Pete Bush pours a comeback
The former LSU first baseman swings for the fences with his BamVino wine label.
Baton Rouge financial advisor and former LSU first baseman Pete Bush invented a baseball-shaped wine bottle holder back in 2008. It took until this year for it to finally come with a bottle worth holding.
Why it matters: It's a snapshot of how Baton Rouge deals actually get made—a stranger's podcast, a Napa connection made years before anyone needed it and just enough patience to let a good idea sit until the right partners showed up.
The original hit: Bush dreamed up the holder—a bronze batter frozen mid-swing—while cleaning up after a Baton Rouge Uncorked wine event he co-founded in 2007 with six others. He says he sold more than 60,000 of them before the business went quiet, though the idea never really left him.
The pitch: That changed when Bush mentioned the old holder on Robbie Olivier's podcast, Wino with Ryno. Olivier—who owns the Perkins Rowe card shop Cards and Culture—connected Bush with Napa winemaker Grant Long Jr., someone Bush had actually met years earlier on a trip to California. Long crafted a 2023 Atlas Peak Cabernet aged in French oak, and BamVino was born.
The other comeback: Bush knows a thing or two about second acts. As LSU's first baseman in 1989, he was part of a team that clawed out of the losers' bracket to sweep top-ranked Texas A&M and punch a ticket to Omaha.
The bottom line: BamVino, a big, bold Cabernet Sauvignon, is direct-to-consumer only—$49 a bottle, $588 for a case of 12, or a two-shipment yearly membership for $529. The original bottle holder, Bush's 2008 sketch cast in bronze, is back in production too, and the three friends just launched a podcast of their own—Episode 1 reunites Bush, Olivier and Long around the table that started it all.
