Elusive wines a little less so, at a price

NAPA, Calif. " Wine-lover R.J. Hilgers is caught in a cabernet Catch-22.

The good news, he notes, is that the recession means once impossible-to-find vintages suddenly are not so impossible to find. The bad news? There's a recession.

"The cruel irony of the whole thing is all of a sudden it feels like these mailing lists are starting to open up," he says of the ultra-exclusive buying lists some in-demand wineries use to sell their bottles. "So when you get on them you're like, 'Oh great.'

"But then you look at the prices and say, 'Oh.'"

Still, when Scarecrow, a much sought after, hard-to-find Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, became available, he couldn't resist.

"Honestly, that's one of the two or three lists I've been coveting for a while," says Hilgers, who works in marketing in the San Francisco Bay area and blogs about his experiences with wine. "That one was kind of a no-brainer for me."

Despite the economy, consumers aren't buying less wine. But they are buying less expensive wines. Wine sales by volume increased

1 percent last year over 2007, to 317 million cases, according to the San Francisco-based Wine Institute.

But sales dropped slightly to $30 billion, compared to $30.4 billion in 2007.

And even in the rarified world of high-end wine, prices are down, say wine merchants and others.

"The so-called cult wines are not quite as elusive as they were," says Mark Pope, founder and chief executive of the Bounty Hunter, a Napa shop carrying wines that range from $10 to hundreds of dollars a bottle. "It's a lot more competitive world than it was."

What makes a wine a cult is that it's highly regarded, but made in small quantities. There's no defined list, but some widely cited Napa Valley brands include Screaming Eagle, Colgin Cellars and Harlan Estate.

To buy cult wines direct you have to be on the winery mailing list, which until recently meant you faced months or years on a waiting list first. But now slots are opening up.

Rare wines also are becoming more available on the secondary market, some from restaurants that don't want to lose their place on a winery's list but that can't afford to keep the wines in inventory, some from private collectors looking to convert their treasures into cash.

But even at a discount, cult wine cellars won't ever be mistaken for bargain basements.

Last year, a 2005 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, a wine from Burgundy, France, that is considered to be among the world's finest, was released at between $3,000 and $5,000 a bottle and quickly worked its way up to $13,000 a bottle on the Internet, says Leo Fenn, founder of the online store cultwine.com.

Now, the going price is more like $6,500.

"You're seeing prices going back down to the pricing equivalent of three, five, six years ago," says Fenn. "You've got a wonderful opportunity for the right individual."