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Appreciation of wine and a good cause whipped up enthusiasm at this charity auction, where wealthy buyers enjoyed charity's sweet bouquet - at out-of-sight prices.
By CHRIS SHERMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 6, 2002
NAPLES, Fla. -- Cases and cases of the finest and rarest wines in the world -- from venerable vintages of Margaux and Le Pin to the hard-to-get California's Screaming Eagle and Harlan Estates -- were auctioned off for $2.5-million on the golf-green back lawn of this wealthy city's second Ritz-Carlton.
But there was no rarefied sniffing by connoisseurs and no PGA hush in the crowd.
Saturday's auction at the Naples Winter Wine Festival was, in the words of auctioneer and vintner Ann Colgin, "the Super Bowl," and almost as loud.
Along with fine wines were maracas, saltwater taffy and key lime coconut patties at every place setting. Volunteers who greeted guests wore Florida souvenir hats as tacky as any NFL superfan's and waved inflated dolphins and toy monkeys as they spotted bids.
When the hammer went down, the sound system kicked in: "Boom shakka lakka, boom shakka lakka" . . . "Play that funky music," and the crowd went wild.
They danced to the music, shaking their booties and their maracas. Video cameras panned the scene, while encouraging "WOW"s popped up on big screens.
And why not? These wines would cost more than $100 for a 750-ml bottle of a new vintage if you could find one at all. Each of the 70 lots, or items, in this auction consisted of several bottles or an entire case of older vintages or rare large bottles in commemorative packages that would command much more in rare wine circles. Add auction energy and charitable good will and prices hit the stratosphere.
The NWWF was not to be confused with the World Wrestling Federation, chairman Brian Cobb announced with a chuckle.
It was not stuffed-shirt Old Naples. On this afternoon the attire was very relaxed, Tommy Bahama shirts over pleated Bermudas or black silk tops not long enough to meet a low-rise Burberry skirt.
You could learn that 1970 and 1982 were still prized Bordeaux vintages and 1985 and 1997 the pride of Napa, but this was not a place to debate wine's fine points, simply a display of affluence and generosity that would amaze most devoted wine buyers.
The only solemn moment came at the beginning, when three children from the benefitting agencies, the Boys and Girls Club of Collier County and Youth Haven, described the programs and thanked the crowd. That ended when young Kevin Guerrero sang God Bless America and asked the audience to join in.
Then the ball was in play. "This is competition," Colgin said, "You no longer have any friends in this room," before she started her spiel. She introduced one lot -- double magnums of 1970 Chateau Latour and 1970 Chateau Mouton Rothschild and a magnum of 1982 Haut Brion -- as party bottles and in minutes the bids had gone from $2,000 to $22,000 and "Hot, Hot, Hot" blasted from the speakers.
So it went, every time a wine lot topped $20,000, and most did:
'97 Viader Cabernet, $26,000, "Who let the dogs out?"
Three double magnums of 1996 Gaja Barbaresco, $28,000, "Dance to the music."
Private tasting of nine vintages of Vieux Chateau Certan, $50,000, "She's alright."
It went on for three hours, wines from Far Niente, Dalle Valle, Vega Sicilia, Lynch-Bages and more, plus vintage rock. Colgin took turns baiting the audience with English auctioneer Humphrey Butler, who touted Chateau d'Yquem as "the Viagra of dessert wines."
Top price for a single bottle was $70,000 for an imperial of Colgin's own 1999 Herb Lamb Vineyard, in a hand-crafted box of sycamore inlaid with ebony and burr ash by Viscount Linley, English furniture maker and son of Princess Margaret. The final bid of the day, also $70,000, went for a case of Pillar Rock cabernet from a new winery in Stag's Leap, owned by friends of Barbara Olson, the political analyst who died in one of the Sept. 11 plane crashes.
The auction Saturday afternoon was just the highlight of a star-studded event that draws an A-plus list of prestige vintners and superstar chefs. They, in turn, drew a very select group of more than 400 wine fans, from Naples and across the country, who paid $5,000 a couple and up to be patrons. That included dinners the night before in private homes of the festival's 18 founders cooked by the likes of Thomas Keller of California's French Laundry, Florida's Norman Van Aken, and Roberto Donna from Galileo in Washington, D.C., with wines from the visiting winemakers.
That rich combination, started only last year, already has resulted in the second-largest wine charity in the world, behind only the annual wine auction in Napa itself.
Cobb, who owns and brokers television stations, admitted he had feared the economy might prevent this year's festival from raising as much as last year's. "I told them they had a recession but it was not the same recession everyone else had." Counting the auction and other contributions, the weekend raised $3.4-million, beating last year's by $500,000.
Cobb's only surprise in the bidding, he said, was that a 2002 retro Thunderbird sold for $120,000. "I can understand spending that kind of money for wine . . . but a car?"
What kind of people can spend an average of $35,000 per item on wine?
The rich, obviously, for this was a crowd where diamonds could be the size of class rings and guy talk might be about good Ferrari colors (cabernet, appropriately enough).
And people who care about wine, of course. This proved to be another chapter in an unusual tale of two cities, the growing love affair between Naples and Napa, the wealthy Florida enclave and California's most fabled wine region.
While some come south to a second home in Naples, a few locals have gone west. Clarke Swanson, a Naples businessman and developer, turned his eyes to Napa years ago and started a winery there that has succeeded with merlot and sangiovese. Jeff Gargiulo, a success at Florida agriculture (and producer of the Ugly Tomato), had bottles of his new Money Road Ranch cabernet and merlot on the table.
Others, like Jay Baker, Milwaukee department store business retiree who paid $55,000 for a bottle of Screaming Eagle, set his mind on buying the wine after tasting it at Friday's dinner. "I loved it, the best wine I ever tasted in my life."
The festival also provided a reminder of the tale of two cities that are Naples, Fla.: this fabulously rich one and the rest of booming Collier County, where one-third of the schoolchildren are at or below the poverty line. Many buyers, and the prices they paid, reflected an awareness of that.
"I took care of some kids," Steve Hirons said modestly to some friends after after buying a lot of Stag's Leap. Then the investment brokler added, "I "grew up' in a YMCA. My parents both worked, and that's where my brother and sister and I went every day after school."
"The wine is secondary. If you bought it in a liquor store you might pay $500 to $1,000. Here it will sell for 10 to 15 times that," said Len Anderson, a retired Minnesotan who heads a group of yacht owners who monitor the environmental state of the seas as they travel. "This is a bunch of really fortunate people getting together having fun and giving money to people who need it."
Chef Michael Chiarello of Napa's Tra Vigne agreed, saying he found it different from many benefits that chefs and winemakers get drafted into.
"Most of these things are the overprivileged celebrating their overprivilegedness. Here's there's a real sense of community you can feel it."
If skeptics sneer at the idea of wine and wealth as philanthropy, vintner Dick Grace of St. Helena did not. "I am not judgmental toward others," although he has made charity, not wine, his life.
Grace, a Buddhist and a man who marked his 14th year of sobriety at the auction, has a tiny three-acre vineyard with the motto, "Wine as a catalyst toward healing our planet." His wines are in great demand and in such small quantity that they are available only through a long waiting list or at charity auctions designed to benefit children.
A square-shouldered man in a T-shirt and close-cropped hair, he looked like the YMCA athletic director he once was when he took the stage to introduce the children from the Naples charities.
Later he said that wine by itself is pleasure, not happiness. "But when you can combine financial affluence with generosity, that's what I want to do. I want to turn the bellows onto the ember of compassion that lurks within everyone."