Wine Country Weekend sold out

If you’ve been waiting all year to attend the Sonoma Harvest Wine Auction, hopefully you got tickets already.

Even at $500 each, passes to this Sunday’s auction at Chateau St. Jean – the culmination of the hugely successful Sonoma Wine Country Weekend – are all sold out.

Sonoma Starlight, a nighttime event at Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Geyserville ($125 a pop), also is sold out. But tickets for Taste of Sonoma, a “food and wine culture” gathering at MacMurray Estate Vineyards in Healdsburg, are still available at $165 each – at least as of this writing.

“We’re probably moments from selling out Taste of Sonoma,” warned Sara Cummings, public relations director for the event, on Thursday. She added that the weekend also features a number of individual winery lunches and barbecues, “But they are all pretty much closed out and sold out at that point.”

Conceived as a fundraiser, Sonoma Wine Country Weekend has been phenomenally good at this goal, pulling in $12 million in charitable donations since 2008, its first year. The event raised well over $1 million last year alone, with about $700,000 of it going to children’s literacy programs.

This weekend’s event, starting today, Friday, Aug. 29 and wrapping up Sunday, Aug. 31 with the auction, appears to be on track for something similar, Cummings said. And the attraction of this year’s honorary chairs, legendary wine couple Jose and Gloria Ferrer, can’t hurt.

“We have done a lot of work to communicate the special auction lots that are open this year,” Cummings said, describing, among the many things going on the block, a trip for two to the Grammys, a luxury African safari and a private concert for 200 at Rodney Strong Vineyards.

“This year is going to be wild, as the Grand Lawn of Chateau St. Jean will be transformed into the plains of Africa,” says the event’s website.

Billed as “From Sonoma to Serengeti,” the event is described as “the flagship event of Sonoma Wine Country Weekend” and the county’s all-around largest fundraiser.

As for the Ferrers, “Their auction lot donation is an amazing personalized experience at their home in Barcelona, with them,” Cummings said.

In total, $370,000 has been committed so far this year to local charitable nonprofit organizations by the Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers Foundation and the Sonoma County Vintners Foundation, the groups associated with Sonoma Wine Country Weekend. But the final amount given out will probably be much higher.

A majority of the money will go to “Fund the Future,” a multi-pronged literacy program carried out by such groups as Sonoma Valley Education Foundation, Community Action Partnership and United Way.

“We’re continuing that for several years. And this is year two of that,” Cummings said.

Has last weekend’s earthquake hampered the plans at all?

“It hasn’t,” Cummings said. “We’ve been extremely, extremely fortunate, obviously.”