How F1 Star Valtteri Bottas’s Love of Wine Led Him to Finally Make His Own
As one of only 20 Formula 1 drivers currently on the grid, Vatteri Bottas is approached for many a moneymaking venture. This is not one of them.
Last month, the Alfa Romeo driver launched Ihana, a Shiraz produced with South Australian winery Oliver’s Taranga. And it’s clear from how Bottas has approached the project, he’s looking to actually make wine more than he’s hoping to make money. “We’re a very small family business,” says sixth-generation winemaker Corrina Wright. “He’s doing this because this is what he wants to do—we’re not paying him any money to be our sports spokesperson or anything like that.”
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For Bottas, 34, his interest in a project like this was sparked long ago. “Since I became the legal drinking age of 18 years old in Finland, I was into wine,” Bottas told Robb Report. “In Finland, we don’t obviously produce any proper wine from grapes as the weather is pretty extreme, but the nice thing about Finland is in the shops there were wines from around the world.”
His love of wine was fueled by the opportunities his day job afforded him. Joining F1 as a driver for Williams in 2013, his incessant travel allowed him to sample varietals from regions around the globe. And it planted a seed. “I’ve always had a bit of a dream that somehow I would get involved in wine because it’s been a passion for me for a long time,” Bottas says.
For five years, though, making his own wine was not possible. It was team orders. As Lewis Hamilton’s teammate at Mercedes from 2017 to 2021, Bottas won 10 races and helped Toto Wolff’s squad to five consecutive Constructor’s Championships. Life at the front of the grid was good for his racing, but there was a drawback. Per Mercedes, Bottas couldn’t be involved with any alcohol brands, precluding him following his wine dream during perhaps the apex of his fame.
His fellow F1 drivers weren’t doing much to inspire his wine passion either. Unlike in the NBA, where players and staff have been known to bond over good bottles, a similar community hasn’t arisen in F1, (though Alpha Tauri’s Daniel Ricciardo now has his own wine brand). “The problem with Formula One is it’s a bit too serious,” Bottas says. “Everyone is so busy with their own schedule. For example, during European races we stay in motorhomes, and there’s this tiny motorhome village, but everyone stays in their own motorhome, and nobody really bonds that much. It’s a shame.”
Of course, it’s not like it never happens. On the Friday night before qualifying a few seasons ago in Italy, Bottas got a text: “Hey, man, do you have any wine bottle openers? I’ve lost mine.” It was from Ricciardo in need of the proper tools to pop a vino. “He knew who to reach out to,” Bottas says with a chuckle. “Yes, I had one.”
So he spent those years exploring wine with those closest to him and not his fellow drivers, homing in further on what varietals he enjoyed as his F1-fueled globe hopping continued. Bottas’s journey kept bringing him back Down Under. “I like pretty big and bold wines with lots of body and character,” he says. “So South Australian Shiraz is kind of my go-to.”
Fortunately for Bottas, his girlfriend Tiffany Cromwell—a professional road cyclist who represented Australia in the Tokyo Olympics—is from Adelaide Hills, so he frequently finds himself in South Australia during the off-season. While basking in the Southern Hemisphere summer, he and Cromwell enjoy taking in wineries, and her mother happened to have an acquaintance at Oliver’s Taranga. The winery in the coastal McLaren Vale region, known for its dense and concentrated style of wine with finely textured tannin, hadn’t been on Bottas’s radar previously, but he was intrigued enough to arrange a visit and tasting.
Wright braced for a wave of celebrity to wash over the winery with her guests’ arrival. “When we found out both Tiffany and Valtteri wanted to come, we thought there would be an entourage and be all a bit precious, and they’d be keen on themselves because they’re a bit famous—and we didn’t find any of that,” Wright says.
During that initial visit in January 2022, Bottas was struck by what he discovered. “We had the tasting, and I immediately fell in love with their wines,” he says. He felt there could be something bigger here for him now that he could pursue a wine partnership under his contract with Alfa Romeo. He just had to get Wright onboard.
“So the first day, I was away at a special lunch, and so they organized to come back again, and then come back again, and I was like, ‘Geez, I can’t shake these guys,’” Wright recalls with a laugh. “When I started tasting with him, I realized he knew what he was talking about, and he wasn’t some Johnny come lately to wine.”
Eventually Bottas approached Wright to ask if they could make a wine together. By the time they agreed to partner up, the 2022 vintage was already resting in barrel, so they had numerous blocks of Shiraz they could select from to craft a blend.
“In the beginning there was quite a big selection of stuff to try—there were almost too many options on what to blend,” Bottas says. With Wright’s and the winery’s guidance, the driver started whittling down the samples and figuring out the balance he wanted to achieve. Bottas sensed a note of bilberry on the nose of some samples, a blueberry native to Finland that he wanted to tease out so his blend would feel connected to his homeland. Through the process he gained a greater appreciation of the characteristics old vines brought to his blend versus the brightness of Shiraz made from newer plantings. And he leaned on Wright to understand what his blend would become.
“I know a bit about the wine, but tasting something that is not fully ready yet and knowing how that is going to evolve and taste in a few months—or a few years—that’s something where I definitely needed some professional advice,” Bottas says.
Bottas had a strong vintage to work with. With a La Niña year in 2022, there were cooler temperatures and no aggressive heat waves, thus Oliver’s Taranga’s vineyards experienced a long, slow ripening that Wright was excited about. And Wright’s style of winemaking is low-intervention, hoping to produce bottles that are an expression of what the vineyards provided. She achieves that with techniques like using indigenous yeasts to ferment and aging in larger format barrels so as not to overwhelm the wines with wood. “There is still oak influence, but I’m trying to make sure that fruit is beautiful and ripe,” she says.
Through trial and error, Bottas created a blend he was quite happy with—one that really suited the style of bold wine he liked to drink. They produced 5,000 bottles, sold in a two-pack that currently has distribution in Australia and the United States. And Bottas named it Ihana, which is a Finnish word meaning “wonderful” or “lovely.”
But the moment of truth came when he returned home to see what his friends would think of his blend. “The first two persons I gave the wine to try, I didn’t show them the label and I didn’t say what it was,” Bottas says. “The first reaction was—from two persons in a row—‘ihana.’ That was the first word they said when they tried the wine, and that was pretty cool.”
For Bottas, the 2022 vintage is just the beginning, with hopes of producing numerous editions of his Ihana wine. He was back this past offseason during Aussie harvest time ready to dive deeper into the process.
“He had to borrow a pair of local boots we wear here in the wine regions, take off his white sneakers, and get his hands dirty a little bit,” Wright says. While Bottas loved coming back for harvest, he isn’t ready to turn in his race car for a tractor just yet.
“I feel like I still have some unfinished business in Formula One and I want to get back to the front of the grid,” Bottas says. “It’s no secret that Audi has bought our team. They’re already helping the team for next year and the transfer to Audi in 2026. I think to be able to fight for wins nowadays, you have to be part of a big team. It’s such a competitive field that you need a good car to win or be on the podium. So for me, that’s the next target.”
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