Raving fans such as Weltman continue to pour their wealth into these potables. He estimates he spent more than $300,000 on cult California wines this past June—albeit most of it at the charitable Napa Valley Wine Auction. “It’s a little crazy, the money I’ve been spending on this,” he says with a laugh. While some of Weltman’s wines might need booster rockets to create a return on his investment—his winning bid on a 6-liter bottle of 2001 Colgin Herb Lamb Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon was $90,000—more prosaic vintages are proving to be more palatable gambles. In 1998, he paid $80 for a bottle of Araujo Estate’s 1994 vintage. At a recent Acker Merrill & Condit auction, the same wine sold for four times that amount.

Secondary markets for wine—commercial auctions and retail sales—are seeing values for other cult vintages rise. A bottle of 1997 Harlan Estate was released at $150; the average auction price at Sotheby’s in 2003 was $550, according to Jamie Ritchie, head of the house’s North American wine department. A bottle of 1997 Screaming Eagle, released at $125, now auctions at $1,450.

The first generation of cult wines is generally defined as being limited vintages from a handful of wineries, all located in Northern California, that rose to prominence in the late 1990s: Araujo, Bryant Family Vineyard, Colgin, Dalla Valle Vineyards, Diamond Creek Vineyards, Grace Family Vineyards, Harlan, Shafer Vineyards (Hillside Select) and Screaming Eagle. These wineries have engineered scarcity into their products, usually producing fewer than 2,000 cases at a time. Screaming Eagle may output as few as several hundred cases of a given wine.

VALUE JUDGMENT In the 1990s, Northern California cult wines rocketed onto the must-have lists of dot-com millionaires. Today, some of them, such as vintages from Screaming Eagle and Harlan Estate, still garner lofty release prices and record values at auction. Investors must use a practiced eye buying these robust reds, however, as prices can be erratic, fluctuating with demand and the overall economy.

Consistently Cabernet-based, cult wines also share a signature style: On the tongue they are robust and fruity, with well-balanced tannins and relatively high alcohol content. They are made from grapes harvested on small, hillside vineyards that have either long produced fine wines or are near such vineyards. Vintners spare no expense in hiring winemakers, such as Heidi Barrett, Helen Turley and David Abreu, who promote themselves as artisans rather than vintners. The vineyards pass the costs on to collectors. When cult wines first came to market in the mid-1990s, they sold in the range of $75 to $150 per bottle, says Mark Pope, owner of the Bounty Hunter, a Napa Valley wine store. Today’s release prices have climbed to more than $200 per bottle.

SOUR GRAPES
These wines are not without their critics, however, including some in the heart of cult wine country. Skeptics call them overpriced, arguing that the cult wine buzz and its resultant bidding wars are rooted more in speculative frenzies and trend-watching rather than upside potential and inherent value. “There are wines that are of the same or better quality than the wines that are considered cult wines,” says David Stevens, owner of Acme Fine Wines in St. Helena, Calif. “A lot of people buy cult wines for the name. They buy them for the label.” Detractors like Stevens claim that cult wine prices are driven as much by ratings in magazines and newsletters as taste; they view cult wine collectors as trophy hunters, rather than dedicated oeneophiles.

Indeed, these vintners with the Midas touch have wine critics to thank, at least in part, for the furor over cult vintages. The pack of scribes is led by the Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker, who began stoking interest in these wines in the early 1990s, raving about them in print and giving them near-perfect ratings on his well-known 100-point scale. They have also turned these winemakers into celebrities. Today, Parker’s influence is so potent that a wine must be rated near 100 in order to qualify as a cult. Unfortunately for collectors, when a wine reaches that rarified level, its price has almost assuredly already begun to soar. Todd Serota, an investor and wine collector in Manhattan Beach, Calif., reads Parker’s reviews the moment they arrive on his doorstep. Then he immediately begins phoning the highly rated wineries, hoping to slip onto their lists before they fill. Serota’s strategy almost always fails, but on the rare occasion when it does succeed, his odds for someday seeing his wine investments appreciate rise significantly.

Savvy investors seek to minimize their initial investments in cult wine by eschewing the volatile aftermarket entirely. Despite many noteworthy exceptions, the secondary market for cult wines can be lukewarm. A 1997 Colgin Herb Lamb that auctioned for $700 in 2001 garnered just $625 in 2004, according to Sotheby’s. By buying these vintages direct from wineries, collectors greatly increase their chances of reaping future profits. But identifying future cult wines and gaining access to their growers can be as vexing as gaining entrée into today’s hot hedge fund. Retailers almost never keep cult wines on the shelf; even the most reputable wine purveyors are allotted only a few cases each to sell to eager customers. Ironically, Serota might be using the most effective method: attempting to get on cult winery mailing lists. This gives oeneophiles the right to buy yearly allotments at the vintner’s release price. Of course, wine fans can wait years before finding a spot on one of these coveted rolls. (For more details, see “In Vino Vanitas”.)

Weltman’s quest has taken him 3,000 miles from his homes in New York and East Hampton to the tiny California town of Calistoga. There he has purchased a third home and has begun building relationships with winery owners, winemakers and their vines. He plans to travel to Napa Valley every four or five weeks to fine-tune his avocation among the cult classics. “The name of the game with investing is, you always have to buy the top names,” he observes. “You can’t think, ‘This little garage operation will deliver bang for the buck.’” 

Eryn Brown is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Fortune and other publications. eryn_brown@sbcglobal.net

Additional Information
In Search of...