L.A. WINELINE.

Byline: Larry Lipson

They call it ``Two-buck Chuck.''

And it has been selling like hotcakes at Trader Joe's, its exclusive retail outlet.

It's Charles Shaw wine, available at $1.99 a bottle. Shaw offers two whites (chardonnay and sauvignon blanc) and two reds (merlot and cabernet sauvignon).

People who have never bought wine by the case before are doing exactly that with Shaw, especially in Southern California, where the wine purportedly has reached cult status.

Youngheng Teng of Studio City was spotted walking out of a local Trader Joe's with two cases, one merlot, one cabernet sauvignon. ``Friends recommended it,'' he said. Previously, he'd only purchased wine by the bottle.

Raeanne and Larry Marmorstein of North Hollywood bought three cases, two of chardonnay, one cabernet. He was disappointed because the store had already run out of Shaw's merlot. They were all the 2001 vintage and she had already tried and liked the chardonnay.

The rumors fly as to why it's so cheap.

One theory suggests that Charles Shaw and his wife were recently in the process of a bitter divorce and he had dumped his wine at ridiculously low prices in order to lower his assets.

Another blames the airlines, saying that their wines have been sold off cheaply under the Charles Shaw label because they cannot use corkscrews any more.

The real Charles Shaw - yes, there is one - is an investment banker and Stanford business school grad who divorced his wife Lucy back in 1991. They had bought a Napa winery in 1974 and Shaw eventually gained a modicum of fame for his Beaujolais-style wine.

But the market's declining wine sales and huge wine surplus in 1991 caused his downfall and his assets were picked up by the Bronco Wine Co., obviously allowing the use of his name.

Today, once again with such a load of surplus wine on the market, Charles Shaw, as a bulk wine product of Bronco, has become the target of a consumer frenzy.

``We're selling it faster than we can keep it in stock,'' says Mark Stephens, merchant manager of the Toluca Lake Trader Joe's.

He confirms that there's never been any wine like this before at his store, with the Trader's current sales surpassing 2 million cases.

The wines look upscale enough. The bottles have corks not screw-caps. The wines are evidently bottled and labeled in Bronco's Napa facility. But the California designation on the labels denoting origin indicates that the grapes could be grown anywhere in the state, even in the lower-quality Central Valley.

Because of enormous sales in 2002, Bronco was recently named Winery of the Year at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium.

Although most wine-tasting experts agree that the reds are a notch or two higher in quality, generally speaking, than the whites, one wine publication wrote that a Charles Shaw $1.99 chardonnay tasted as good as an unnamed $67 equivalent.

However, local wine expert Martin Weiner, who runs the L.A. School of Wine, cautions wine fanciers that the Shaw bottlings are very inconsistent.

``It's a blend of mostly, if not all, bulk California wine that is made from various batches purchased at different times with different tastes, ending up with a markedly inconsistent product.''

But at this price, who cares?

Certainly not the Two-buck-Chuck-hordes that invade Trader Joe's daily.