Napa Valley Vintners' weekend shines once again
By Sasha Paulsen
The synergy of an event and a cause in Napa Valley sometimes verges on the magical. For the Napa Valley Vintners’ inaugural Together Again Weekend, which took place June 2 to 4, even Mother Nature cooperated, providing days that were sunny but not broiling and evenings that were pleasant, nearly warm, under cloudless skies. She must have approved, as did the guests at the newest offering from the Vintners.
While some people profess confusion at the changes from the old Napa Valley Vintners’ June auction, the intent remains the same: to transform the bounty — and pleasures — of this valley into a means of benefiting its residents, especially those in need.
The Together Again weekend not only celebrated the still heady joy of being able to gather post-COVID, it also introduced a new, simpler form of the auction, smaller, light-hearted, unpretentious and focused on a single cause.
“It’s a return to Napa,” said Linda Reiff, president and CEO of the 500-plus member Napa Valley Vintners.
A brief history
The French created the model for an auction of fine wines to support a good cause with the Hospices de Beaune, founded in Burgundy in 1443. In 1981, Napa Valley Vintners held the first Napa Valley Wine Auction, a community party and auction of local wines to support services for the valley’s essential farm workers.
Since then the idea has been adopted by myriad organizations in Napa Valley and around the country: a celebration with great wine, food and company with the proceeds benefiting a worthy cause. Locally these unfold for everything from accessible health care (OLE Health’s Vida OLE!) to animal rescue (Jameson Humane’s WineaPAWlooza). In some instances, like the V Foundation’s Wine Celebration Weekend, the event is held in Napa Valley but generates millions for national cancer research.
I had been living abroad and on the East Coast before I returned to the valley in 1999. Shortly thereafter I attended my first NVV wine auction with Pierce Carson, the features writer for The Napa Valley Register. I was (in theory) his editor. I trailed behind him in wonder as we entered under an enormous canopy on the golfing green at Meadowood Resort, where tables were filled with many wine bottles and a rollicking crowd.
“Hey, Pierce!” a man hailed him. “Sit over here. I saved you a couple of seats!” This was how I met Robert Mondavi. I don’t remember if this was the year he wore a sports coat made of wine corks, but I do recall watching the high-spirited vintners hopping from table to table, encouraging the bids as the wine flowed. Most of the community seemed to be there, if not as paying guests then as volunteers, including a crazy Hoopla Committee who celebrated winning bids with confetti, cow bells and horns. The money raised would all come back to the community, benefitting several local nonprofits. This, I thought, is a glorious genius of an idea.
In the 2000s the format shifted to a weekend called Auction Napa Valley. It included a new community party, the barrel auction for wine futures on Friday. The Saturday live auction was for a smaller, more select (which is to say wealthier) group. Guests for the full weekend package were treated to winemaker dinners leading up to the live auction at Meadowood Resort. This latter became a dazzling, designer-dressed event with ladies in grand hats and spike heels poking holes in the golf course as they walked to an enormous tent that sheltered them from sun, rain and wind. They bid mind-boggling amounts for lots that included fabulous jewels, premium boxes at the Super Bowl and round-the-world trips. And also wine.
In 2009, when my vacuum cleaner had just died and I was trying to figure out how to afford to buy a new one, I sat next to a man from New York who told me that the recession had hit him hard. This year he was so broke he could only spend $45,000.
“Your idea of broke and mine are quite different,” I told him.
But then he said something that struck me.
“I figure this is for the kids of this valley. I can’t let them down.”
What, I wondered, created this connection for him with children he’d never met?
If sometimes it was hard to find Napa in the auction, which brought in famous chefs and entertainers, one couldn’t argue with success: Since 1981, the Vintners gave back more than $225 million to the community, providing necessary items that might otherwise have been impossible, from computers for schools to state-of-the-art equipment for local hospitals. In 2014, when an earthquake struck Napa, the Vintners were among the first to step in with $10 million in aid.
The Collective
Auction Napa Valley ended after 2019. COVID-19 cancelled the 2020 event, and the Vintners announced they were going to take time to re-envision the means by which they would continue their commitment to local philanthropy.
The result was the new model, Collective Napa Valley, a broader year-round umbrella approach to community engagement with smaller events focused on specific causes as well as opportunities to learn more about the valley, its wines and winemakers. Membership begins at the free level and progresses upward.
As COVID receded, the Collective hosted two events in 2022: The hugely popular barrel auction took place on the first weekend in June, traditionally the wine-auction weekend, and it raised $1.5 million for much-needed mental health services in the valley. A much smaller form of a dinner and auction in November benefitted environmental programs, including fire prevention.
When the NVV announced Collective’s agenda for 2023, it included the new Together Again Weekend in June with the Friday barrel auction, vineyard walks, winemaker dinners and, yes, a Saturday dinner and auction.
It sounded the same — but different.
