Vivid Girl Savanna Samson has started a company called Savanna Wines that will unveil its first vintage in 2006.
“I’ve dreamed about making my own wine or champagne or something, and I didn’t know how it would work, and then I started to climb in the adult world,” Samson told AVN.com.
“I started featuring, and a lot of clubs have posters of girls from the industry, and I said, ‘Oh my goodness, how can I make my mark in the world, something people can remember me by.’ It’s such as short life as an adult film star. What greater way to do it than my love for wine.”
Wine is a passion for Samson, who has been studying it for the past seven years.
“Because of my connections in the wine world, I’ve been going to Italy and France for years studying, and I was confident it would work given my name in porn if I had my wine in every strip club across the country,” she said.
But Samson won’t just have her creation in strip clubs. Savanna Wines has received such a positive response that it will also be in select fine restaurants both in the U.S. and abroad.
Italian wine maker Robert Cipresso, who is famous for his Chiacci wines, made Samson’s first vintage. She chose Cipresso because “I loved his passion.” To start the process she traveled to Montalcino, Italy, where Cipresso presented her with 80 different samples.
“I loved the Cesanese grape, which grows outside of Rome. It’s been basically forgotten about because wine makers in the past have tested its strength instead of its silk side,” Samson noted.
The starlet narrowed her selections to four different samples that she brought back to the U.S., where she tasted each one blindly while making her final decision.
“I always liked this certain one, which is the first Savanna Wine, Number One,” she said.
The result is Always Savanna Vino Rosso (2004), which she said is 70 percent Cesanese, (“the spine”), 20 percent San Giovese, (“like the flesh”) and 10 percent Montepulciano (“the makeup”).
“It’s not a wine for the masses,” Samson said. “This wine will make you think. It’s been described as ‘curiously delicious’ or ‘unusually delicious.’ Right now it’s bottled. It’s resting.”
While Samson could have released it in time to have people “drunk by New Year’s,” she decided to have a grand unveiling at her favorite fine-dining establishment, La Masseria, in Manhattan during Carnival - the Venetian holiday in February.
La Masseria was named GQ’s “Restaurant of the Year” for 2005. She has documented the entire process of the making of the first Savanna Wine, and the 20-minute video clip will be played during the launch party.
Samson said that Robert Parker, the highly regarded wine critic and publisher of The Wine Advocate, reviewed Always Savanna Vino Rosso and gave it 91 points, which is considered an excellent score.
“He’s a big influence in the wine world, and for him to give it 91 points it’s incredible, amazing,” Samson said. “He determines the price of wines just by reviewing them.”
Samson only has 409 cases of 12 bottles of Always Savanna, so it will be hard to get.
“It’s so exciting. Everyone that tries the wine says the Cesanese is so curious and yet it’s elegant,” she said. “It really represents me. Anybody that knows me knows that 10 percent of the time I’m sweet. There is just a slight hint of chocolate sweetness. It’s also elegant like my love for the arts.”
Samson said she already has interested distributors in Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Florida and New York.
“I’m so proud of the wine,” she said.
The 2005 host of the AVN Awards Show and star of The New Devil in Miss Jones admits that, at first, an adult star making her own wine “sounds like a gimmick.” But Samson said “what’s going to be amazing about it is that it’s also going to be very good.”
More information can be found at the soon-to-be-launched savannawines.com.
