There's some good wine auction news out of Hong Kong. Bloomberg reports that a 12-bottle lot of much-prized 1961 Chateau Latour sold for a record price of HK$1.32 million ($170,320) at Christie's International first wine auction in Hong Kong in seven years on November 29. The amount was double the high-end of the pre-sale estimate of HK$650,000. They were bought by an Asian private collector. Two other lots of Latour 1961 were the second- and third-most expensive items at the auction. And the sale ratio was healthy on this one, out of 246 lots offered, 231 sold for a combined HK$31.5 million with many lots going above estimates. Wine seems to be fairing better than art at auctions recently, especially in Hong Kong. Around 90 percent of lots offered at Acker Merrall & Condit's Nov. 15 sale found buyers.

For a couple years now the wine industry has been moving toward more screwcaps but there are some good reasons that the pendulum may shift again.. A study by The World Wildlife Fund shows that up to three quarters of the Mediterranean's cork forests could be lost within 10 years if the trend for plastic stoppers and screw tops continues. A BBC Natural World documentary highlights the fact that these forests also support rare species such as Iberian lynx, black storks and booted eagles which are already disappearing in some areas. Because the farmers can no longer make as much money from cork harvest they have been ripping up the trees in order to grow alternative crops that will provide more ready cash. But the land that the cork oaks are on sometimes turns into a desert when the trees are removed. According to an article in the Telegraph, in the Algarve, Portugal, cork forests have declined by 28 per cent in the past 10 years. The cork industry in Portugal is now attempting to fight back and has introduced new methods to protect against cork taint and are trying to bring increased attention to the industry through public service announcements.

It can be hard to find the right wine to give your favorite wine lover so how about a gift that helps them enjoy their hobby. Hinckley Cellars has created The Note Wine Label Saver. The tool peels wine labels from bottles so they can be saved in an accompanying leather journal. The Note Wine Label Saver is made of stainless steel with a leather blade cover and it comes in a wooden keepsake box. It can be purchased on its own for $64 or with an Italian leather wine journal for $98. Check out how it works in the video below.

Deciding where and how to display your best bottle of wine or champagne can be a tough time unless, of course, you have a golden Fort Knox wine rack. Both strikingly elegant and appropriately simple, the Fort Knox displays and protects a single prized bottle inside a cage of shining gold. Each piece is unadorned except for the engraved logo and limited-edition number that's hammered on by hand.

Certainly not for the modest household, the Fort Knox would make a great gift/investment that could be passed down as an heirloom for years to come. Price upon request only.

Via Born Rich

When you are tasting wines most often water is the preferred palate cleanser. Now there is a new beverage called SanTasti which was created by a pair of college students while they were working toward their degrees in enology and viticulture at Cal Ply San Luis Obsispo's wine and viticulture program. SanTasti is meant to be a palate cleanser designed to help winemakers evaluate their wines more accurately and prevent "palate fatigue" in tasting rooms. Andrew Macaluso and Nicole Chamberlain have filed a patent for their beverage which sells for $3 a bottle. It is lightly effervescent and designed to be almost tasteless. They say it restore balance by moderating acidity, sweetness and astringency so you can experience more flavors from more foods. It also comes in peppermint and cinnamint flavors.

[via San Luis Obispo Tribune]

One of the top luxury events each winter is the Naples Winter Wine Festival in Naples, Florida. The auction and gala weekend is scheduled for February 6-8, 2009 and as usual it offers a a mix of once-in-a-lifetime experiences and one-of-a-kind treasures, with all proceeds benefiting underprivileged and at-risk children through the Naples Children & Education Foundation (NCEF), the festival's founding organization. As befits a wine auction, the majority of the 65 lots feature rare wine, including many large bottles such as a 27-liter bottle from Revana Family Vineyards; five Magnums of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti; a never-before released Salmanazar, which holds a complete case of wine, from Colgin Cellars; and a single lot consisting of a hand-signed Magnum from each of the festival's 28 participating vintners. Wineries are also offering private tours of wien caves, vintner dinners and unique travel options.

Other lots include one that offers two tickets to the 2009 Primetime Emmy Awards and entitles the winner to be drawn in as a character on The Simpsons TV show, one that includes a wild boar hunt in Tuscany another entitles the winner to the "ultimate house party" at Blackberry Farm with special guest and Grammy-award winning artist, Martina McBride. There are also jewelry lots from Cartier, Chopard and Bulgari, and one lot offers a shopping spree at Tiffany & Co. The car to be raffled off has not been announced yet but the website appears to indicate it might be a Lexus GS 450 Hybrid.

On the night before the auction, vintner dinners are hosted in the homes of 17 trustees and vintners and celebrity chefs including Emeril Lagasse, Jonathan Benno, Linton Hopkins, Bob Kinkead and Mary Ann Esposito. Festival ticket packages are $7,500 per couple; $20,000 for reserved seating at the same vintner dinner for two couples and tickets are limited to 550 guests.

