Top picks include a chance to help harvest grapes at Cain Vineyard and Winery, high on Spring Mountain, enough wine to instantly populate a cellar with Napa classics, and a sleepover at a vintner’s home in buzzed-about sub-region Coombsville. The ultimate wine lot is a Salmanazar (9-liter bottle) of killer cab 1995 Shafer Hillside Select.
In the Friday barrel auction: 110 lots (minimum bid, $200) go on sale at Charles Krug winery. Each is a barrel of wine from a different estate; when the auction closes, the top 10 bidders for any barrel will each get one case of the wine. A new mobile app will track your position in the top 10 and send alerts when you’ve been outbid.
I’d single out the one-of-a-kind special Insignia cuvée from Joseph Phelps, Larkmead Vineyards’ the Lark Ascending cabernet from a two-acre vineyard plot, and the inaugural release of the Prisoner’s new, plush Dérangé red.
In the live auction: Saturday afternoon’s big spend highlights 32 extraordinary, vintner-sponsored lots that typically bring $100,000 and up. (You can fax an absentee bid by Thursday night.)
In addition to the Mondavis’ Arabian luxury Lot l, I have my eye on Lot 11: “Party Like It’s 1789 with Opus One.” It features a stay at Versailles and an invite to a fabulous masked ball in its Orangerie, where you can dance all night in custom costumes and masks. (Those are yours to keep.)
Additional fascinating lots include 100 miles-per-hour-plus laps around a track with Danica Patrick (Lot 28), a tour of Portugal’s Douro Valley (Lot 14), and a stay at a lavish villa on Saint Barth’s (Lot 21).
The wine highlights are two 1992 vintage double magnums of Screaming Eagle and Paradigm (Lot 27) and five six-liter bottles from Bond (Lot 19).
Don’t fret if your bids don’t make it. Just start thinking of 2019. That will be the 75th anniversary of the founding of Napa Valley Vintners trade association, which promises that next year’s auction “will change everything”—meaning it will be really, really over-the-top. FYI alert: On Monday, June 4, 75 special packages at $7,500 apiece will go on sale.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.