Gaining entrance into the worlds most exclusive wine society is expensive, but there are no dues, no silly rituals to undergo, no costumes festooned with gewgaws, no gold medallions to polish, no bacchanalian icons requiring genuflection.

All it takes is a sealed case of some very expensive and already-famous wine, preferably red and preferably impossible to get.

Once you get it, you do not drink it. In fact, you do not open the box it came in. Sealed cases have much more cache than ones you actually drink.

The secret is to have an unopened box of something so special that other wine collectors will drool when you tell them you have it. It must be a wine that others want, and thus is a wine that scores very high with one of the in wine reviewers.

Such wines are always loaded with raw power and richness, something so incredibly dark and powerful that aging the wine is essential -- preferably past the time when you yourself will be able to enjoy it, senility having set in some years earlier.

This is not a joke. This is the way many of the worlds newest wine collectors, for whom collecting became a sport a decade ago, actually live. They got the go-ahead for this lifestyle by reading wine journals that rate wine on a numeric basis and say when, exactly, the wine will be ready to drink.

Any wine scoring high enough qualifies as an entrance to the club, as long, of course, as the wine is $100 or more a bottle. And it is a wine that cannot actually be bought unless bribery or pictures from the company picnic are involved.

Once you have your case of something, your bragging rights are equivalent to owning a new Saleen. But beware: Wine bragging rights have a half-life of something like two hours. After that, its time to go searching around for something else. Its a never-ending cycle and leads to a lot of unopened cases of red wine piling up in the garage, next to the leaky water heater that has needed repair since shortly after your latest hobby began.

Then there are people who care not for numbers, and therefore do not have to worry about the price of what they buy. What they buy rarely gets a high score and thus remains affordable. Such wines often go nicely with dinner.

And how do they find these wines? Its simple. These are people blessed to have born with palates that simply cannot appreciate weight, power, richness, intensity, hedonistic concentration, and other such wines that are collectible.

These are folks who like wines that taste like grapes, not raisins or trees. Continued...