(Forbes) - At first glance, Michael Greenlee looks more like the eighth man for the Leicester Tigers rugby club than the Daddy Warbucks of wine that he really is.  At least here in Newport, Rhode Island, a seaside city once dominated by America’s original one-percenters and savants of over-indulgence.  A wine glass looks way too fragile in this man’s hands. Yet he is surrounded by beautiful people looking for tips on what to add to their wine cellars.

“Wine has been a luxury product for centuries. Champagne was a favorite of the Russian Czars. Wine made Bourdeaux and Madeira what they are today,” he says of the French and Portuguese towns that became rich because of their vineyards.

Who but a serious wine collector knows that there is a secondary market exclusively for tradable Bordeaux, where buyers and sellers negotiate on a price for rare vintages?

“It’s a very seductive business and people find it intriguing,” says the giant Greenlee, suited up inside Rosecliff mansion in Newport on a cool end-of-summer night. “You buy wine and let it sit for five or ten years to open it up and see how it tastes. Or you store it away because you know it is going to be worth more than what you paid for it. But I have to say that most wine collectors are in this for the story, for the intimacy. You can’t drink a Picasso.”

Outside of Rosecliff, a valet delivers a silver Bugatti Grand Sport to a Chinese couple. It fits the setting, of course.  The Gilded Age mansion was a rich couple’s party paradise under its original owner, silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs and her executive transatlantic trader husband Hermann Oelrichs. The house was known to be one of the three big New York-to-Newport Roaring Twenties party scenes.  Each year, it’s the setting for the Newport Mansions Wine & Food Festival along with Alva Vanderbilt’s former summer getaway, the Marble House, a short two minute drive away. Nearby, construction crews are gutting the old John Jacob Astor family mansion for Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison.  A calm EastonBay, known as FirstBeach by the locals, reflects the moon and the house lights along a rocky cliff.  A few feet away, people dressed to the nines sample vintages of small producers – most of them American. A jazz band plays a bossa nova, which goes good with just about anything – even an Argentine malbec.