It's not looking good for the 2008 Bordeaux. Decanter reports that France's two main newspapers, Le Monde and Le Figaro have panned the 2008 vintage. They say that the recent poor weather has affected the harvest. Le Figaro said that the 2008 wine 'promised neither quality nor quantity' while Le Monde said that readers 'should not expect answers [from winemakers] when all the conditions that go in to making a great vintage do not come together.' The harvest has been very difficult all over the region running weeks behind schedule due to increased rain. The news comes at a time when conflicting Bordeaux stories are in the media. On the one hand, the 2005 Bordeaux is said to be phenomenal, but things after that aren't so rosy. Vintners are threatening to boycott producers over the cost of the 2006 vintage and the emperor of wine, Robert Parker had limited kind words for the 2007 vintage.

Recently, Dr. Vino had an interesting post on avoiding the Beaujolais Nouveau hype in favor of drinking local wine so as to avoid the carbon footprint of the French wine which is quickly bottled and then zipped off around the world on planes and trucks. French law rules that this popular red wine made from the Gamay grape be released the third Thursday in November at one minute past midnight.

While it's hard to argue with Dr. Vino's green logic there is something so pleasingly frothy about the Beaujolais Nouveau festivities. Georges Duboeuf won't win any prizes for being either subtle or carbon neutral this year, especially since the 2008 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau is being celebrated with a motorcycle parade through New York City. On Thursday, November 20, "motorcycle chef-heads" Marc Murphy, David Bouley, Johnny Iuzzini, Francois Payard, Kevin Garcia, R.J. Cooper and other top chefs and sommeliers will ride and deliver the first case of 2008 Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau to an uncorking ceremony with Beaujolais bigwig Franck Duboeuf at Secession restaurant in the morning. Later in the day, from 4 p.m.-6 p.m. Franck Duboeuf will appear at Sherry –Lehmann (505 Park Avenue) to offer a complementary tasting of Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau and in the evening from 6 p.m. – 9 p.m. City Harvest's Generation Harvest and Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau Bash will take place at the Samsung Experience at Time Warner Center. Ticket to that event are $85 per person and benefit City Harvest. There are also events planned in Miami and in Las Vegas where a helicopter delivers a case of 2008 Beaujolais Nouveau to Las Vegas' Paris hotel and the hotel's s Eiffel Tower facsimile is lit in Beaujolais Red.

(Pictured above is Frank Duboeuf in a scene from the 2005 celebration.)

We may all be cutting back, but at the the White House dinner Friday night for foreign leaders to discuss the global financial crisis, the meal was anything but spare. The menu for around 24 global leaders gathered in the White House State Dining Room included, according to the AP, fruitwood-smoked quail with quince gastrique; quinoa risotto; thyme-roasted rack of lamb; tomato, fennel and eggplant fondue; a salad course of endive, baked Brie and walnuts; and a pear torte. What's raising some eyebrows though is one of the wine selections, the Shafer Cabernet Hillside Select 2003, which runs for around $300 a bottle, if you can find it. This wine was served with the main course will more modest wines such as the Landmark Chardonnay Damaris Reserve 2006 (around $40 a bottle, served with the appetizer) and the Chandon Étoile Rosé sparkling wine (about $30 a bottle, served with dessert) rounded out the rest of the meal. The President pays for his own groceries in the White House but state dinners such as this one are paid for with taxpayer dollars. It is perhaps some comfort in this case that at least two of those attending: President Bush and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are said to be teetotalers. Others in attendance included Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Chinese President Hu Jintao;German Chancellor Angela Merkel; and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Sam's Club members will soon have a new choice in the wine aisle. The chain is launching their first fair trade certified wine, the charmingly titled Neu Direction. The wine is a 100 percent Malbec from the winegrowing region of Lujan de Cuyo near Mendoza, Argentina. The wine is one of the first to receive this status in the inaugural year of the groundbreaking Fair Trade Wine certification program in the U.S. Neu Direction is produced by Vina de la Solidaridad (vines of solidarity), a co-op representing 20 small farms, which grow and hand pick the grapes and Bodega Furlotti the winery, a century's old family owned business. The London Independent picked it as the best Fair Trade Certified red wine in the world in February 2008. Fair Trade Certified programs guarantee a fair price for goods and services and help to fund the development of schools, medical clinics and other basic necessities. This process is administered in the U.S. by TransFair, a non-profit organization. Neu Direction will sell for about $10 a bottle in more than 450 Sam's Club locations that are authorized to offer wine.

If you are in the market for a winery, we've got one for you and you could get it for half price. The Kirkland Ranch Winery in Napa Valley is being put up for sealed-bid auction, with a minimum bid of $22 million. International Wine Associates, which is a financial adviser to owner Kirkland Knightsbridge LLC, says that is "less than half of the previous value" of the property. The winery has been on the market for a while but due to the credit crunch has been unable to find a buyer.

