Dennis is also an unlikely hip-hop fan, and when he came home from Australia with a sample of a particularly fab grenache he wanted to sell, Debra tasted it and offered the perfect name: It's so good, she said, it should be called The Chronic. The name didn't cut it with government regulators (it's a reference to the highest quality weed and also the title of a seminal Dr. Dre album). But Debra's second idea, The Chronique, sailed through.

ONE HANGUP

Their Dilido Island house -- 3,000 square feet on the edge of Biscayne Bay -- has enough wall and floor space to accommodate only 50 to 60 works at a time. That means the rest of the collection (except for works the Scholls lend to museums or hang in their second home in Aspen) languishes in storage until the next curator comes along and has a hankering for it. The Scholls show their largest pieces at World Class Boxing, an exhibition space they own in Wynwood.

''We're pretty good at acquiring work, but we figured out a while back that we're not so good at hanging it,'' says Dennis, who like Debra, seems to be a different breed of collector. They may be art obsessives, but they're not art snobs. They know plenty about the mostly young artists they collect. But they're not beyond admitting they can learn more. That's where the highly schooled curators come in.

'An art dealer once saw that our latest purchase was hanging over the fireplace and said, `Oh, you're trophy hangers.' And he didn't say that in a positive way,'' Dennis says. ``We're very careful about selecting curators, but then we don't interfere in their process. They're able to find connections between pieces that maybe we were not aware of. It's like your collection being reseen by some of the best eyes in the world.''

This year, Nicholas Baume, chief curator for the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, got carte blanche to pick and choose among the more than 600 pieces the couple has acquired over the years.

READY TO PARTY

''The curator will come in on a Thursday and the party is always on that Saturday,'' says Debra, who graduated from Hollywood Hills High. Dennis went to Norland High. ``We do it this way so that there's a deadline and no one can dilly-dally.''

There's never enough time to patch holes and repaint walls before that first event of the year, which features Shorty's barbecue and serves as a thank you to the 100 local artists who donate works for a raffle to benefit Locust Projects, which provides Miami artists with alternative exhibition spaces.

''Miami is still a young community with not enough institutions to give artists access to important works,'' says Locust Projects director Claire Breukel, who attended the Scholls' party, which was a couple of weeks ago. ``So it's fantastic for people who have the ability to collect really good art to share it with so many young artists.''

Felice Grodin, represented by Diana Lowenstein Gallery in Wynwood, was psyched to stand close to Julie Mehretu's large-scale Looking Back to a Bright New Future. Mehretu's work has long been an influence. ''But that's funny to say,'' says Grodin, ``given the fact that I had never actually seen a physical piece until today. It's very inspiring. It's everything I thought and more.''

The post-hang painting and sprucing up gets done before all the museum groups and art world VIPs who descend for Basel come through the house on tours in early December. Between Basel crowds and school groups, more than 15,000 people have filed through in the past decade, Dennis says.

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