Gold Medalist Turned Vintner

At a recent wine event I ran into 1968 Olympic Gold medalist Peggy Fleming. It turns out that Fleming hung up her ice skates in exchange for a wine bottle, a wine bottle that boasts her own name. In 1999 Fleming and her husband Greg Jenkins, a retired dermatologist, started their own vineyard in the San Francisco bay area. Fleming says the project started out as a simple landscaping idea and grew from there.

“Well it started out as a landscaping project but now we have landscaping we can drink. But you just get more interested and curious as you see the vines everyday and you just wonder what they would produce if it was all our grapes and what would that wine taste like.”

Fleming says the Fleming Jenkins winery is now producing two thousand cases of wine a year and is working on a goal of eight thousand cases. It seems that this former ice queen has learned some new moves.

(Brian Banmiller is a national Business Correspondent for CBS News Radio, free lance writer and public speaker. The former television business news anchor in San Francisco can be reached at brian@banmilleronbusiness.com .)