Rare collection of Ventura County’s cult winery Sine Qua Non wines goes to auction

Internet auctioneer WineBid.com is offering a rare collection of older vintages of Sine Qua Non wines on auction this week in several lots. The wines are highly allocated and highly sought after. Every release has a different name and a different label designed by owner/winemaker Manfred Krankl.

All of the wine in the auction comes from the original buyer and has been stored in a temperature-controlled professional wine storage facility.

You don’t see these wines from Manfred and Elaine Krankl’s cult Ventura County winery at auction very often, and certainly not in these quantities or from older vintages.

And we’re not talking just a few bottles here, but multiple lots of the Rhone-style wines which have garnered big points from the likes of Robert M. Parker Jr. You can bid, for example, for a six-bottle horizontal of the 2007 “Dangerous Birds” Estate Grenache and Syrah in their original wooden box (starting bid $2,690) or two large-format (3 liter) bottles of 2006 “A Shot in the Dark” Syrah and “In the Crosshairs” Grenache, both 100-point wines and now at $6,000 and going up.

But the big bopper is a 32-bottle mixed lot of Grenache and Syrah from 1992 and every vintage from 1994 to 2006. What will that fetch? The bidding starts at $30,000, or just under $1,000 a bottle. On the auction site, you can scroll through the bottles, each listed with relevant Robert M. Parker Jr. and Stephen Tanzer scores and comments.

The Krankls should be proud. Manfred Krankl, for those who don’t remember, was a partner in Campanile and the designer of its extraordinary wine program, among the best in the country at the time. He went on to manage La Brea Bakery and in 1994 founded Sine Qua Non in with his wife, Elaine. That first vintage, they made four and a half barrels. Now wine lovers wait years to get on the mailing list for the wines.

For more information about the auction, visit www.winebid.com or call (888) 638-8968.