Ask the wine experts to choose the most striking wine lots from the Naples Winter Wine Festival’s live auction on Jan. 27, and the silence is palpable. Their challenge is to try to anoint “more fantastic” from a list of fantastic.

Still, two of them graciously looked at the lots for this year’s Naples Winter Wine Festival for The Naples Press and singled out items they saw as outstanding.

From the wine appraiser

Naples wine and spirits appraiser William Edgerton (edgertonwineappraisals.com) has been a certified wine appraiser since 1985 and is former editor-publisher of Wine Investors Monthly Market Report. He found four lots intriguing, beginning with the three-night stay and trove of multi-liter bottles offered by Château d’Yquem in Bordeaux. (Lot 4, How Sweet It Is).

“It is the world’s most famous sweet wine. It’s also the world’s most expensive sweet wine,” he said.

“It has a history of at least 200 years. It is very long-lived, exceedingly so if it’s properly stored. The sweetness that went in as part of the liquid helps as a preservative,” he explained. There are tasting notes of that wine back to the early 1800s, he said.

Fortunately for the lot buyer, the sweetness also preserves it somewhat after it’s opened. As Edgerton observed, because of its smaller portion size, a 6-liter bottle of Château d’Yquem could yield about 96 pours—a wedding party-size endeavor.

Drinking it all at one event is unlikely unless you are serving dinners for the United Nations. There are three of those bottles in this lot, along with three 3-liter bottles and several more commonly seen sizes.

Don’t equate Chateau d’Yquem with any other sweet wine you’re familiar with.

“It is very exotic,” he said. Its growers comb the vineyards multiple times to find the ripest grapes that carry the famous Botrytis cinerea fungus, which helps create its unique flavor. Most standard 750 ml bottles of vintages from the last 20 years sell for $300 to $7,000.

Edgerton was also impressed with the Harlan Estate offering (Lot 6, Uncorking a First Growth) of private lunch and dinner with two generations of the Harlan family for three couples, along with three 6-liter Harlan Estate wines—1993, 2001 and 2019. Its famed red-blend releases generally are available only by application.

“It’s outstanding in quality of wine, one of the 10 best in California,” he said, adding there are more than a thousand wineries in California competing to be in that circle. Robert Parker, considered the world’s foremost wine authority, has given four of its wines score of 100. In Parker’s farewell year as a wine writer, he praised the 2019: “Gentle cedar notes lead into layered dark chocolate and cassis, somehow impossibly rich yet savory.”

All three of the auction wines carry that perfect 100 score.

Great travel with great wine

Likewise, Edgerton finds irresistible the Antinori estate trip to Italy, with its high-end, intimate accommodations in the vineyard region and its three 3-liter bottles of Antinori Tignanello Toscana, its highest rated wine. (As if that isn’t enough, there are three 1.5-liter bottles of its Solaia Toscana as part of the lot.) Two nights in Florence in a private apartment and a guided tour of the Uffizi Gallery there add even more luster.

He’s also partial to the Champagne region trip (Lot 42, The Rarest of the Rare). The trip roams Rheims, with private tours, dinner with vintages in the historic Residence Rheims and a visit to the home of Rare Champagnes, an ultra-discriminating maker that has only released 11 vintages in the last four decades.

“It’s the wine of celebration. It’s the wine of excitement. And it’s near a significant and major city,” he said. Paris is little more than an hour away by train.
But what excited Edgerton most was the NCEF trustees’ collection (Lot 47, Trustee Treasure Trove), a 140-bottle lot, with half a dozen 6-liter bottles.

“A key characteristic is there are more bottles larger than 750 milliliters in this lot than you usually find at any one time,” he said. Because wines in larger format bottles age more slowly, there is a lot of good drinking opportunity here. By his calculations, the winner will have an instant wine collection worth around $290,000.

Along with all that comes some local excellence: a 5-foot Barbie-informed Naples Dreamhouse created by Thomas Riley Artisans Guild and Method & Concept. There’s still more: a 219.67-carat aquamarine to be designed into a custom piece of jewelry from the Diamond District.

Edgerton admired the breadth of the lot, from the Colgin Cellars IX Estate in California to Chris Ringland Shiraz in Australia, with Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and French wines.

The French wines hold sway, and Edgerton would gladly help taste the 1997 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, from its signature Romanée-Conti vineyard, which he appraised at roughly $28,500. (Wine sales sites offer the 750-ml bottle at $26,000 to $35,900.)

