Are $1,000 Napa Valley Cabs on the way?

(LATimes) - I can remember when $100 for a California Cabernet seemed excessive. This year, though, if you’re on the list for Screaming Eagle, the poster child for cult Cabernet, you'll pay $850 a bottle, including tax and shipping. And Harlan Estate is now released at $800 a bottle.

But that seems like chump change compared with the prices top wines fetched at the Napa Valley Vintners’ 18th annual Premiere Napa Valley barrel tasting and auction last week. According to a story by W. Blake Gray on wine-searcher.com, “last weekend, a dozen different 60-bottle lots of Napa wines sold for more than $1,000 a bottle, most of them to retailers and restaurateurs that plan to mark them up and sell them for more.”

Keep in mind, though, that the average wholesale price per bottle sold was $283 — high, but a long way from $1,000. The wines are made solely for this event, and sold to single bidders in lots of 60 to 240 bottles.

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Some of those wines breaking the $1,000 barrier had special emotional selling points, writes Gray, “such as a solera-style wine of 21 vintages from ZD Wines at $1,667 a bottle. But some were relatively new on the scene and their high prices were more stunning for it.”

Glen Knight, domestic wine buyer for the Wine House in Los Angeles, paid a whopping $4,333 a bottle for 60 bottles of the 2012 Scarecrow Toto’s Opium Dream: Scene III Cabernet, “making it probably the most expensive current-release wine ever sold in the U.S.”

In fact, that same wine, made from grapes from 70-year-old vines, is already listed by the Wine House on wine-searcher.com at a crushing pre-arrival price of $5,400 a bottle. Or you can splurge on a case of 3 bottles from $13,500.

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Knight's brother, Jim, explains that his father, Bill, and brother go to Premiere Napa Valley every year. "Our customers love those private auction labels, with each bottle individually numbered, and we usually buy three to six auction lots every year."