From No. 11 to Ones: How Domantas and Shashana Sabonis Put Down Roots in Napa

When Domantas Sabonis was traded to Sacramento in February 2022, his wife, Shashana, had an immediate response: they were moving to Napa.

For a professional basketball player, movement is normally dictated by the league. A trade changes the arena, the uniform, the commute and, often, the shape of family life. Napa offered the Sabonis family something different: a landscape organised around patience. Grapes could not be hurried. A harvest could not be rearranged around the NBA calendar. Establishing a relationship with a place required staying long enough to understand it.

What began as an attempt to participate in their new community eventually became Ones by Sabonis, a limited-production family wine label named after the two ones on Domantas's jersey. But the more revealing story is not that an NBA player entered the wine business. It is how a family living inside the instability of professional sport began creating something rooted, slow and intended to outlast a season.

A trade, then a home

The 2022 trade sent Sabonis from the Indiana Pacers to the Sacramento Kings, placing him at the centre of a franchise attempting to find its way back to relevance. It also relocated his family to one of the world's most recognisable agricultural regions.

Shashana has recalled responding to the trade by telling Domantas, simply, "We're moving to Napa." The decision initially appears almost impulsive. In retrospect, it provided the conditions for a project that combined two family histories.

Domantas spent part of his childhood in Málaga, Spain, in a landscape where vineyards and wine were familiar presences. Shashana has spoken about her grandmother making wine for family and friends. Neither connection, on its own, predetermined the creation of a label. Together, however, they made Napa feel less like an unfamiliar luxury destination and more like a place they could learn to inhabit.

After arriving, the couple began meeting people within the local wine community and educating themselves about farming and production. Wine offered a way into their new surroundings—an industry built not only around bottles and tasting rooms, but around soil, weather, labour and long relationships.

The project did not begin with a large commercial plan. According to the couple's previous interviews, the earliest intention was to make something small for family and friends. The Sacramento Bee reported that their first experiment was a single barrel, bottled and given away as a holiday gift.

Positive reactions encouraged them to take the next step. In 2024, Ones entered the market with a limited release of 600 bottles of 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon.

Smallness was not simply a starting limitation. It became part of the identity.

Learning the place

The celebrity drinks business is now a familiar category. A recognisable name appears on a bottle; the founder participates in a campaign; lifestyle and fame do much of the initial work. The distance between the public figure and the product can be difficult to measure.

Ones presents itself differently.

The Sabonis family did not arrive in Napa claiming expertise. Their public account of the project has focused on learning: spending time with growers and winemakers, participating in harvest and developing an understanding of the decisions behind a finished bottle.

They began working with winemaker Joe Harden of Nickel & Nickel. Speaking to The Sacramento Bee, Harden recalled the couple arriving for a grape pick at two in the morning, with Shashana working on the tractor and Domantas picking fruit. What persuaded him, he said, was not their visibility but their willingness to be present, ask questions and engage with the process.

Presence matters in this story. It separates an endorsement from participation.

Professional sport is structured around highly specialised teams. The player may be the most visible figure, but performance depends on coaches, medical staff, analysts, equipment managers and countless others whose expertise shapes the result. Wine operates through a different rhythm, yet it relies on a similarly interconnected system: growers, vineyard workers, winemakers, cellar teams and the environmental conditions no individual can control.

Sabonis does not need to pretend to be the most knowledgeable person in that system. The more credible role is that of an invested participant—someone learning when to contribute and when to trust expertise.

The meaning inside the name

The name Ones comes from the number 11 Domantas Sabonis wears on the court. But the number is not solely his.

Eleven was also worn by his father, Arvydas Sabonis, the legendary Lithuanian centre whose career stretched from Žalgiris Kaunas and the Soviet Union's Olympic team to Spain and, eventually, the Portland Trail Blazers. Arvydas wore No. 11 in Portland and became one of the most influential European players of his generation, entering the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011.

Domantas has described the number as having a special place in his family. He wore it earlier in his career in honour of his father, but initially played in No. 10 after arriving in Sacramento because the Kings had retired No. 11 for franchise great Bob Davies.

In 2024, Davies's family gave its blessing for the number to return to the court. Sabonis was able to wear 11 again—not simply as a personal preference, but as an acknowledgement of the player whose career formed the earliest backdrop to his own.

That history changes the meaning of Ones.

The two digits are not just a reference to Domantas's contemporary NBA identity. They carry a line of inheritance between father and son, Portland and Sacramento, Lithuania and the United States. The name takes something publicly associated with basketball and translates it into a family object.

Separated into two individual digits, eleven becomes open to further interpretation. It can represent Domantas and Shashana as two founders. It can suggest partnership: two individuals standing alongside one another, equal but distinct. It can also describe the movement from an inherited sporting identity towards something the couple is building together.

The visual reference remains understated. The bottles have appeared with purple wax, reported as a quiet acknowledgement of the Sacramento Kings. These details connect the wine to basketball without turning it into team merchandise.

That distinction is important. Ones uses the Sabonis sporting identity as an origin point, not as the entire creative concept.

