LOS ANGELES (AP) - Accidents happen, the people at the Accidental Wine Company like to say. Good thing for them that they do, too, or the Accidental Wine Company would be out of business.

Every time a delivery person, a vintner or wine distributor drops a case of wine and one bottle breaks, staining all the others, the sound heard in the minds of the people at Accidental Wine is not that of glass shattering. It's more like the "ka-ching" of a cash register going off.

Accidental Wine rushes in and buys up the remaining blemished but otherwise unbroken bottles that a retailer won't touch. Then it resells them over the internet for a third to half off the price.

Everything from France's most famous Bordeaux wines, which can go for hundreds of dollars a bottle, to acclaimed vintages from California's Napa Valley, to more modestly priced but still enjoyable selections from places like Australia, New Zealand and Chile.

Indeed, sometimes they don't even have to break.

Not that long ago Los Angeles' venerable San Antonio Winery, in business for 103 years, decided to bring out a new label called Windbreak.

"It's an outstanding wine. It's 40-something dollars a bottle," says Forbes, holding a Windbreak pinot noir.

But for some reason - and in retrospect it doesn't take too much imagination to guess that reason - the name Windbreak never caught on. The winery has since changed it to something more marketable.

In the meantime, the winemakers didn't want to dump their leftover stock, so they sold it to Accidental, which is packaging it with two other similarly priced vintages from other winemakers and selling all three for a total of $68, about half the price.

Then there was the Argentinean winemaker that produced 150 cases of a pinot noir before noticing someone had spelled it Pinor Noir on all the labels. Bob Castellani, president of importer-distributor Specialty Cellars quickly put in a call to Accidental Wine, which scooped up the bottles and resold them, with a note to consumers that it really was pinot noir they were getting.

Because Accidental, like Forrest Gump with his box of chocolates, never knows what it is going to get, consumers who buy through its Web site can't order specific brands of wine. But they can specify what kind of wine they want, a chardonnay, for example, or a merlot. Likewise, if they hate zinfandel or chianti reminds them of that creepy scene in "Silence of the Lambs," they can say so and they won't get any.

www.accidentalwine.com