The Series
LearnAboutWine.com, the Los Angeles-based wine education and events platform founded in 1995, has announced five ultra-premium collector dinners scheduled between September 2026 and February 2027. Each event is capped at between 8 and 14 guests and will be held at top-tier Los Angeles dining rooms, positioning the series at the narrow intersection of fine-wine investment culture and high-end hospitality.
Sommelier Director Ian Blackburn, who has led the organization since its founding, described the format as deliberately intimate. "The caliber of our guests is a primary draw," Blackburn said, "complemented by our rigorous standards for wine selection and service." The blind-tasting structure — wines revealed only after guests have assessed them — is a deliberate differentiator from conventional collector events, where provenance is typically disclosed upfront.
The Lineup
The opening dinner on September 10 pairs two vintages of Pétrus (1983 and 1975) against a horizontal of 2000-vintage First Growths, served blind at 71Above on the 71st floor of a downtown Los Angeles tower. On September 24, a California cult wine dinner at The Belvedere inside The Peninsula Beverly Hills will focus on Harlan Estate, Screaming Eagle, and Scarecrow across nine wines for eight guests.
The most consequential event in valuation terms is the October 8 Burgundy dinner, also at 71Above, at which all 10 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti expressions — spanning nine Grand Crus and one Premier Cru — will be poured side by side for 14 guests. LearnAboutWine.com places the combined estimated retail value of the bottles at $70,000. Events of this nature are rare in the U.S. market: DRC's annual production across its Grand Cru holdings is tightly constrained, and secondary-market prices for top vintages routinely exceed $3,000 per bottle for single labels such as La Tâche or Romanée-Conti itself.
December 3 brings a Sine Qua Non dinner at Providence, one of two three-Michelin-Star restaurants in Los Angeles, directed by James Beard Award-winning Executive Chef and proprietor Michael Cimarusti. The evening, capped at eight guests, will also feature Jean-Louis Chave's 1990 Hermitage Rouge and 2011 Blanc, alongside selections from Austrian sweet-wine producer Alois Kracher. The series closes February 25 with a Vega Sicilia vertical at 71Above, featuring Dennis Fassett, the estate's worldwide ambassador, as guest of honor.
Market Context
The series reflects broader momentum in ultra-premium experiential beverage hospitality, a segment that has outperformed volume-driven wine retail since 2022. Collector-grade events — defined loosely as dinners anchored by wines retailing above $500 per bottle — have drawn institutional attention from auction houses and secondary-market platforms seeking to deepen engagement with high-net-worth buyers. For operators and foodservice venues such as 71Above and The Peninsula Beverly Hills, hosting such events strengthens positioning in the luxury hospitality tier while generating ancillary revenue from private dining buyouts.
LearnAboutWine.com's format — blind tasting, small tables, historically significant vintages — mirrors the structure used by private clubs and auction-house events in London and Hong Kong, suggesting the Los Angeles market can support comparable programming at scale. The beverage alcohol sector continues to see collector-tier engagement as a durable revenue stream even as broader wine consumption volumes in the U.S. face demographic headwinds.
Full ticketing details for all five events are available at learnaboutwine.com.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