The current releases extend the project beyond its original Cabernet Sauvignon: a 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon from Howell Mountain and a 2024 Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast. The brand describes both as being produced in extremely limited quantities and makes them available through its own shop and mailing list.

The model is closer to a small family label than a mass-market celebrity launch. Exclusivity helps position the wine at a premium level, but it also reflects the practical realities of working in limited quantities while the founders continue to learn what they want the project to become.

There is no loudly declared plan for global expansion. That absence may be one of the brand's strengths.

A different measure of time

Basketball is measured in visible units: possessions, quarters, games and seasons. Its results are immediate and public. Performance can be reduced to a box score before a player has left the arena.

Wine resists that urgency.

A harvest could not be rearranged around the NBA calendar.

The work takes place long before the bottle is opened. Weather intervenes. A harvest arrives when the fruit is ready, not when it is convenient. Decisions made early may not reveal their full consequences until much later.

For an elite athlete, this slower cycle may be part of the attraction. It creates an activity that cannot be won through force or accelerated by competitive instinct. Patience is not a passive condition; it is part of the work.

Shashana has described wine as a shared creative outlet and a way for the couple to redirect their attention from the pressure of basketball. Their children have also participated in harvest activities—tasting grapes, drinking fresh juice and exploring the barrels. "It's just fun family time that's different than basketball," she told The Sacramento Bee.

The phrase explains much of the project's emotional logic.

The family name will always carry basketball history. Domantas is part of one of Lithuania's most significant sporting families, and his professional identity is inseparable from the game. Ones does not attempt to erase that inheritance. Instead, it creates another family practice alongside it—one whose memories are attached to harvests rather than seasons.

Beyond the endorsement

Athletes have long promoted products. What is changing is the depth of their involvement.

The traditional endorsement model rented an athlete's image. Newer athlete-led businesses increasingly seek to convert visibility into ownership: production companies, fashion labels, investment portfolios, hospitality concepts and consumer brands intended to exist beyond a playing career.

The difference between meaningful ownership and another layer of personal branding is not always immediately visible. Authenticity cannot be established by a founder’s story alone. It has to be demonstrated through choices, expertise, consistency and time.

Wine is unusually unforgiving in that respect. A celebrated surname may persuade someone to open the first bottle. It cannot determine what they think after tasting it.

Ones therefore faces the same test as any young premium label. The Sabonis name provides attention, but the wine must establish its own reputation. The family's visible participation may create credibility, yet credibility must eventually be carried by the product.

Authenticity cannot be established by a founder’s story alone. It has to be demonstrated through choices, expertise, consistency and time.

That may explain why the limited scale feels appropriate. Ones does not need to present itself as the next great Napa institution. At this stage, it is more interesting as a record of a family becoming connected to a place.

The athlete's cellar

The Sabonis family is not alone in seeing wine and spirits as more than a sponsorship category.

Former NBA champion Dwyane Wade founded Wade Cellars in partnership with Napa vintner Jayson Pahlmeyer in 2014. The company has since developed from premium Cabernet Sauvignon into a broader range intended to make California wine feel more accessible and inclusive.

CJ McCollum and his wife, Elise, followed their growing interest in Oregon wine with the launch of McCollum Heritage 91 in 2020. They later acquired a 318-acre property in the Yamhill-Carlton wine region, signalling an ambition that extended beyond a label towards land, cultivation and long-term production.

Carmelo Anthony and his business partner Asani Swann Benjamin created VII(N) The Seventh Estate with the stated intention of bringing new voices into wine. Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton moved in a different direction with Almave, a non-alcoholic blue-agave spirit developed with Mexican distiller Iván Saldaña.

These businesses occupy different categories and levels of involvement, but together they reveal a broader change. Athletes are no longer only appearing in drinks advertising. Some are entering production, acquiring land, developing products and attempting to influence who feels represented within traditionally exclusive industries.

The movement makes cultural sense. Wine and spirits sit at the intersection of agriculture, hospitality, travel, design and luxury—all sectors that allow an athlete's public identity to evolve beyond performance.

But the category also carries a risk. The more celebrity bottles enter the market, the less persuasive fame becomes as a point of difference. The projects most likely to matter are those with a genuine relationship to place, product and personal history.

For Ones, that relationship begins with Napa, but it extends backwards: to Shashana's grandmother, to Domantas's upbringing in Spain and to the number inherited from his father.

Putting down roots

Professional athletes are frequently described in terms of movement: drafted, transferred, traded, released, called up and sent down. Their value is discussed across markets, while their families repeatedly negotiate the personal consequences of decisions made elsewhere.

The Sabonis story in Napa reverses that language.

A trade produced an opportunity to remain. A new team led to a new community. A number passed between generations became the name of something shared. The public career continued at its usual speed, while another project began moving according to seasons of a different kind.

Ones by Sabonis is still young. Its long-term scale and ambitions remain deliberately undefined. But perhaps the clearest measure of the project is not how far the bottles travel or how large the business becomes.

It is that, in a profession where almost everything can change with a telephone call, Domantas and Shashana Sabonis found a way to make their new geography mean something.

The trade brought them west. The number carried the family history. The wine helped them stay.