the restaurant carried the wine, Dalla Valle and McCoy ordered it and shared the bottle and she told him the full story of the win over dinner. "Listening to her talk about the story of that wine -- and just how proud it made her -- (there) was a connection that she would always have with her father through that wine," McCoy said. "It was really special."
