Wine’s secret club

“Tell me what you think of this,” says Lou Liuzzi, a twinkly eyed guy wearing a long leather apron. From a bottle wrapped in brown paper, he pours red wine into a glass. Holding it by the stem, he hands it to a guy in black slacks who has just deposited a case of wine by the front door. Next to them, a number of men, relax on overstuffed sofas, holding wine glasses, smelling, tasting.

“Sounds like entrapment to me,” laughs the guy in black slacks. Concentrating, he swirls, sticks his nose into the glass, takes a deep sniff, closes his eyes and sips.

“Pinot Noir,” he says. “Napa.” The guy is Matt Strauss, sommelier at Grace.

“Australia,” counters a young man sitting in an armchair, swirling, tasting, hoping perhaps to trip up the sommelier. The rest of the room at the Wine Hotel weighs in, no one person agreeing with another.

The wine is revealed: It is Pinot, as Strauss guessed. A prestigious 2001 from Russian River -- Sonoma, not Napa. The producer is Du Mol.

That’s close enough for Strauss to politely bow out of “Name That Wine” and get back to the Los Angeles restaurant, leaving the group to argue over the difference between California and Australia Shirazes.

Welcome to a little-noticed, but thriving, wine subculture: the wine locker room.

All across Los Angeles, climate-controlled wine locker rooms are hidden away in the basements of old buildings, on the alley side of strip malls, behind the “employees only” doors in the back of wine stores.

One in Glendale -- the Cave -- began as a speak-easy in the 1920s and counted Clark Gable as a patron. A dusty but distinguished collection of old bottles lines the corridor leading to the lockers, trophies left by Cave clients to memorialize great wine experiences. Another one in West L.A. -- Los Angeles Fine Arts & Wine Storage Co. -- specializes in storing fine art along with wine.

And an entire wine storage district has sprung up around Cotner Avenue’s inexpensive industrial space, which is convenient to the affluent Westside. Hundreds of thousands of bottles of rare wine worth tens of millions of dollars are stashed within a half-mile radius, including those owned by retailers such as the Wine House, Twenty-Twenty Wine Merchants and Wally’s Wine & Spirits. The Wine Cellar, the district’s oldest and largest on nearby Pontius Avenue, has taken over one nondescript building after another as it has expanded to 20,000 square feet, nearly an entire city block.

But recently, some of these wine lockers have been trying to become more than that. They want to be a clubhouse for the most dedicated of wine lovers, a group, incidentally, that’s almost entirely men. When the cognoscenti of the wine world -- people who order Bordeaux futures or keep their names on cult Cab mailing lists -- outgrow their basement wine closets, they don’t stop buying. They rent wine storage.

And as great wine becomes easier to buy, particularly as a result of the current wine glut and the instant gratification of Internet shopping, this happens quickly. New locker rooms are proliferating; old ones are expanding.

Denizens of Los Angeles’ wine storage facilities don’t just stop by their lockers to pick up a bottle for dinner or drop off that new case purchased last week. They stop by to pick up wine-world gossip or taste a locker mate’s favorite Burgundy.

“We trade tips,” says a regular at another wine locker room. “We’re guys. We don’t call it gossip.”

On a recent Friday night at the Wine Hotel, Liuzzi’s newly opened wine storage facility on Third Street just west of La Brea Avenue, six of his regular customers are there to hang out and play his favorite tasting game. Liuzzi moves aside half a dozen wine bottles to make room for a plate of sliced Brie and country pate. Everyone’s brought a status bottle out of their wine locker. Some are wrapped in foil, some in paper, others have been decanted. Sommelier Strauss just stopped by to pick up some wine for Grace, which stores some of its wine there.

“It does become an obsession,” says Chip Hammack, sales manager at the Wine House, which provides storage at the back of the store. “You buy more and more wine,” he adds, noting that his storage clients are among the store’s best customers.

Besides providing a secure space that’s maintained at a consistent 58 degrees and 65% to 70% humidity (clients provide their own racks), the facilities also handle shipping and receiving for clients -- a boon for collectors with an Internet auction habit. The lockers range from plywood boxes that fit a dozen cases to chicken-wire rooms stacked with thousands of bottles.

Inside the lockers, it’s each collector for himself.

Some bins are a jumble of old Petrus boxes stacked against a few Opus One cases, half a case of Australia’s Clarendon Hills Astralis and a dozen boxes of 2000 first-growth Bordeaux.

Others are the work of weekend craftsmen who have laboriously created floor-to-ceiling wine racks, tagging each bottle with producer, vintage and optimal drinking date.

