Investing in wine: Expensive not always better
By Jim LaMar • Bankrate.com

You've just come into a little extra cash and are looking to diversify your portfolio. Recalling an article listing fabulous wine auction prices, you decide to add some burgundy chips to your blue chips. After all, not only does wine taste better with age, it appreciates in value, right? Not always. Do some research before you take a walk through the Boulevard Bottle Shop or you may corkscrew your liquid assets in ways you never intended.

Fact is, only some wine increases monetarily as it gets older and that has more to do with it becoming more rare than with an actual improvement in taste. While there are wines that get better with age, most simply just get older. Most wines begin to deteriorate in flavor and value within two or three years of purchase, especially without proper storage conditions.

The $4 bottle of champagne you saved from your wedding to open on your son's fir^st birthday died while Junior was being conceived. Oh, it was a $140 bottle of Dom Perignon? That's different -- it may have made it to his first day of kindergarten celebration, but beyond that, you'd have done better putting your money into a savings bond.

While supply and demand dictate prices more than quality, the good news is that great-tasting wine -- even the best -- is not that far from the average consumer's economic grasp.

For example, my wine-tasting compadres and I recently blind-tasted some examples of Cabernet Franc. Our host slipped two bottles of Chateau Cheval Blanc into the mix. Recognized by experts as one of the top French Bordeaux, they cost over $400 a bottle. Rather than blowing away the competition of California wines, though, they blended in well and neither their ages nor pedigrees were extremely obvious. In fact, although it was fairly tight, the French wines actually settled into the bottom of the group rankings.

Only some wine increases in value monetarily as it gets older -- and that has more to do with it becoming more rare than with an actual improvement in taste.

Does this mean that Chateau Cheval Blanc 1985 St. Emilion, at $460 a pop, instead of tasting 77 times better than Pepperwood Grove 1998 California Cabernet Franc at $6, doesn't actually taste ANY better?

Well, it's not that easy. It might be that we wine tasters have "California palates," characterized by preferences for wines that have more fruit, ripeness and youth to their flavors. Or that in spite of the panel members' experience with and dedication to wine tasting, we're not very good at it. It's also just as likely that grape growing and winemaking techniques have improved so much in the past 20 years that traditional French benchmarks of quality no longer dominate.

What it probably means, though, is that the flavor differences that exist between premium and not so premium wines may be much more subtle to most people than the price differences would suggest. Translation: Unless you're a bona fide sommelier, tasting as good a wine as exists may quite likely be fulfilled at the local wine shop and even within the confines of the weekly grocery budget. These benchmark and counterpart wines give reasonable flavor approximations for fractions of the originals' prices.

Curious about the pinnacle of Pinot Noir, but a little short of the $1,800 to $4,000 per bottle needed to sample Domaine de la Romanee Conti 1995 Romanee Conti? Give the Cambria 1997 Santa Maria "Julia's Vineyard" Pinot Noir at about $18 to $27 a try. Or instead of shelling out $150 to $225 for a Joseph Drouhin Le Montrachet 1997 "Marquis de Laguiche" Côte de Beaune Chardonnay, pour yourself a glass of the Cuvaison 1999 Napa Valley Chardonnay. You'll get more than 75 percentof the taste for about 10 percentof the price.

In fact, many New World wines are 50 years ahead in vineyard practices and winemaking technique, but lag 200 years behind in renown. The following bargains don't necessarily have expensive or famous counterparts, but all are examples of very affordable and delicious wines: Mason 1999 Napa Valley Sauvignon Blanc ($11-$14), Laurel Glen 1998 California "Reds" ($7-$9) and Lindemans 1998 Australian "Bin 45" Cabernet Sauvignon ($7-$10).

So, put some of these into your portfolio and you'll realize a profit two ways -- both at the checkout counter and when you share them with friends at dinner.

Jim Lamar studied journalism in college, but began drinking wine when he found out there were no entry-level editor jobs. He now sells wine to support his habit and writes wine articles to justify his tuition. They are mostly on Professional Friends of Wine.