It's been a long road for this producer of Sangiovese, Pinot Grigio, Syrah and other wines. The winery filed Chapter 11 a couple of years ago to avoid a foreclosure auction and emerged from bankruptcy protection last year. The Kirkland family built the 57,000-square-foot winery ten years ago and it can process 200,000 gallons of wine annually and has the capability to produce more than twice that. The cellar has storage for 3,000 oak barrels. The winery can crush up to 2500 tons and handle 257,000 gallons in refrigerated stainless steel tanks.

The winery is located on a historic 2500+ acre cattle ranch that was originally part of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo's huge Suscol Rancho. The Kirklands purchased the former Lynch Ranch and the neighboring Sheehy Ranch in 1978 to create the Kirkland Ranch and raised cattle on the ranch until 1999. In 1985, a test vineyard was planted and the family eventually expanded their vineyards to 150 gently sloping acres of vineyards, while continuing to raise cattle.

The winery itself is a lodge-style building which is supported by 67 giant Oregon Red cedars that run along a wide porch surrounding three sides of the building. The lower floor has a retail room where guests can shop the exclusive selection of reserve wines. The second floor is home to a ttasting room opens to a large porch and the three story tasting room is supported by the largest of the red cedar trunks. A viewing hall, adjacent to the tasting room, overlooks all areas of the cellar and provides a safe location for visitors to view all phases of the wine making process. The winery has hosted retail sales and public tastings by appointment and hosted events at banquet and meeting facilities.

The winery is being auctioned through Braun Auctioneers and the Beverly Group Inc. Potential bidders will have until December 2 to conduct due diligence before purchase and sealed bids are due by noon on December 3.

I've mentioned the Dog Lover's Wine Club that features pooch-centered wine labels and donates to dog-helping causes before. Now they've become involved with the rescue efforts to rehabilitate the dogs involved in the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal. The Carivintas Winery Vicktory Dog Wine Collection spans 22 bottles and each label features a work of art portraying one of 22 dogs rescued from NFL player Vick's kennels. The "Vicktory" dogs now live at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah and ten percent of sales goes to the animal sanctuary. The portraits of the dogs were painted by artist Cyrus Mejia, one of Best Friends founders. The bottles contain red wine, currently a 2006 Tempranillo, Santa Barbara County but that may change as the series goes on. Individual wines are $40 and the entire 22 label series is $672.

[via Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

I rather expected this news to come after hearing this summer that the Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts in California's Napa Valley was in financial trouble. It seems that the Copia will be selling off its main campus in Napa Valley and then leasing back part of the space. The good news is that the center isn't going completely belly up. It plans to expand its education programs and open satellite campuses with wine bars and stores. They'll need the help, the organization has a debt of $78 million, and prospective buyers are already dealing with a 50 percent write-down in value as reported in Wines & Vines.

The city of Napa might consider using the site as a civic center. Certainly the Copia building always did seem a bit large for its audience and was only stuffed with visitors during certain key festivals and events. Robert and Margrit Mondavi planned the center as a hub for Napa's expansive wine tourism industry but it never quite took off, its education-based lure never as strong as that of a hedonistic jaunt along from winery to winery in Napa Valleys verdant countryside. The most popular parts of Copia, the Julia's Kitchen restaurant and Cornucopia gift store will stay in Napa, either in the building or elsewhere and there are also potential plans for a Copia Napa wine bar.

Copia's feature may lie in San Francisco where a large wine bar and teaching kitchen could attract many more potential visitors. They've also expanded the Copia website to make it more interesting to all those interested in wine, not just potential visitors to the Copia center.

Hopefully the business or organization that ends up purchasing the space will have a tourism or wine focus. Several business including the Oxbow Public Market, the new Westin Hotel and a proposed Ritz Carlton chose their sites based on proximity to Copia and the plan to create a epicurean tourism destination. Copia is hoping to sell off the property by the end of the year.

UPDATE: Copia has temporarily closed but plans to open up again on December 1.

The current U.S. President George W. Bush doesn't drink wine but President-elect Barack Obama does and one winery has already made an overture to him. As our sister blog, Slashfood recently mentioned Kendall-Jackson winery announced that it is sending 'a few congratulatory cases' of its Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay to President-elect Barack Obama. In a People magazine interview before the election Obama mentioned the wine which sells for $14 a bottle. The K-J Chardonnay is a popular favorite in many homes and a lovely, drinkable wine, but we might recommend that Obama step up the Kendall-Jackson ladder a little bit when entertaining. May we suggest the aptly named Stature? The 2003 Stature is a limited-production blend drawn from five classic Bordeaux varieties - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petite Verdot and Malbec. At $95 it costs a bit more but we think the dignitaries will approve.

Musician Jackson Browne has a leg up on other aspiring celebrity winemakers: he already has the property. Contact Music reports that Browne is thinking of turning his Hollister Ranch home in Santa Barbara, California into a vineyard. He knows he's got a great location for grape growing and ideal soil, there's only one problem, he thinks it might be too much work. He is quoted as saying: "I want to be a gentleman farmer, but I don't want to work very hard." Perhaps Browne should contact Tool frontman and successful winemaker Maynard James Keenan for advice. After all, Keenan has turned a piece of Arizona land into a thriving winery.