Most adults look back on their college years and recall all-night study sessions in libraries and all-night parties, the latter most often defined by cheap beer and equally cheap alcohol. Not so for Evan Dangle. Sure, his days at Colby College in Waterville, Maine were sprinkled with a healthy offering of those typical college experiences, but they also included an unofficial education in the finer things in life. For some, college marks the time when they meet and fall in love with their significant others; for Dangle, it marked the time when he fell in love with first-growth Bordeaux.

As he tells the story, it was a wine-collecting chaplain who lived on the first floor of Dangle’s dormitory during his sophomore year who would invite Dangle and his two roommates in for games of cards and introductions to French wine. "He used to serve us these fantastic second, third, and in some cases first-growth Bordeaux," Dangle says. "It was spectacular and I thought, ‘this stuff is fantastic.’"

Dangle may not have understood just how special those bottles were at the time, but when that same chaplain taught a wine appreciation class during Dangle’s senior year, Dangle was one of the first to sign up. By the time he graduated in 1986, Dangle had a newcomer’s understanding of fine wine and an insatiable passion to learn and enjoy as much of it as he could.

It was still a few years before he evolved as a wine consumer and arrived at a stage where he wouldn’t open a bottle immediately after buying it. This was during a time when Dangle was living in an apartment in Boston’s Italian neighborhood, which meant that although he was surrounded by fine restaurants with vast wine cellars, he did not have one of his own. In those early years, he would store bottles in cardboard boxes that he stacked in a closet—a system that eventually would house a couple of hundred bottles. It wasn’t sophisticated, but as is often the case, most great passions grow from humble beginnings.

In those early years, Dangle’s greatest challenge—aside from not having a proper cellar—was learning to live without the quality of wine to which he first was introduced. Like most recent college graduates, Dangle’s income couldn’t support the purchase of rarefied French wine, so he narrowed his focus to more affordable domestic varietals and soon discovered California reds. "I enjoy wines from around the world," says Dangle, who now lives in a Boston suburb with a 1,500-bottle collection and a cellar capable of holding 500 bottles more. "But if you said that I could only enjoy wine from one part of the world and pass on all the others, it would be Cabernets from California. That’s my first love."

These days, Dangle’s cellar is home to a variety of verticals—Joseph Phelps Insignia, Dominus, and Mondavi Private Reserve, to name a few—and he has a few jewels, including two bottles of 1990 Château Haut-Brion. But more so than amassing a collection of impressive bottles, Dangle’s greatest joy comes from the exploration and the hunt. "I get most charged up about discovering little-known wines from small producers that are ready for prime time," he says. "It doesn’t always work out, but you have quite a story to tell when it does."

The early discovery of a burgeoning winery or vintage may not be an easy task, but Dangle has a strategy that at least gives him a better-than-average chance at striking it rich. "I like to find vineyards that surround first-growths," he says. "Because winemaking is about the earth, if you can find the new wineries around these great milestone or hallmark wineries, they have similar terroir as the first-growths, so you’ve got a pretty good chance of finding some great wines."

Facts and Fallacies
The element of discovery is a common thread that draws most collectors together, and it’s one that even new collectors, like Yuri Vanetik of Southern California, understand early on. "There has to be an excitement and a passion and an interest in discovering; that’s the impetus for everything," says Vanetik, who began collecting wine 10 years ago.

"Initially, I got into it for superficial reasons," he admits, "but once I decided to understand what makes wine tick, I became intrigued. There’s a mystique, that you don’t know what you’re going to get until you open it. And once I learned that it appreciates in value, I was hooked."

Unlike Dangle, who developed an appreciation for fine wine early in his life and had to work hard to afford the first-growth Bordeaux that initially had tantalized his palette, Vanetik already was a successful businessman when he stumbled upon the art of collecting wine. As such, he had the means to purchase various examples of the 2000 vintage of Bordeaux (first-growth and otherwise) as the foundation of his collection. Nevertheless, Vanetik developed an appreciation for California reds, as Dangle had, but through a different approach.

When Vanetik acquired a friend’s small wine collection, he knew nothing about the craft of winemaking or the complexity that a fine wine could possess. To remedy that, Vanetik bought, as he says, "every book that made sense," scoured through them all, and scribbled detailed notes in their margins. But what he learned and was told by other collectors would later reveal itself to be a fallacy, he says, and it all stemmed from his willingness to taste and try anything. "My understanding initially was New World wines were monolithic and designed for critics like Robert Parker," he says. "New World wines, I was told, are not supposed to age well. They’re fruit-forward wines that don’t have substance. But California wine, in essence … it’s a lot more than people think it is. It’s not trendy, expensive wine, and it can’t compare in history to the Old World. But in terms of the aging potential, it does have it."

