For The Love Of Port

With 18 bottles in a vertical, spread the wealth by including 12-14 individuals, lowering the price and with 1.5 oz. pours of 18 VPs, you are sure to attract more people. Dinner after the 4-5 hour tasting, allowing for 13-16 minutes per wine would be about right. A six or seven hour event for such a lineup would be what I'd do.

Just my

Looks like the price is getting up there into serious money and finding 10 people to put up enough to buy the lot is getting to be a logistic nightmare. One person, maybe two, has expressed a willingness to put up serious money and go halvsies on the lot with me. We will see what develops over the next day or so. I will upload photos tomorrow so people can see what the bottles look like.

Well, that is serious money now, but still a bargain. If you could travel the world, wine-searcher.com still says you would pay more than $12,000 for those bottles, and that includes three very questionable listings. I think the actual price would be a few thousand more.

Jay Hack wrote:Looks like the price is getting up there into serious money and finding 10 people to put up enough to buy the lot is getting to be a logistic nightmare. One person, maybe two, has expressed a willingness to put up serious money and go halvsies on the lot with me. We will see what develops over the next day or so. I will upload photos tomorrow so people can see what the bottles look like.

Jay, two or three organizers/financial backers sounds like the best approach. I think that you can easily find 10-12 people that want to participate in a tasting/dinner, but just can't make a financial commitment up front without a firm date. It is especially difficult to commit from outside the NYC area. Please keep us posted.

Eric Menchen wrote:If you could travel the world, wine-searcher.com still says you would pay more than $12,000 for those bottles, and that includes three very questionable listings. I think the actual price would be a few thousand more.

Yeah, if you restrict the search to just the US (and eliminate the very questionable listings) the total jumps to around $15,500.

$250/bottle for a mixed lot of Nacional would be a bargain without the '63, '70, '94, and '97s. With them it's a steal. Good luck, guys!

IF you don't wind up making the purchase, it would be interesting to see what that lot goes for. Please DO post the price, unless you are the winner and want to keep that a secret.

Don't forget the 22% buyer's premium...

Tom D. wrote:Don't forget the 22% buyer's premium...

And sale tax unless you go to NJ to pick up.

Oh Well, someone else is going to own the lot. I just pushed the bid to $6,000 and was immediately outbid by an autobid at $7,000. That makes the next bid $7500, which with premium and tax gets just a bit shy of $10,000. It's "worth" that much, but there's too much other wine in this world. I guess I'm not going to have a Nacional verticle after all. But I do have a nice collection of photos of Naconal bottles I will post as soon them as I have time to reduce the size of the files.

Moses Botbol wrote:

Tom D. wrote:Don't forget the 22% buyer's premium...

And sale tax unless you go to NJ to pick up.

They have moved the warehouse to NY and that dodge no longer works.

Jay Hack wrote:It's "worth" that much, but there's too much other wine in this world.

That got to be my thinking as the price went up. I'd love to try some Nacionals, but am I willing to pay the premium compared to all the other wonderful bottles out there? Apparently not for a whole bunch of them. I may still have to buy a 1997 some day.

If anyhone knows the seller, tell him he owes me a bottle of good Port because I have been the only competing bidder for the last $3,000 +. Then I'll open it in NY and we can all share.

Jay Hack wrote:Oh Well, someone else is going to own the lot. I just pushed the bid to $6,000 and was immediately outbid by an autobid at $7,000.

Looks like that was the winning bid. A good value for 21 bottles of Nacional... provided they're all legit. A couple of people I have talked to about the lot have doubts, so I don't think you should feel too bad about "losing" the lot. The winner is going to end up paying about 60% of internet retail value (according to winesearcher.com, US availability only) once the buyer's premium and NY state tax are included, which to me is pretty steep for something that expensive when there are some reasonable concerns about its legitimacy.

The final bid was $7000, which is where I pushed the bid when I bid $6000. I have reviewed the bidding sequence and I have determined that if we had not bid, the lot would have gone for $5.500, because all bids after that were the competition between me and LoveVino. Which means that LoveVino could legitimately hold a grudge, but the seller got $1,500, AMC got $300 and the State of NY got about $150 in tax because lf the bids based upon interest on this BB. So, I definitely think that those who profitted should give us a free bottle to share. Don't you?

On the bright side, you can still take that $6,000 and buy yourself a lot of really nice wine...

Jay Hack wrote:The final bid was $7000, which is where I pushed the bid when I bid $6000. I have reviewed the bidding sequence and I have determined that if we had not bid, the lot would have gone for $5.500, because all bids after that were the competition between me and LoveVino. Which means that LoveVino could legitimately hold a grudge, but the seller got $1,500, AMC got $300 and the State of NY got about $150 in tax because lf the bids based upon interest on this BB. So, I definitely think that those who profitted should give us a free bottle to share. Don't you?

Tom D. wrote:On the bright side, you can still take that $6,000 and buy yourself a lot of really nice wine...

Actually, the money was only half mine. Another BB member agreed to go 50/50 with me and I decided to keep his name secret because there was no need for both of us to look foolish when I could look fooolish all by myself. By the way - I did win 1 bottle of 1990 Kistler Dutton Ranch Chardonnay for $30, which I bought because I was curious how a 20 year old Kistler was doing. So it was not a total loss.

Moses Botbol wrote: I think the hammer price will be like 6-7K for the lot.

I was right on the mark for the lot.