For the first time the auction would take place somewhere other than Meadowood, which is still rebuilding from the 2020 wildfires. Silver Oak Winery in Oakville was the host site. Instead of the usual 2,000 guests there would be more like 200 or so. Instead of dozens of lavish lots there would be 10. And the proceeds would all go to one specific cause, mental health services for the young people of Napa County. The recipients would include SHINE Napa Valley (Student Health Improvement Through Nonprofit Excellence), a collaborative that brings together schools, community and nonprofit service providers, along with other organizations that provide mental-health support.
Louis Martini Winery, now 90 years old and owned by Gallo, proved to be an ideal choice for the barrel auction, with its indoor and outdoor spaces large enough to comfortably accommodate the hundreds of guests who showed up to taste and bid on wines while sampling fare from the valley’s restaurants. This is always a joyful event, a time to catch up with people such as Paula Kornell, pouring her own (excellent) sparkling wines, and Judd Finkelstein of Judd’s Hill, whose downtown Napa cocktail lounge, the Fink, is opening this summer.
Then it was on to Saturday’s auction.
“Welcome to the movable feast,” announced David Duncan, president of Silver Oak and Twomey wineries. He, along with Beth Novak Milliken, president of Spottswoode Estate Winery and Vineyards, were the chairs for the weekend’s events.
Buses transported some 300 guests to Silver Oak — people wearing everything from ball gowns to blue jeans, with U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson riding along. After a reception under one canopy, guests were beckoned to the dining area by guides ringing cowbells and banging tambourines. It began to feel like old times in Napa.
Gone was the tent. The tables formed a long single line in the vineyards, each one representing an appellation of the valley. Beneath a canopy, tables were filled with a plethora of bottles, glasses and colorful flowers. Servers presented dinner, prepared by Cindy Pawlcyn and her team: platters of colorful vegetables, salmon and beef. Volunteering somms circulated with wines. Laughter and bonhomie prevailed. At our table, vintner Rich Frank, entertaining guests from Iowa with tales from the winery, picked up a bottle of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars’ Fay Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon.
“Shall we see if it’s any good?” he asked.
As the sun set over the Mayacamas Mountains, the movable feast moved to the Silver Oak patio for the auction. Certainly there were modern touches: Sotheby’s now powers the auction, allowing bidders to chime in from around the world. The main action, however, was in person.
But like old times, with cowbells ringing and bursts of silver streamers falling over winning bidders, Shari and Garen Staglin congratulated Mary Miner, who won their lot, six magnums of wine plus a trip to South Africa for $500,000. Emma Swain, president of St. Supéry, posed for photos with Doug and Annette Shafer, who won her lot, 23 bottles of wine and also a trip to Paris for a Chanel fashion show and a tour of the Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment.
The top lot of the night was Spottswoode’s “Ultimate Napa Valley June Experience,” a week that begins with VIP BottleRock tickets and ends with full access to the Collective’s 2024 events. In between these bookends are dinners at Charter Oak and PRESS restaurants in St. Helena, tastings at Ovid and Rudd, and a hike and dinner with Beth Novak Milliken. It went for $280,000, and Milliken doubled the experience to accommodate the top two bidders.
There was a Napa feel to all of the lots, including Cakebread’s 50th anniversary lot of wine and tickets to Live in the Vineyards, and the Gargiulo-Silver Oak lot for dinner for 40 at Gargiulo Vineyards with entertainment there by Nashville singer-songwriters.
For a shining future
In all, the weekend, including the barrel auction and the fund-a-need, raised $3.8 million, but the final amount did not seem as important as its purpose.
“Remember when you were in high school? What did you have to worry about?” Milliken asked, inviting the crowd to contrast their own high school concerns — dates, acne, grades — to the challenges today’s young people face: the bizarre world of social media and AI, pressures, bullying and harassment, school lockdown drills and pandemics, not to mention the state of the world they will inherit. According to the Vintners, a recent local study indicates that nearly 60 percent of students in Napa County experience depression and anxiety.
With the proceeds from the 2022 barrel auction, two new Wellness Centers were opened for a total of seven, one on each high school and middle school campus in the Napa Valley Unified School District. Each Wellness Center is staffed with a counselor, a school social worker, a nurse and a youth outreach coordinator. More than 1,000 students have found support at these centers.
Daisy Zamora, the outreach coordinator at the Napa High Wellness Center, shared her story. While she was a student at Napa High, she said, “I tried to commit suicide.” Finding help, however, allowed her recover, move forward, graduate and enroll in Napa Valley College. While she completed her studies at NVC, she also returned to work at the Napa High Wellness Center.
“I was so proud to be able help create the youth center,” she said. “There are so many students who are afraid of the stigma of mental illness, afraid to find help for things like depression.”
She will move on to Sacramento State next fall to finish her degree in sociology.
So the synergy continues in a way few places can match. As the evening ended the full moon was rising, and I had a fanciful notion that Pierce Carson and Robert Mondavi were looking down with approval over this “return to Napa.”