Some collectors choose not to focus on the present-day value of each of their bottles and instead prefer to remember only what they originally paid for them. It’s a tactic most commonly used by enthusiasts who intend to—someday—drink every bottle in their cellar. Vanetik, by contrast, owns a cellar that houses a collection made up of trophy bottles that he will never drink (and likely will never sell), as well as cases that he eagerly looks forward to opening. But because he views himself as a venture capitalist in the business of wine, he can’t ignore the monetary component. "I buy wines that may never appreciate," he says. "If things happen, great; if they don’t, that’s okay too. But in the last two years, I’ve become a lot more conscious of the investment component. It’s not what drives me, but I need to consider value. Once you get to a certain point, you can’t ignore value, even if you have elastic resources. It’s a yardstick for how we achieve success and conduct our lives."

Risks and Rewards
David Hunt, the owner and winemaker at Hunt Cellars in Paso Robles, Calif., was at one time a serious wine collector, but the market has proven too volatile for his comfort. As a result, he keeps his cellar stocked only with the vintages that he aims to drink now or within the next few years. "Are they buying to collect it and brag about it, or are they buying it to drink it?" he asks, defining the two camps into which wine collectors typically fall. "If people are collecting just to store them and save them and not to drink them, that wine’s probably not going to be good."

But he’s careful to point out that some of the top-scoring wines currently coming out of the West Coast have a short lifespan and, contrary to logical speculation, will not improve with significant age. In fact, he says they may decline much faster than you think. He points to 1997 vintages of Opus and Insignia, two wines that were, he says, "some of the best that I ever tasted." But in less than a decade, he realized that they were beginning to fall apart. "What was lacking in that vintage—the fruit got overripened," he explains. "It was a great expression, but there was no backbone to bind it together to make it last and to preserve it."

Can a wine collector motivated by the return on investment be successful? Absolutely, Hunt says, but it’s not an easy thing to do. For starters, he points to the Asian wine market, which has exploded in recent years, but that explosion, he says, is fueled by wealthy businessmen spending exorbitant amounts of money to impress their peers and feed their egos. Such activity has elevated the value of many rare vintages, but because of that, there’s really no indication of how long it will last and how quickly those prices will fall back to earth. "I certainly wouldn’t be a player in that market," he says.

Another aspect to consider is the auction scene, though Hunt has found that some auctions are designed to produce inflated results. Oftentimes at charity events, rare bottles will sell for prices that far exceed their true value, but it’s the charitable angle that motivates such heavy spending. Ultimately, Hunt believes the success of a wine collector as an investor is the product of two things: careful analysis and a willingness to sell. "They need to track their investment," Hunt says, "and sell when it’s high. Don’t be married to that bottle of wine unless you’re going to drink it. Believe nothing of what you hear, half of what you see, and everything that you experience."

Cultivating a Passion
Experiences are everything to Hank Bernbaum, a 60-year-old Illinois collector who voraciously bought wines when he was younger. In more recent years he has tempered that habit, though he does say that his cellar, which holds a 2,500-bottle collection, seems to gradually grow larger all the time. "When you’re finding your way in the world; when it’s time for you to make your own mark; and when things are coming your way better than you ever though they could—your ego goes out of whack and you start buying things because it enhances your lifestyle, but it’s also to impress yourself," he says. "When you get to be my age now, none of that is important. You buy things and collect things because they make you happy."

This is not to say that Bernbaum’s cellar is devoid of any trophy bottles. In fact, he says that he’s acquired more trophy bottles than any one person should own. But his philosophy on wine collecting, even as it pertains to those rare vintages, is rooted in the pleasure of consumption. Bernbaum says that in some cases, he knows specifically when certain bottles will be opened. Take the 6-liter bottle of 1988 Gaja Speers. That particular bottle will be uncorked the day Bernbaum sells his business and retires. "With wines, you buy them to drink them," he says. "When you take a great bottle of wine and you can share it with someone and it can become an event that you can remember 15 years later, that’s cool. That’s the beauty of wine and collecting wine."

However, not everyone who owns a wine cellar and collects wine shares that perspective; and it’s something Bernbaum wishes he could change. He can rattle off countless vacations that he has taken with his family—trips that many times have brought them to a small winemaking region in an exotic part of the world. That passion for wine has connected them with interesting people and has introduced them to cultures that they otherwise may never have known existed. If your motivation to collect is not fueled by a natural curiosity about wine, then, in Bernbaum’s opinion, you’re not getting the full experience. "Some people who have a ton of money and decide that they want a wine cellar, they’ll go to someone who knows what they’re doing and say, ‘there’s no budget. Go build me a wine cellar and buy me the wines that I should have,’" he says. "They haven’t gone to classes to learn how the grapes are harvested, how long they sit in fermentation tanks, how the musk sits on the grapes and what that does to it. Part of the fun about building a great cellar is learning those things and experiencing those things.

"I don’t think wine is meant to be collected," he adds. "It’s meant to be purchased and methodically enjoyed. The best pleasure is when you drink it."