The Domaine de al Romanée Conti, which only produces 5,000 bottles annually, has cult status, and a history to back it up: The first vintage was recorded in 1232 A.D. The bottles in this lot are, enviably, approaching the time when it’s right to drink them—if you drink $28,500 bottles of wine.

The 12-liter 2007 Silver Oak Napa Valley Cabernet poses a different dilemma for the buyer, Edgerton noted. It weighs between 60 and 80 pounds and requires multiple handlers to pour it.

“You’ve got a real estate problem there,” he said. Still, 2007 was considered a near-perfect year for California Cabernets. So, if you have a special event in the future, and a muscular staff, Edgerton would be the first to say he’d like a glass of that, thank you.

“These are many of the great names in wine,” he declared. “If we’re talking wine, this is the best of the lots. It’s the best of the best.”

From the wine lover

Jacques Cariot is a dedicated and authoritative voice for good wine, as witnessed by the wine cellar in Bleu Provence, the French restaurant he and his wife have operated in Naples for 24 years. (bleuprovencenaples.com). Its wine list has won a raft of awards, including Wine Spectator magazine’s Grand Award for the last eight years.

His strong feelings meant that Cariot was looking for wines rather than lots, and he found joy within the first one (Lot 1, Drive a Piece of History and Collect Liquid Legends). The 1.5 liter of Chateau-Figeac stopped him, because he knows the grower’s practices and the terroir of its St. Emilion region, a gravelly soil that contains quartz, flint and an iron-rich blue clay.

“It’s exceptional because the guy is breaking all the rules,” Cariot said. The winery began using organic practices in the 1940s, long before they were recognized publicly, when the late Theirry Manocourt took over its direction. Today, the vineyards share space with pollinators that buzz around rose bushes and trees. Horses do the work—no motorized vehicles.

“They’re extremely friendly with Mother Nature. There are no chemicals, nothing ever,” Cariot said.

The components of its Premier Grand Cru Classe A Bordeaux wines are also singular: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, rather than Merlot grapes, define it, Cariot said.

Above all, what he appreciates is that Chateau Figeac reveres its terroir. Take a sniff, he said: “You don’t smell the Cabernet Sauvignon or the Cabernet Franc. You smell St. Emilion.

“I love that. For me, the choice of a grape is—it’s a media. The grape is to show the uniqueness of the place.”

He pointed out that at least one good Beaujolais comes from a Chardonnay grape: “But when you smell this stuff you have no idea it’s a Chardonnay because the terroir transcends the grape.”

This bottle is a magnum, and “magnums are 100% better—for different reasons I’ve been trying all my life to figure out,” Cariot said. One of the potential reasons, he said, is that they are the first juice bottled, which is done by hard, rather than through pipelines. Even the larger format bottles—the 3- and 6-liters—don’t have their magic.

“I think the universe loves this volume.”

That’s good news for bidders on Lot 1. All 39 bottles, one from each of the 2024 Naples Winter Wine Festival’s participating vintners, are magnums.

Not France, but wonderfully California

Cariot’s other favorite wine is the Verité, and there are three magnums of it in this lot.

“I love it because it’s not French. It’s California. It’s Sonoma. And it’s such an incredible cooperation between the French winemaker from St. Emilion (Pierre Seillan) and the (Jess) Jackson family,” Cariot said. Jess Jackson is gone, but the family has upheld his standards deliciously, he said.

“They are thoroughly fantastic, sexy, brilliant, a lot of purity. It shows the magic of California at its best,” he said of Verité wines.

The sunny, faster-growing climate of California won’t always produce terroir-rich flavor grapes.

“It’s like when you take a picture of the night. You should keep your camera open to capture a lot of stuff from the sky. A lot of light. A lot of impressions. The grape is the same,” Cariot explained. “The longer it takes the grape to mature, the more the grape captures everything that lives underground, in the air, everything.”

“But what you’ve got, the plus you’ve got in California, is a wine that’s super-sexy, more super-easy drinking.”

“Derived from a layered concentration of primarily Cabernet Sauvignon grown along the steep hillsides and volcanic benches of the Mayacamas Mountains, La Joie is a commanding wine that will reward the patient collector” he said in an email on the wines.

Both those wines, and the others, will be kept in storage for delivery, rather than shuttled to the winner in another part of Lot 1: a restored 1966 Ford Bronco in a custom pink color informed by the 2023 hit movie Barbie.

Still, its new owner can park it in the back yard, slip into its custom white leather seats, and enjoy some extremely special sips of wine.

This story was originally published in The Naples Press on Jan. 19. For more coverage of the Naples Winter Wine Festival visit naplespress.com