PNW wine collectors share how they find, invest in the best bottles

At a ridgetop picnic table in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Will Paustian looks out at a pastoral patchwork of oaks and vines and prepares for battle. 

The 28-year-old financial adviser takes out a pen and marks the lots he’s going to bid on at this wine auction, his first ever. He doesn’t have a ton of money to spend, but for each lot only the top five bidders will take home a case of rare wine. Even one win would boost his 200-bottle collection.

Buying a case of a sought-after wine can deliver the same rush as collecting Porsches or Picassos. It’s a passion project. But unlike cars or watches, fine aged wine becomes scarcer over time. After all, you would never drink a Porsche.

“Wine collecting is different than collecting, say, handbags,” said Joshua Wludyka, chair of the Willamette Valley Wine Auction. “The Gucci bag you bought five years ago will always stay the same. Wine is ever evolving.”

That metamorphosis is what’s driving most collectors. They are buying tomorrow’s luxury wine today, when it’s young, tannic, relatively inexpensive — then aging it themselves to mellow complexity. 

Take these two examples from Washington state wines. A 1987 Woodward Canyon Dedication Series cabernet sauvignon originally sold for $18.50 per bottle. Today it costs $280 per bottle if you purchased it from the winery’s library.

When Cayuse Vineyards released its Bionic Frog Syrah in 2014, it charged $95; now the hard-to-find bottle is listed online at $1,500.

“That’s the illness. The thrill of the hunt,” said Tom Flookes, whose wine collection always outgrows the 2,800-bottle cellar in his Walla Walla home. “You find a wine, and it’s just too good not to get it.” 

There are two kinds of wine collectors. One keeps rare gems in the cellar to be enjoyed with family and friends. The other buys for investment, not for drinking. The latter stores bottles professionally at a facility like Seattle’s Phenol 55. The goal is to buy the most famous wines and hang onto them while they appreciate. There are even wine stock exchanges and investment funds. 

To learn more about how to make money while collecting wine, we talked with wine lovers who aren’t pure investors, but they view their high-end wines as a fun beverage and a fungible asset.

“I buy things that have a marketplace value,” said Flookes. “If I ever got into a situation where I needed money — I can sell it.”

Start here. Visit wineries

A casual trip to a winery is the way many wine fans begin to morph into collectors. 

For Anacortes resident Sue Kuehne, her love for fine wine increased when she and her husband, Stewart, started to meet the people who make it. Each bottle told a story of vineyard visits and growing friendships with winemakers. “We love Washington wine because it’s so good and more affordable than Napa,” said Kuehne.

The Pacific Northwest is a terrific place to be a wine collector according to Larry Stone, a master sommelier and founder of the winery Lingua Franca. 

“That’s the advantage of living in Seattle or Portland,” said Stone. “From Walla Walla in Washington, or Willamette Valley in Oregon, or Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, you can go to the winery. That’s how you develop your own style. Taste all kinds of wine — then you will know what you want to put away.”

Bid at auctions

When most of us think about wine auctions, we have a vague vision of the hammer coming down as a rich person buys something old and French: like the 1945 bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti sold at Sotheby’s for $558,000 in 2018. 

There’s a less-spendy kind of auction that draws collectors, put on by wine alliances like the one held in Willamette Valley in May. The wines on offer were new releases and could sell for less than retail. They were also unique.

“Each winery presents five cases of wine sourced from their favorite barrels,” said auction chair Wludyka. “People who get these wines at auction are the only people who have them.”

That appealed to Paustian, who drove from Portland to Abbey Road Farm in Carlton to bid at his first wine auction. As he nervously scanned a booklet of wines on offer, he zeroed in on cases created by winemakers he had visited and wanted to support.

“I’m a fourth-generation Oregonian, and wine is a core part of who we are,” Paustian said. “Winemakers are artists, and they bring joy to me.”

How much joy will this young collector bring home? He scored a case of sparkling wine from boutique winery Et Fille but lost out on two others. 

Want to get in the game? At the Auction of Washington Wines in August, there’s an event called a barrel auction. The wines are so young they haven’t been bottled. “The wines are not released yet. You are trying the wine from the barrel and predicting its future,” said Kuehne.

Jamie Peha, the auction’s executive director, said this live auction tends to get a little wild. “The countdown is a frenzy, like musical chairs. Only the last five bids on the board will get a case of wine.”

But is it good wine? Can be. Kuehne took a chance on a red blend from L’Ecole at a previous barrel auction. “It was named the best Bordeaux blend in the world in 2014,” said Kuehne. “That was a big surprise! We have three bottles left.”

Join a club 

At a buzzing party inside a Seattle art glass factory, Sidney Rice was topping up goblets of Dossier Wine Collective’s velvet-spice Syrah, while people sidled up for a splash. 

Dossier’s wine club parties are a boisterous mix of oenophiles and football fans. Before he founded this winery with his business partner Tim Lenihan, Rice was a Seahawks Super Bowl champ.

Because this was a “pickup party” for Dossier club members, Rice was also muscling boxes of wine into Teslas and Range Rovers. 

The way most wine clubs work, members agree to buy a set number of bottles each year, which can include reserve wines and wines made just for the club. Parties and free tastings often sweeten the deal.

If you are lucky enough to have joined long ago, wine clubs are a way to score cult Washington wines like Quilceda Creek, which has earned dozens of 100-point scores, or Cayuse, the near-mythical creation of Christophe Baron.

Flookes shared this hack: If you know someone in those clubs, they might sell you some of their stash. 

Secret wine clubs you (probably) can’t join

There are wine groups that are almost like secret societies for serious collectors. At an induction ceremony for new members of the Sous-Commanderie de Seattle, you might be hard pressed to guess what century you’re in as men and woman in red and yellow robes sing a Ban Bourguignon.  

To get into this Seattle chapter of the Chevaliers du Tastevin, you must be sponsored by existing members and pass an exam on Burgundian wine.

“The Chevaliers group is for people who love Burgundy,” said wine collector and game developer Yahn Bernier. “You are expected to host a dinner. You can use wines from the Chevaliers’ collection, which are super amazing!”

Rice is a member of a club called the Mad Quaffers, which flies so low under radar it barely has online presence. Because he grew up playing football, not drinking wine, Rice is on a mission to taste wines from around the world. At club dinners, Rice said, members bring a bottle with a specific theme, like Pol Roger Winston Churchill Champagne. 

What he learns at these dinners informs Rice as a winery owner and wine collector. “The Mad Quaffers’ knowledge of wine is so crazy! I taste something that piques my interest, and then I go and find it.” 

What happens to wine collections?

There comes a moment when collectors of a certain vintage realize it’s physically impossible to drink all their bottles. That was OK with longtime collector Stone, of Lingua Franca. His vast cellar would be his retirement fund. 

But then he discovered a piece of farmland in Oregon he knew would make a fantastic vineyard. In 2012, when he was 60 years old, Stone auctioned off the collection and founded his acclaimed winery.

Flookes, the Walla Walla wine collector, said his bottles won’t be sold at auction. “My kids are wine connoisseurs. They know where it’s going. Oh yeah.”

And Kuehne? Let’s just say, you want to be her neighbor.  

“We have over 5,700 bottles. We never thought we would have so many!” Kuehne said. 

She and her husband have created holidays like “Open That Bottle” night, the last day of February. “We tell neighbors, ‘Go to the wine cellar and pick out whatever you want.’ There’s always some Cayuse in that. Being able to share wine is part of the joy.”