It’s a term that seems to be loosely thrown around.

“Cult Wine.”

Which opens up it up to being used subjectively. Benchmark Wine Group Founder and CEO Dave Parker and Jen Saxby, a certified sommelier and B.W.G. events manager, attempted to answer the question, ‘what makes a cult wine?’

As a distributor and retailer of fine wine, both are in a unique position to define the qualifications of a “cult wine,” and protect and provide for investors that want to hunt them down.

“A lot of the cult wineries don’t like to be called cult wineries,” Saxby said. “Especially the Harlan group. Grace family was the first to be recognized as such but not at the Harlan or Screaming Eagle price point. When Napa got popular with scores in the Robert Parker, Jr. era, price points went up as interest in joining the mailing list of these wineries grew. It was hard to join those lists. Sine Qua Non you can’t even get on the list, but you can purchase their wines from us.”

For a strict definition, Parker stuck with mailing list status.

“If it has a mailing list and people can’t get on it, or fight for it, that would be the definition of a cult wine,” said Parker who was an engineer in his first career but caught the wine industry bug when he bought a vineyard then another vineyard and in 1998 dove full time into a wine career. “I want to differentiate it from the classic brands like Opus One or Dominus.”

Whether there is such a thing as a cult wine is up for debate. But, there’s no question that with expensive wines come counterfeit production. The Benchmark Wine Group buys rare wines from brokers in Europe and is the largest buyer of domestic private wine cellars

Everything gets examined by Benchmark Wine Group before a wine is certified. The print on label is a primary tell for authenticity. As is a consistent label location and lack of glue stains. Benchmark also picks up glass codes from the bottom of a bottle. The numbers should match what the winery purchased and later bottled. It’s something that can’t be faked by a copycat.

“We appraise six wine cellars a day,” Parker said. “We buy about half of our wines from perfectly stored cellars and hand inspect every bottle. We put our provenance guarantee on every bottle.”

Regardless of the term used to describe it, cult wine seems to have become widely accepted, it’s a meaningful guarantee to protect the authenticity of an investment.

Benchmark Wine Group: Does Cult Wine Exist?