Since its beginning in 1981, the Napa Wine Auction (in its various iterations) has raised and invested more than $230 million toward helping the Napa Valley community address some of the challenges its youth face.
This year, after suffering through COVID and all of its restrictions, the Napa Wine Auction altered its name to the Collective Napa Valley Barrel Tasting and Auction and invited wine lovers to gather in Napa to celebrate both the local wine and the generosity of its winemakers.
Held on May 31 and June 1, the weekend featured barrel tasting wine futures from almost 100 wineries and elegant dining at more than a dozen wineries. The sit-down auction was held on Saturday. Combined, the Collective raised $5 million.
Terry and I attended both the barrel tasting (which also acts as an auction, which I’ll explain in a bit) and a magical evening dinner under the stars at St. Supery Winery.
Spread across two floors of the spacious Hall Winery, the 80 or so wineries set up their individual stations. Rather than rolling close to a hundred wine barrels into Hall, each winery bottled a sufficient amount of their offering to last the afternoon for pouring. Cabernet sauvignon comprised a majority of the wines. Some of the wines had another year in barrel before bottling and others another two years.
Guests wandered inside Hall for the wines and went outside for the food, which was outstanding. As you know, Napa is home to chef Thomas Keller’s famous restaurant, The French Laundry. I guess chef Tom also likes some down-home cooking from time to time, so he opened Ad Hoc, “his casual dining venue for showcasing the American comfort food of his childhood.” I don’t know about you, but I didn’t eat like this growing up. Ad Hoc served its fried chicken sandwich, probably the finest version of this dish I have ever had. Spicy, crunchy, juicy – I want to move into Tom’s house if this is any sample of what he usually enjoys.
So, you, the wine taster, enter the first floor of Hall, where you encounter three wineries pouring their offerings right away. You travel the maze of barrels and other winemaking paraphernalia to reach about 50 or so wineries. Then you travel upstairs for the approximately 40 remaining wineries.
The Collective distributed the wineries alphabetically, which helped in deciding where to go by knowing where the wines you planned on sampling likely would be.
Large screens were scattered across the venue, each screen focusing on the three or four wineries pouring in front of that particular screen. Each winery offered 10 cases of whatever wine it was pouring. All the bidders knew that, even if they were successful in bidding on the wine, they would have to wait at least a year (and perhaps longer) before the wine would be available.
This is how the bidding worked. Say you liked what Arkenstone was pouring, so you bid $1,000 for a case. And, let’s say that, at the time of your bid, $1,000 was the top bid. If more people wanted to buy a case, then they would have to offer more than $1,000. So, someone bid $1,100 for a case. That bumped your bid from the No. 1 position to No. 2. But you would still be OK, because there were 10 cases being offered. If another person wanted a case, then they would have to bid $1,200, dropping you to No. 3. And so on for each successive bid, which was still OK so long as you were at least at No. 10. But, if there were 11 bidders, then you would be in the losing position of No. 11. If you wanted to get back in the game, then you needed to bid $100 more than the then-top bid.
Actually, this happened to me with Arkenstone. I loved their wine, so I made the then-highest bid. But as the day wore on, my bid got lower and lower to the point where I was at No. 17, well out of the race.
Drinking all that wine was great, but the bidding added an additional level of excitement and tension. I did successfully bid on two cases.
I’ll talk about the wines we really enjoyed in my next column.
Carl Kanowsky is an attorney, a fledgling baker, an enthusiastic cook and an expert wine drinker.
