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.

"We never know when an accident's going to happen," says Janice C. Lee, who carries the dual titles marketing director and master imbiber with the company she helped found two years ago. "We never know what quantity we're going to get."

But get them Accidental Wine does. 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.

That's because, as David Forbes, the company's chief executive officer and grape wrangler, likes to say: "The expensive bottles break just as easily as the cheap ones."

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 Argentine 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.

"It worked for them, it worked for us and it certainly worked for their clients, who got some great deals," Castellani said of Accidental. The company, he added, is the only one he knows of in its niche market.

The company came into existence, its founders like to say, over a bottle of wine.

Forbes, a friendly, white-haired man of 64, had honed his wine-drinking tastes over numerous lunches and dinners when he was president of Orion Pictures. Lee had done the same while in the marketing business, where she met Forbes when his company was a client.

Somehow, Lee noticed, whenever Forbes was playing host he always managed to pull out the perfect bottle of wine for the occasion. It turned out he had a friend who was a wine distributor who was passing along bottles he couldn't move because the labels were damaged.