Former LSU baseball player Pete Bush is giving The BamVino another at-bat

Pete Bush wasn’t trying to start a business one night nearly 20 years ago. He was cleaning up after a wine tasting for a local charity when he picked up a wine bottle by the neck and held it like a baseball bat. “At that exact moment, I thought, that would be a very cool bottle holder. I wonder if they have one,” Bush recalls.

It turned out to be more than just a cool idea. The former LSU baseball player eventually turned that thought into The BamVino, a wine bottle holder shaped like a baseball player. The product sold more than 50,000 units, found its way into Major League Baseball team shops and onto MLB.com, and prompted calls from baseball teams and fans around the country.

And Bush is now taking another swing with The BamVino, resurrecting the brand and adding an actual wine to the bottle holder.

“I don’t know that it really reached its potential. When you think there’s millions and millions of baseball fans and millions and millions of wine fans, and we only sold 50,000? It sounds like a lot but compared to the market and the potential, there’s room to grow,” Bush says.

He first began seriously considering another run four years ago, when he enlisted his daughter Shelbi to help relaunch the brand and bottle holder. The idea gained momentum again last fall after an appearance on Robbie Olivier’s podcast. Olivier, a Baton Rouge entrepreneur and wine enthusiast, happened to have a BamVino holder in the background without realizing Bush had created it. That conversation revived another idea Bush had carried with him for years: The BamVino shouldn’t just hold the wine, it should be the wine. Olivier connected Bush with Napa winemaker Grant Long Jr., a baseball fan who helped bring the wine side of the brand to life.

“I think the planets aligned to where I was in the right place, at the right time with the right guy,” Bush reflects.

Bush wanted the wine to be exceptional. He and Olivier, now his partner in The BamVino, tasted several samples and independently selected the same wine. The BamVino Cabernet has already sold 300 bottles with essentially no marketing, relying mostly on word of mouth. Bush hopes the wine, the original bottle holder and a new podcast focused on baseball and wine will eventually feed into one another and take the brand to a larger audience.

But for Bush, The BamVino’s success has never been measured solely in sales. “The accomplishment for me was that that thing started as a thought, and it turned into something that is actually physically in the world, and that’s pretty cool.”

Find more information at thebamvino.com.

This article was originally published in the October 2026 issue of 225 Magazine.