Twenty years ago, there was only a scattering of wine lockers, places such as the Wine Box in West Hills, the Cave in Glendale and the Wine Cellar in Beverly Hills. Trader Joe’s, which has since gotten out of the business, provided in-store storage. All told, it added up to perhaps 30,000 square feet of storage space.

It’s difficult to estimate how much space there may be today, but it’s certainly at least three or four times that.

In the old days, there was only one locker room that really counted: the Wine Box. Odd as it may seem, among wine geeks it’s still spoken of with reverence.

Opened in 1976 in the basement of a West Hills strip mall, the Wine Box has always been operated by wine lovers. An early owner set the tone on Friday afternoons by popping the cork on a bottle and standing at the doorway, greeting clients with a taste. By the early 1980s, the tenants of this plywood warren of homemade storage bins were gathering every Friday night to share knowledge, along with their wine.

Today, it’s owned by Dale Sharp, who continued the Friday night festivities after he bought the facility. By some counts, there were 50 to 60 collectors pulling corks on a given night. The rule wasn’t that you had to open a great wine, just the best one you had in your locker. “It was an exhibition, not a competition,” says Mike Reavley, a patron. “You’d learn about wine as a result.”

That came to a screeching halt two years ago, when one of Sharp’s customers was pulled over for driving under the influence of alcohol after leaving a Friday night tasting. Worried about liability, Sharp moved a much diminished rotating tasting party to Pinot Bistro and other nearby restaurants.

They’re still tasting at the Wine Box, but the door closes at 7 p.m. “If you have a locker here, you are more than welcome to open a bottle to share,” says Sharp. “You absolutely pick up gossip. And you are hearing it from peers, rather than from a retailer trying to sell you something.”

The ‘Types’

Less tempting than a home cellar that can be tapped at a moment’s notice, the locker rooms also allow collectors to keep their wine hidden away from spouses with less passion for the hobby.

“My wife wants to know why [she needs a password] to view my wine spreadsheet,” says one man who asked not to be identified unloading a few cases at the Wine Vault in Glendale, where he keeps an expanding collection. “I don’t want her to see the cost column.”

There are three kinds of locker room guys, says Sharp: “The guys who like to tinker, the guys who love their trophies, and the guys who just like to drink good wine.”

It’s rare to find someone under age 30 who is collecting wine worthy of the annual storage fees of 50 cents to $2 per bottle. But the 30 to 55 crowd are the most social, visiting their collections, sometimes daily.

“The older guys know what they’ve got,” says Terry O’Hagen, manager at the Wine Cellar. “The young guys need to touch it.”

Liuzzi just wants to share it. At the Wine Hotel, which he opened in an abandoned concrete-domed antique store, Liuzzi is building a tasting room. He also plans to bring vintners in for special events. One recent Friday night at the Wine Hotel, Frank Martell, director of fine and rare wines with the auction house of Bonhams & Butterfields, brought out a Chateau Mouton Rothschild from 1957, an undistinguished vintage. This one was teetering on the edge of drinkability, providing more of an education than a delight. The Pride Mountain Vineyards 2001 Cabernet Franc that he also uncorked was the crowd pleaser.

Talk turned to the next day’s wine auction by Bonhams & Butterfields, also a client of the Wine Hotel. Liuzzi mentioned that he had his eye on a case of red Bordeaux, a 1982 Cos d’Estournel. Martell nodded -- good choice. (Liuzzi got it for a middle point in the projected price range.)

Other facility owners talk about wanting to add tasting rooms and even wine stores to their storage services, but no one is as far along with their plans as Liuzzi.

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Locker room buzz

Wine storage facilities -- a.k.a. locker rooms -- are great places to pick up the latest gossip from the wine world, along with white-hot buying tips. Heard lately:

* Mondavi is rumored to be selling off its over-production of reserve wines under the Castle Rock label, meaning that rare wines normally costing up to $120 can be had for $10 a bottle while the good juice lasts. (Mondavi denies the rumor.)

* Everyone has been rushing to snap up a $13 South Australian Shiraz produced by Marquis Philips. It’s good, but over hyped. If you buy, don’t overpay.

* Thinking about shopping at Costco for some 2001 Bordeaux when it’s released in the spring? Buzz from the Wine Box has it that the Westlake Village Costco had the best selection of 2000s.

* An advance copy of Wine Spectator’s Top 100 Picks of 2003 has Cos d’Estournel beating out all Bordeaux’s first-growths. And a California Merlot, of all things -- Paloma, from Spring Mountain -- is ranked No. 1.