In addition to my passion for the musk ox, I also have a deep love for horses. I’m not sure where this interest comes from. If you walk around my house, I have tons of paintings and sculptures of horses. It wasn’t done deliberately or consciously. When I was sitting on that sad-looking pony in Toronto as a child, I certainly wasn’t thinking, When I grow up, I want to own a seven-hundred-acre horse farm. Though that’s exactly what ended up happening.
In the mid-1980s, I’d loaned money to a friend who was setting up a winery.
When it came time to pay back the money, he said, “Instead, why don’t you take an interest in the winery?”
“Good idea.”
Ten years later, after losing two million dollars, I got out of the winery business. We were the only winery in California at the peak of wine growth in the state that lost money. I lost a lot of money and lost a friend. It’s funny, money can change relationships so quickly. People will do things under financial pressure that destroy relationships.
The bank that was dealing with the winery had foreclosed on this horse farm not far away. Seven hundred acres of prime land with a racetrack and barns and great pasture.
They came to me and said, “You know what you should do, Alex? You should buy this horse farm.”
“I don’t know anything about horses,” I said.
“Not to worry,” they replied, “there is a tenant who’s leasing the horse farm now.”
I went to look at it and fell in love with the place, and I bought it. Two months later, the guy who was leasing it said he wasn’t going to renew. Now I had seven hundred acres of prime horse-training property that was going to be empty. So I got into the horse business. I started hiring advisers and breeders and a manager, and we began running the farm. We had some successes, but the business never did as well as it could’ve. So after about a decade, I sold the farm. I sold it just before the crash. I got lucky.
I didn’t ride horses much myself. I did more riding at the winery than at the farm. We had horses for guests so they could take rides through the vineyards. One day, shortly after our wedding, Jeanie and I were out riding, and she went a little fast and fell off. She wasn’t seriously hurt. But it was around that time that she got pregnant with Matthew. So we always joked that the reason Jeanie got pregnant was because she fell off the horse and that shook up her insides and that resulted in the pregnancy. That’ll scare kids off from riding horses. They’ll say, “Alex Trebek said I better not go horseback riding or I’ll get pregnant.”