On April 24, 2024, jazz guitarist Bernie Williams made his debut with the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, performing his 2009 composition “Moving Forward” as part of the orchestra’s spring gala.
“It was the experience of a lifetime,” Bernie recalled in an interview with the Westfair Business Journal, adding of Dudamel, the philharmonic’s Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang music and artistic director: “We all fell for his charismatic presence.”
Baseball fans and non-fans alike might say the same thing about Bernie. In his 16 years as a powerful yet graceful centerfielder for the New York Yankees (1991-2007), he was a four-time World Series Champion and a five-time All Star, with more post-season runs batted in (RBIs) than any other player in Major League Baseball (MLB) history. His résumé includes four Gold Glove Awards, six American League pennants, the 1996 American League Championship Series MVP award and the American League batting title in 1998, the year the Bronx Bombers fielded what many experts consider to be the greatest baseball team to date. On May, 24, 2015, the Yanks retired Bernie’s uniform No. 51 and dedicated a plaque to him in Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park, where he is honored with the team’s other immortals.
But Bernie, a former Armonk and now New Fairfield resident whose twin passions for baseball and music were born in his native Puerto Rico, has recently added a third to the lineup – winemaking, collaborating in its marketing with daughter Beatriz, who is enriching the family legacy by making a name for herself as a New York City-based artist.
“I’ve always been a fan,” Williams said of wine but particularly of its pairing with food. And he became more enamored in 2021, when he visited the Millbrook Vineyards and Winery LLC. Established in 1982 on a former Hudson Valley dairy farm, the winery plants 38 acres of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, Tocai Friulano, Riesling, Grüner Veltliner, Gamay Noir and Traminette grapes, producing 13,000 to 15,000 cases of wine a year. A chance meeting with David H. Bova, the winery’s vice president and general manager, led to the question: Why didn’t Bernie have a wine named for him?
Athletes have long endorsed products, including some that they’ve become intimately involved with. Former teammate Paul O’Neill has his Warrior 21 Northeast India Pale, a collaboration with White Plains brewery Wolf & Warrior.
The results of the Williams-Millbrook Winery teaming have been three vintages of Bernie’s Blend red wine – a mix of Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvingon and Merlot that Bernie oversees with Millbrook’s winemaker, Ian Bearup. (In 2023, the brand also offered a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay.)
Making the process even more enjoyable, Bernie said, is daughter Beatriz’s paintings adorning the labels of the second and third vintages.
“That is so much fun,” he said. “She is so talented.” Bernie’s pride as a father is understandable. From a longtime art critic’s perspective, Beatriz is performing some alchemy of her own, blending the symbolism and sensuousness of the Postimpressionists and Surrealists in canvases that capture the family’s love of Puerto Rico. For the 2023 vintage, Beatriz created “The Sun Reflects: Part II,” a meditative, acrylic image of her father’s head, eyes closed, seemingly inhaling and merging with a sun-dappled Puerto Rican beach. For the 2024 vintage, Beatriz conjured a still life featuring an electric guitar, grapes and two baseballs, draped in the manner of an Old Masters work.
In this and other paintings, Beatriz stressed, she collaborates with sister Bianca, who is more of the conceptual artist with Beatriz more of a technician. Theirs is a close family, reflected in lush canvases for which Bianca, brother Alex and mother Waleska have served as muses.
The family portraits meld with the Puerto Rican landscape in unusual ways. In one, “Dorado,” a 2021 acrylic named for the place where the family scattered the ashes of Beatriz’s paternal grandparents, Bernabé Sr. and Rufina, you can spy the couple’s faces amid the offshore vegetation.
Beatriz left the island with her family when she was 4, growing up in Armonk and attending Byram Hills schools before graduating with a Bachelor of Art’s degree in art history from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in art therapy from New York University. She divides her time between art shows – like the ones she had at 212Art Gallery in 2017 and in TriBeCa last April, along with an upcoming group exhibit in Madrid – and commercial work, including a branding collaboration this month.
Like her father, she is easy to talk to and is passionate about health and arts education. Some of Bernie’s performances, like last August’s concert at the Millbrook Winery, have helped benefit NAMM Foundation’s SupportMusic Coalition, which unites nonprofits, schools and businesses working to ensure local music education; while his annual softball tournaments and concerts on the Ridgefield Playhouse campus have supported Breathless, drawing awareness to Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), an incurable lung disease that claimed the life of Bernabé Sr.
Beatriz began her artistic career teaching cognitively impaired children in Lower Manhattan – “rewarding” work that she said she’d like to go back to – and lives a vegan lifestyle. Asked separately for their thoughts on Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, M.D.’s recommendation that cancer warnings be added to liquor health labels, the two answered as if with one voice:
“Honestly, I think the more information you have, the better,” Beatriz said, adding, however, that there would have to be a greater cultural shift for this to be effective.
Millbrook Winery, Bova added, is all about moderation – except when it comes to a decided appreciation for its collaboration with the Williamses.
“Having Bernie and Beatrix as wine partners has been fantastic,” he said. “(Beatriz) shares many of the same attributes in her art as Bernie does in his music. Millbrook Winery is thrilled to have them both with us enjoying the journey together.”
