Donor: Elise at Elkhorn Peak
Value: $229 (This has to be a mistake!!)
MinBidIncr: $10
Auction Closes: 8pm PT
Three bottles and accessories! and A vertical tasting looks at just one wine through a range of different years, emphasizing the difference in vintages. Each Pinot Noir Vertical include:
2016 Elkhorn Peak Pinot Noir Napa Valley Estate
2017 Elkhorn Peak Pinot Noir Napa Valley Estate
2018 Elkhorn Peak Pinot Noir Napa Valley Estate
Vertical tasting guide
Wine tasting notes & tasting cards for recipients to analyze each vintage
Elkhorn Peak logoed corkscrew
Your personal message handwritten on a card
Wines are delivered in an attractive semi-gloss black box, and tied with a fancy ribbon.
A great opportunity to see how time affects wine from our Napa Valley estate vineyard, and a nice study of how Pinot Noir evolves with time!
Elkhorn Peak Cellars is a small, family-owned vineyard and winery on the south end of the Napa Valley. Owned and operated by father/daughter duo Ken and Elise, Elkhorn Peak Cellars makes 1,000 cases of wine annually. You won’t find our wines in any stores or wine shops, we sell our small batch wine 100% direct to the consumer. We have no plans to go big; the emphasis is on growing and making limited production, ultra-premium Napa Valley wines and keeping the small family farm viable for future generations.
Thanks for the bid, @Christophercook5. This is a really fun experience, and if you take it home you’ll have to let us know which vintage of Pinot you like best!
I like your tenacity, @Christophercook5!! This vertical is still a steal at $85. Each one of the wines included in the vertical retails for $60/bottle – so you’re still way ahead of the game!
The three vintages in this vertical were quite memorable for us…the 2016 vintage marks the end of a 4 year drought that plagued CA. The four-year period between fall 2011 and fall 2015 was the driest since record keeping began in California in 1895. And then the rain finally arrived… It began to rain in November 2015 and continued through April 2016. This was a welcome sight, and one the grapevines were very happy to see arrive. The rain in early 2016 set this vintage off on the right foot. The rest of the growing season was fairly boring…In farming, nothing beats a boring year. We love boring weather.
Winter rain and cold weather marked the beginning of the 2017 growing season as well; we received nine inches of rain in February. The heavy rain continued through March and April, we logged four inches of rain at our ranch in April – very heavy for April. Napa Valley received so much rain in the winter of 2017 that valley floor vineyards looked like they were growing out of ponds or lakes, with vines sitting in several feet of water; we even got some snow on Mt. St. Helena – very unusual! Ultimately, the volume of rain we received at the beginning of 2017 would officially end the five-year drought in California. The fires came in 2017, but they broke out in October, and Pinot Noir is one of the earliest varietals to be picked – we’d already harvested the Pinot on September 6, 2017 – a full month before the fires broke out. By the time the fires arrived, our wines were sleeping soundly in barrel, protected from the elements.
2018 was another year of “miracle rain,”…2019 was wet as well. But the rain gods did not visit in 2020, and drought conditions, heat waves and more fires plagued our small valley in 2020, 2021 and 2022. But that story is for another day…
All this to say, the 3 vintages in this vertical – 2016, 2017 and 2018 – are some of the best wines we produced in the last decade. We hope the winner of this auction items loves these wines as much as we do.
I’m here until 8 PM PST if anyone has any other questions about these wines.
It began to rain in November 2015 and continued through April 2016. This was a welcome sight, and one the grapevines were very happy to see arrive. The rain in early 2016 set this vintage off on the right foot. The rest of the growing season was fairly boring…In farming, nothing beats a boring year. We love boring weather.