Leslie Alexander's Wine Club Asks For $50,000 Initiation Fee, Promises Ultimate Wine Experience

(Forbes) - Sipping a glass of 2010 Louis Latour Chassagne-Montrachet, Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander is explaining where he got the idea to buy a potato barn in Bridgehampton, New York and hire a Hollywood production designer to rip it up and turn it into an ultra-exclusive wine club. “I wanted to do something fabulous, grand,” he says. Cost to join: a refundable $50,000 initiation fee plus annual dues and extra charges for special events.

Clad in a red Rockets baseball cap, beat-up Top-Siders, red polo shirt and white cargo shorts with a hole over the right knee, Alexander, 70, is sitting on an upholstered chair that looks like it came from a castle in 17th-century France. His wine glass perches on a low, distressed-wood table. Three filigreed chandeliers dangle from the high-vaulted ceiling above, their blue bulbs casting a soft light.

This being the informal yet status-conscious Hamptons, summer home to billionaires like Ronald Perelman and Steven Spielberg, Alexander figures that wine enthusiasts will be eager to join and attend tastings like the two-day, $17,500-a-head extravaganza of 57 vintages of Château Pétrus the club hosted in June 2012.

“I envisioned a place where people who had great collections could store their wine and come together and hang out,” he says. For older Hamptonites, he notes, there are no inviting places to go after dinner. “You’re not going to go to a disco,” he says. “Instead you can come here and drink wine. It’s like a golf club for wine.” Though he flunked high school French in South Orange, New Jersey, he named the club Société du Vin. “I wanted something that was French-sounding and intriguing.” Intriguing is an understatement. As one observer says about the club, it looks as if the Addams Family won the lottery and blew the money decorating.

There’s a reason for that. After buying the barn in 2008, Alexander saw the opulent New York loft of actor Gerard Butler on the cover of Architectural Digest, loved it and called the decorator Elvis Restaino, whose main work has been in movies and television.