The Product
Silver Oak Cellars, the Napa Valley winery founded in 1972, has partnered with Los Angeles-based luxury game maker Throwing Doubles on a limited-edition holiday gift set: 100 handmade leather backgammon boards in a custom Cabernet-red colorway, each bundled with a bottle of 2022 Silver Oak Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, priced at $450 per unit. The sets go on sale exclusively through silveroak.com beginning October 15.
The boards are handmade in Los Angeles and finished with an embossed Silver Oak wordmark. Throwing Doubles, founded in 2022 by Brittany Weinke, specializes in premium leather interpretations of classic games and counts Moda Operandi, Nordstrom, and goop among its retail partners. The Silver Oak collaboration represents a custom, exclusive colorway developed specifically for the winery — unavailable through Throwing Doubles' existing retail channels.
Why It Matters
For Silver Oak, the move reflects a broader brand strategy: positioning the winery's wines not merely as a beverage purchase but as a recurring fixture in social rituals. The $450 price point — which bundles a collectible object with a single bottle — signals a clear tilt toward the premium gifting segment, where luxury wine brands increasingly compete with experiential and lifestyle products rather than other bottles alone. The 100-unit ceiling also reinforces scarcity as a marketing lever, a tactic that has gained traction across the wine and spirits category as producers chase collector and enthusiast demographics.
Lauren Larrabee, Chief Marketing Officer of Silver Oak, framed the partnership around the brand's long-standing association with personal milestones. "What resonates with everyone is that it isn't always the big milestones," she said. "It's the dinners with friends, family traditions, and nights that people remember years later." Weinke echoed the positioning: "The best backgammon boards live out on a table. They get played after dinner, packed for weekends away, and pulled out when friends come over."
Holiday Gifting Context
The collaboration arrives as the premium wine gifting market intensifies heading into Q4. Luxury foodservice and retail operators have noted growing consumer appetite for curated gift sets that combine beverage with lifestyle accessories — a trend documented across the spirits category with whiskey-and-glassware bundles and cognac-and-travel-case sets commanding significant shelf space at specialty retailers. For a winery of Silver Oak's profile — its Alexander Valley and Napa Valley facilities are the first production wineries to achieve LEED Platinum certification — a design-forward, analog-lifestyle partnership aligns with the sustainability and craftsmanship narratives increasingly central to premium wine marketing.
The backgammon format itself carries demographic appeal: the game has seen a measurable resurgence among younger affluent consumers drawn to analog social experiences, a dynamic that wine brands targeting the 30-to-45 cohort have begun factoring into experiential and gifting strategies. Whether 100 units constitutes a meaningful revenue event for Silver Oak is secondary to the brand equity play — a high-visibility, sell-out-likely release that reinforces both the winery's design sensibility and its association with considered entertaining. For coverage of how premium wine labels are rethinking holiday gifting and on-premise strategy, and how luxury beverage collaborations are reshaping retail, F&B Industry News has tracked the category's evolution in depth.
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.
