It’s mecca for collectors

Just inside the entrance to Twenty Twenty Wine Merchants in West Los Angeles, a worker double-checks a case of wine to be delivered to a customer. He lifts each bottle from its thick Styrofoam cradle and reverently turns it in his hands, carefully looking it over before replacing it.

“What’s that wine cost?” a visitor asks Bob Golbahar, Twenty Twenty’s proprietor.

“Eight ninety-five a bottle,” Golbahar replies.

The visitor suggests the worker’s going to a lot of trouble for an order of $9 wine.

“It’s not eight dollars and 95 cents a bottle,” Golbahar explains. “It’s eight hundred and ninety-five dollars a bottle. Ten thousand dollars a case. The customer’s a very wealthy rich guy. It’s kind of his house wine.”

The visitor’s surprise is understandable. Twenty Twenty’s warehouse-like atmosphere -- many lesser bottles are sold from cardboard cases placed on the floor -- belies its status as a premier retailer of rare and old wines.

The wine the visitor asked about turned out to be 1997 Bryant Family Vineyard Pritchard Hill Cabernet Sauvignon, one of California’s cult Cabs. And it’s cheap compared with some of Twenty Twenty’s other fare -- such as the 1997 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, another heralded Cab, at $1,895 a bottle, and the 1961 Chateau Petrus at $15,000 a magnum.

Twenty Twenty may well have the broadest and deepest inventory of old and rare wines, especially Bordeaux -- the category of wines most prized by many Los Angeles collectors -- of any wine shop in the United States. A check of the online inventories of several other storied wine shops in the country, including Zachys and Sherry-Lehmann in New York and Wally’s Wine & Spirits in Westwood, shows that no other store approaches Twenty Twenty’s collection when it comes to the greatest Bordeaux vintages of the 20th century. The store’s thick, glossy catalog, which is mailed to 10,000 wine collectors around the world, lists 43 Bordeaux wines from the 1990 vintage, 30 from the 1982 vintage, 28 from 1959 and 31 from 1947.

“Bob has the greatest collection of old Bordeaux in the country that I’ve seen, and every time I go to another city and hear about a shop that has old wines, I visit it,” says Lawrence Hahn, an avid collector of first-growth Bordeaux, with a cellar numbering 3,000 bottles that date from as early as the 1940s.

“The breadth of Bob’s collection is among the top I can think of in the world,” says Jeff Smith, owner of Carte du Vin, an L.A. firm that organizes and catalogs private wine cellars.

A small bear of a man with slicked-back black hair, Golbahar presides over the majesty of his inventory with an unassuming manner that belies his deep knowledge and wide-ranging contacts with some of the world’s most exalted collectors and producers. The 39-year-old learned the trade from the ground up, starting as a schoolboy lugging cases of wine in his father’s shop, the now-defunct Bel-Air Wines on Santa Monica Boulevard near Beverly Glen.

When Golbahar’s father, Alex, bought the store in 1977, its biggest seller was Blue Nun Liebfraumilch at $1.99 a bottle. Within a year, Alex had transformed Bel-Air Wines, replacing much of its pedestrian inventory with fine wines. “Every business he’s been in, he’s gone for the best and the most exotic stuff,” Bob says. “At the time, there were a handful of good specialty wine stores here, but none with great selections of anything awesome. Somehow he had a sense that great wines had a bigger place in the Los Angeles market.”

The greatest of the great, the stuff of enological legend, is kept by Bob Golbahar these days behind the heavy locked door of an enormous upstairs vault at Twenty Twenty. On a recent morning, in a randomly selected drawer, there were two bottles of 1949 Chateau Latour priced at $5,000 each. One, acquired in London a decade ago, was pristine in appearance, still wrapped in original tissue paper. The other was very dusty, the level of wine inside had dropped an inch or so because of evaporation, and its label was nearly in shreds.

“People don’t like tattered labels, but I love tattered labels,” says Golbahar. “That tells you the wine was in a European cellar for a long time, and cellars in England and France are cool and humid. It’s the humidity that eats up the label, but it also keeps the corks from drying out.”

Twenty Twenty buys a lot of its oldest wines from European cellars because when the wines originally were laid down, there weren’t many proper wine cellars in the United States.

A significant percentage of the old wines are bought by customers who wish to mark birthdays or anniversaries. For many “birth vintage” customers, Golbahar says, the quality of the wine is irrelevant; they don’t want it to drink, but to have as a keepsake. Dead classic wines sometimes command higher prices than those that still are deliciously alive, “because people knew from the start they were vintages that wouldn’t last and drank them up early -- which makes them even more rare today.” For example, the 1946 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild “has been vinegar for 50 years,” Golbahar says. Yet it is listed at $7,500 a bottle. By contrast with the vinegary 1946, the 1947 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild lives on as a lush powerhouse of a wine and yet sells for $4,500 a bottle -- $3,000 less than its spoiled sibling.

Golbahar makes a point of being candid with customers about the wine’s condition. “You don’t want a guy to buy a bottle that costs $600 or thousands of dollars, and get all excited and take it to dinner and then be disappointed,” he says, “He’ll never buy an old wine again.”

Golbahar’s principal sources of old wines are private collectors who are on his catalog list, have heard of Twenty Twenty via word-of-mouth or found the store’s Web site (www.2020wines.com). He tends to avoid wine auctions as unreliable sources. “A lot of their stuff hasn’t been stored well, and we’re very careful,” he says.

There also is the matter of fraud, the bugbear of the old-wine trade. Recently, a prospective seller approached Golbahar with a 6-liter bottle of the great Burgundy Domaine de la Romanee-Conti 1990 Romanee-Conti. Golbahar noticed that the wax capsule on the bottle didn’t have the engraved stamping that Domaine de la Romanee-Conti uses. Unknown to the would-be seller, the wine was a fake. “A little later I saw on an auction Web site some 3-liter bottles of the same wine that had these same homemade capsules,” Golbahar says. “And they ended up selling for something like $20,000. So I guess somebody’s got a $20,000 bottle for a doorstop or something.”

Golbahar recently has been involved in a six-month negotiation with a Frenchman whose cellar includes 24 bottles of 1947 Chateau Latour a Pomerol, a storied Bordeaux, undisturbed since their release from the winery. “When I got a list of the guy’s stuff, I almost fainted,” he says. “I mean, this is like finding a gold mine, especially something that has been untouched for so many years. With this wine, it’s probably the last time it will ever happen.”

Twenty Twenty currently has a single bottle of the ’47 Chateau Latour a Pomerol, priced at $7,500. Golbahar estimates that two cases of it in fine condition could be worth $10,000 a bottle.

Despite the recent economic downturn, prices of legendary old wines have more than quadrupled in the last five years, he says. The rarest wines have gotten so dear that Golbahar no longer has the luxury of regularly monitoring their development with his own palate.

The single oldest bottle in Twenty Twenty’s vault is an 1808 Chateau Lafite Rothschild. It looks deceptively new, because eight years ago it was relabeled, topped off with wine from a later vintage and recorked by a visiting team from the chateau. (The Lafite team used to visit major American cities every five or six years to recondition prized bottles but since has discontinued the practice.)

The 1808 Lafite, Golbahar says, is “one of those things that’s hard to put a price on, but it would be definitely in the tens of thousands of dollars.”

In any case, it’s not for sale. “It’s so rare, we’re just keeping it for ourselves to drink someday. Maybe in 2008, the 200-year anniversary.”