ANDRETTI, MARIO Wine Maker

Mario Andretti is putting his celebrity marque on a wine bottle. Andretti, the four-time Indy 500 winner, owns 13 percent of AWG (short for Andretti Wine Group), which recently bought a bankrupt 53-acre vineyard and winery in Napa County, California and is looking for other properties. Like racing, Andretti said, “there’s a lot of romance to this business.” Since his boyhood, Andretti has been a wine fan and has made many visits to California’s wine country. In 1994, a San Diego promotions firm called Best Regards got Louis Martini Winery to produce 15,000 cases of specially labeled Andretti cabernet sauvignon to commemorate the Arrivederci Tour, Andretti’s final full season of racing. In 1995, Joseph Phelps produced 2,000 cases of Andretti chardonnay. “To continue, we saw that we needed our own base of supply,” said Andretti. Best Regards principals Phillip Dias and Sarla Perkins then got into the wine business. One of their plans was to convert auto-racing fans from beer to wine. Last January, Dias and Perkins merged their infant wine company with an inactive public company called American Arum Corp. Buying a “shell company” is a quick and easy way to go public without the other and disclosure of requirements of a full public offering. They changed the name of the company to AWG and its trading symbol to VINE. Andretti said from his office in Nazareth, PA., that he has an eyeball on another property” and wants to establish a stronger supply base. The plan is to produce $12 to $19 premium wines and even get into tours and tastings.