Winemakers' Hangover Means You Can Buy Great Wines for a Lot Less

Don't let those hoity-toity winemakers fool you with a triple-digit price tag on a bottle of old grapes. They may not act like it, but this economic hangover has them over a barrel, too. This, friends, is a buyer's market: Now's the best time in years to get your hands on some high-caliber wines for a lot less.

Over the past decade, wine sales grew twice as fast as the economy. The growth was more pronounced in the mid- to higher-end of the spectrum, with sales on bottles priced above $8 growing 16% compounded annually. But as with everything else that had legs during the last bull market, wineries overproduced to meet an end demand that never materialized.

"They're going to leave 75 tons of fruit on the vines in California. It's going to rot," said Rhett Gadke, marketing director for Bounty Hunter Rare Wines, a Napa Valley purveyor of rare California wines. Gadke said that while the under-$15 bottle market will suffer the most, the high-end collectible wine arena will feel the pinch as well.

Overproduction has put pressure on the entire wine universe to get rid of inventory to clear shelf space for the next truckload. And with so many dot-com millionaires now thousandaires -- many of whom were Silicon Valleyites who spent lots of dough bidding up tony wines from nearby Napa and Sonoma -- wines that once commanded $1,000 price tags like a bottle of Harlan Estates' finest, are far more affordable.

"Today, you can get Harlan for $500 a bottle. It's not a bargain, but on a relative scale it's a lot cheaper," said Gadke. When you step down the ladder from the most exclusive wines, the discounts get even better.