Napa Cabernet Verticals on the Block

If you like Napa Valley and its wines, there's an online auction going out right now that you should take a look at.

The Collective Napa Valley auction on the Sotheby's website has 50 wine-focused lots, some from big names including Screaming Eagle and Shafer, and others from tiny wineries you may not have heard of. It's an online-only auction that ends at 3pm EST on Monday, November 20.

Surprisingly, as of Tuesday afternoon, the leading lot isn't from a big name. Instead, Baldacci Family Vineyards has a $7000 bid for a four-night stay for eight people at the estate, along with dinner at a local restaurant and a 3-liter bottle of wine. Many of the lots are wine-only, so the chance to circumvent Napa Valley's high hotel prices might be the attraction here.

Here are a few of the most interesting lots:

* Jones Family Vineyards is offering a 26-bottle vertical, attractive because its first winemaker was Heidi Peterson Barrett and she was followed by Thomas Rivers Brown – two of the biggest names in the valley.

* Kenzo Estate is offering a 10-magnum vertical from 2010-2019. Barrett was the winemaker for all of these; enjoy her wines now because she walked away from Kenzo over the 2020 vintage.

* Shafer, a longtime supporter of Napa auctions, is offering a 6-liter bottle of Shafer Hillside Select 2019 and a caviar-and-Champagne visit to the winery.

* Spring Mountain District is offering nine magnums from nine different wineries.

* Screaming Eagle is only offering a magnum of its second wine, but it's Screaming Eagle; it'll do well.

* Behrens Family Winery and Relic Wine Cellars are offering a pizza party for 10 people – and all 10 guests get a magnum of wine.

* St. Supery, one of the event sponsors, is offering three lots. To me, the most interesting is the opportunity to follow Michael Scholz, VP of winemaking and vineyards, on a harvest day next year. You can kibbitz on his picking decisions; for me as a wine journalist, tagging along with a winemaker for a harvest day is still memorable years later. Angelina Mondavi is offering the same type of experience at Aloft Wine as her lot.

"I was trying to think of things that would be totally priceless and that you can't normally do," St. Supery CEO Emma Swain told Wine-Searcher. "Michael is responsible for our vineyards and also our wines. To go around Dollarhide Ranch with him, tasting grapes, seeing the picking decisions, seeing the sorting – seeing those calls, for an avid wine enthusiast, there's nothing like it. That's why all these young winemakers go around the world and make wine twice a year, so they can get that experience and make those calls."

Most of the lots, though, are wine, sometimes with lunch. This is a decidedly non-blingy auction, and that is by design, said Schatzi Throckmorton, general manager of both Behrens and Relic and a member of the Napa Valley Vintners board.

"The summer auction is the big live auction. That's going to continue to focus on all sorts of things," Throckmorton told Wine-Searcher. "Our membership has a lot of small family businesses. We have over 500 member wineries. We want to give some attention to lesser known or small startups that people might be less familiar. There was a lot of rethinking of the auction during Covid. We really wanted to bring it back to the roots and do something that is really authentic and that really gets people to come back to the valley and meet the winemakers and the owners and the vintners, and focus on the community ties."

Proceeds from the auction will go to the Forest Health Initiative, a Napa Valley organization intended to prevent and mitigate fires. Proceeds from Napa's June auction went toward youth mental health. Whereas past Napa Valley auctions benefitted a range of nonprofits, for the three-year period ending next year, all the money goes toward these two issues.

"We did a community survey and it indicated that these are the most important issues for us," Throckmorton said. "We're giving more money to a specific cause hoping we can really see the needle move on them. A lot of organizations that we worked with in the past, like Clinic Ole, we're still giving them money, but we're phasing that out."

Swain said fire prevention feels personal for St. Supery.

"We had three fires converge on us at our winery in 2020," Swain said. "It was our second day of harvest. CalFire told us to get everybody out because nobody was coming. But they were wrong. Our neighbors came. Our neighbors came with their shovels and they built a firebreak around our property. Those neighbors stopped the fire from running through our community. But we just had those two days of harvest in 2020. We lost everything else. We need to be resilient to climate change. Part of that is protecting our forest and our land."

There are usually a few overlooked lots in these auctions where a unique large-format bottle of wine sells for an unexpectedly low price. It's early, but as of Tuesday afternoon seven lots still had leading bids under $500. That's not cheap, but all the wine is from Napa Valley, so it's cheap enough. For now.