You've surely read about the fancy prices paid for old, rare or unusual wines. You've no doubt rubbed elbows with the fellow who brags about the value of his wine collection. And what about the guy who served that red wine at dinner saying it was worth hundreds, though he had paid only a few dollars just a few years before?

    It's enough to make you give up collecting coins, stamps, baseball cards or Pink Panther paraphernalia and jump on the wine collecting bandwagon.

    Big flashing yellow light! Caution! Does wine appreciate in value? Some of it does. Is wine a good investment? Probably not for the average person.

    Collectors want assurances that wine has been stored under the most ideal conditions, which means in a real cellar (which few of us have these days) or investing in fancy temperature and humidity controlled storage devices.

    Then there's the biggest problem of all...reselling your wine when it has appreciated sufficiently in value or when for some reason you need your investment to become liquid in another sense.

    You may discover that the wine you've been cellaring all this time isn't really of interest to other collectors. Only a handful of wines in the world have real collectable value, the highest rated wines of Bordeaux (Lafite, Latour, Margaux, etc), even fewer famous red wines of Burgundy and Sauternes, some Vintage Ports and very few famous and highly regarded California Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines.

    But the biggest hurdle of all is that in almost all of the 50 states there is no "legal" way to sell your wine. I know, it's yours, you paid for it, you have a receipt for it, but the state says you can't sell it unless you are licensed wine merchant.

    There are some exceptions. Some states make provisions for estate sales by consumers, which means you can sell your wine after you're dead.

    California also has a law saying consumers may sell only to people with licenses, and only if the reds are ten years old and the whites five. That means you bought the wine at retail and now you can only legally sell to a dealer who only buys at wholesale prices. Tough to make a profit.

    Your best chance is to live in a state that allows you to sell through auction houses which have wine licenses, because they only take a percentage of the sale.

    What we're talking about here are strictly legal ways to sell your wine. Truth is people have always sold or traded wines to other collectors and friends (the states consider a trade just as illegal as a sale, by the way), sold wines direct to other consumers via Internet auction operations like E-Bay and Amazon.com and openly ran ads in wine publications such as The Wine Spectator and The Wine Trader. In more than 30 years of covering the wine scene I have never heard of anyone being arrested for these kind of collector to collector sales...until now!

    A story in The Washington Post alerted me to the fact that Mark Phillips of Alexandria, Virginia, was arrested by Fairfax County Police and Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) for selling a single bottle of 1991 Chateau Lafite Rothschild for $110 to an undercover officer in a sting operation. As result Phillips faces a $2500 fine and up to a year in jail if convicted.

    Phillips heads up a non-profit wine club in the area with about a thousand members, one of which is a diplomat en route to a country where it is not possible to take his small collection (about a dozen bottles) of varying vintages of Chateau Lafite. Phillips, who is not in the habit of selling wine, agreed to help the fellow out by placing a notice of the wines' availability on the club's website. This was not a "for profit" venture.

    So how did the cops handle this misdemeanor? Six cars and a dozen armed officers with a search warrant held Phillips, his wife and daughter in their front room while searching the house. A little overkill? The equivalent of using a .44 Magnum to assassinate a fly?

    We had lots of questions for Alexandria ABC's Phillip Disharoon, but he didn't return our calls. Like why it took a dozen cops to bust one misdemeanor suspect with no previous record? How many people have been cited for the same offense in the past 20-30 years (we suspect none)? What motivated ABC's interest in Phillips and cracking down on collectors at this particular time?

    If you're wine collector...be careful out there.

   

HARD TO FIND

The production of tiny Alpen Cellars rarely gets outside a few far northern California counties. I tell you about Alpen in case you travel in the area and because the one of its wines brought to me by a friend was a dandy. You can call for information or directions to: 530-266-9513.

    Alpen Cellars 1998 "Trinity County" White Riesling ($6.49) Very delicate green apple and flinty mineral aromatics. Delicious green apple fruit with just enough sweetness to be detected. Crisp and clean and very refreshing. Great value. Rating: 89/94

   

FLAVORED WINES

  The latest beverage fad is flavored wines, often with varietal names like "Peach Chardonnay" or "Raspberry Zinfandel." They're really nothing more than the latest incarnation of "pop wines" from the 60s and 70s, and you should know that most of them have in addition to flavorings such things as water and sugar added.

    A brand called Soleo, produced by Sutter Home, has only a tiny bit of flavor added and make the claim that they are 99.8 percent wine. None of these wines will appeal to most sophisticated wine drinkers, but young adults used to soda pop sweet flavors, or folks who don't think they like wine, might want to check some of these out.

FUN WINE OF THE WEEK

    Soleo Vineyard Berry ($3.99) The label says it has strawberry, cranberry and other natural flavors. I'm here to tell you it smells and tastes more like strawberries than strawberries do! The super-fruit flavor intensity is perfect. It is "fruit sweet" not "gag me" sweet. You do want to drink this beverage icy-cold and it does have enough flavor to survive being served on the rocks. Keeping in mind that I'm scoring this product for what it is...a sweet, flavored wine...it earns big points. And it won Orange County Fair's top award, a 4-Star Gold. Rating: 95/100

   

Subscription Information

Wines are scored using a unique 100 point system. First number rates quality; second number rates value.