After striking TV gold with “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Patricia Heaton could be living a more leisurely life.
Instead, the actress, who won two Emmy Awards for playing Raymond’s wife, Debra Barone, on the long-running series, hasn’t slowed down on or off screen. Now, she’s celebrating the expansion of her new alcohol-free wine business, Solubrae.
“I was looking for a hobby,” Heaton told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.
“I’m like, ‘Embroidery? No. Knitting? No. Should I learn the piano? A little too late.’ So work. I like to work. We just like to work.”
The “we” being her and her husband of 36 years, actor, producer, and director David Hunt.
The couple also founded production company FourBoys Entertainment (also known as FourBoys Films), where they develop film and TV projects shaped by craft, family, faith, and human dignity. They named the company after their four sons: Samuel, John, Joseph, and Daniel.
Since founding the company, Heaton has devoted considerable time and effort to crafting and expanding Solubrae’s wines. The first two are “Daylight,” a white wine, and “Sundown,” a Rosé. “Moonrise,” a red, and “Celebrate,” a sparkling white wine, will join the lineup after Thanksgiving.
“We like to create stuff, and we like business,” said Heaton of her latest venture.
It was also personal.
“This wine was a natural fit for us because I stopped drinking eight years ago and could not find a great non-alcoholic wine,” she said.
“They were either grape juice or some kind of weird version that was too sweet or nothing. So we decided, ‘Let’s make our own.’”
Making an alcohol-free wine resemble actual wine “is hard,” said Heaton.
“The wine is purchased, and then it goes through a process which is centrifugally removing the alcohol. When you remove the alcohol, it very much changes the nature of the wine. So you have to work with your product to bring it as closely back to having a mouthfeel, having a nose, working with the tannins and the acidity to create a likeness to wine,” she said.
“We’re thrilled with how it turned out because it’s only been out for six months and we’ve already won a couple of international awards.”
The couple aren’t just lending their celebrity names to the wines, made in Santa Rosa, California (Sonoma County); they’re knee-deep in the details.
“Dave and I are hands-on at every step of the way—with the creation of it, with the graphics, with the bottle. Everything that’s going on is us doing it,” she said.
When she decided to give up alcohol, Heaton wasn’t sure how it would go.
“It was so much a part of my life,” she recalled.
“I remember an evening when I was cooking and having wine while I was cooking and then having more wine when we were eating dinner and then drinking some more wine while I was cleaning up and then having more wine while my husband and I were watching ‘Wheel of Fortune.’
“By the end of the evening, I looked because my husband has never been a drinker and I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. I drank almost this whole bottle.’ It was an eye-opener for me.”
Talking about that time in her life, Heaton acknowledged the shift as her four sons left the nest and she was finishing a run of weekly sitcoms— “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “The Middle,” “Carol’s Second Act.”
The free time on her calendar led to more cocktail lunches and early happy hours.
A “Raymond” co-star and friend, the late Peter Boyle, inspired her to change her daily habit. The long-time sober actor, who played Raymond’s dad Frank Barone, had taught her a mental rehearsal technique—walking through the consequences of taking the first drink until the compulsion fades.
Besides ditching alcohol, Heaton also made another major lifestyle change when she moved from Los Angeles to Nashville a few years ago.
“I feel so relaxed here,” she said. “There’s a slower pace even though Nashville is booming. Southern hospitality is on full display. There’s an overwhelming kindness and neighborliness here. Geographically, it’s beautiful.”
With film and TV production now often located outside the city, the timing was right.
“I have so many friends that are working that are not in L.A. anymore,” she said.
“L.A. was such a beautiful place, but it’s been so egregiously mismanaged that I don’t know if it can come back from where it is. We loved L.A., but the industry has also been going through so many changes so rapidly. It really is a whole new thing.
“I don’t think it’ll ever go back to the way it was. I feel very blessed that I was able to have my career in the 90s and 2000s, when television was just booming, booming. It was fantastic and so much fun. And I got to be on two great shows that made people laugh.”
To many people, even with new roles and her wine business expanding, Heaton will always be beloved as Debra Barone because, three decades later, “Everybody Loves Raymond” is still on somewhere, finding new and returning viewers all over the world.
“It’s universal,” said Heaton about the classic sitcom’s longevity.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she recounted.
“I was traveling [in] Uganda [with] World Vision, a Christian aid organization I’m involved with. And the World Vision person that I was with was Ugandan.
“It was a Friday, and we were wrapping up for the week. He was going home to his farm, and I said, ‘What’s your weekend look like?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I have to go to a wedding of one of my wife’s co-workers, and I’m not going to know anybody there. And I just want to be at home, but I have to go because it’s my wife’s job.’
“I thought to myself, ‘I’m all the way here in Uganda, and this guy’s complaining about exactly what any husband in America would complain about.’ And that tells you how universal the show is and continues to be because it is about marriage, family. Every writer came into work, and they told stories about what happened on their weekend with their family, and that’s what the show came from.”
While the husband-and-wife team continues creating and pitching new entertainment projects, they find a lot of satisfaction in what creating Solubrae has brought to their lives.
“Being involved in every step is very gratifying,” says Heaton.
“It’s hard work. But as I said, my husband and I are doers, and we like to be able to see something that you put together.
“At the end of the day, you have the product you could hold in your hand. Acting is very satisfying from an artistic view, but it’s not the same as being able to rearrange your linen closet and get to see the results.”
