Home Food & Drinks Steps to Buying Wine at Auction

Steps to Buying Wine at Auction

There are different types of online and offline auctions that are a great opportunity to buy amazing wine at better prices. Take a look at how you too can find a restaurant-value wine but at a fraction of the price.

Advantages Of Buying Wines From Online Auction Houses

Being the bargain hunter and a wine lover you are, buying wine through online auctions is just what doctor prescribed. Your average wine spend may easily be as low as $10 per bottle. Like it, don’t you. The two most important aspects of buying wine form an online wine auction are the price and the vast array of choices. Perhaps the only disadvantage is the inability to get a tactile sensation of the bottle before you buy it, but when you think about it, it does not even sound like a downside at all. If you are willing to do some research, you can find pretty good wine bargains.

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Collector Wines at Auctions

When a big auction is over, wine prices change due to several reasons:

  • some people see such wines as a fine investment and are willing to pay more and the seller knows it
  • businessmen look to impress someone by getting such bottles of wine as a present, or
  • there has been detected a growing demand for a particular continent or country.

The wines that are to be featured on such auctions are usually presented to the public through catalogs several weeks prior to the date of sale. The funny thing about such auctions is that a wine can get at a ridiculously high price due to being sold as a gift several times in a row.

Recent Or Old, All Is Sold

Usually at a wine auction, you can find both recent (usually cheaper) and old (by default more expensive) wines. As the saying goes“the older the better”, it is clear that if quality and prestige are in question, people usually opt for vintage wine. However, many recently-produced wines are hard to go unnoticed and can be auctioned at rather high prices as well.

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What To Avoid

Certain wine auctions feature selling lots that consist of twelve wine bottles. However, a huge and very common problem arises when all you really want is to buy just two or three of them, but you have to purchase the whole case or nothing at all. Beware, fraud is a common thing on auctions, so unless you are quite sure that each bottle comes from a prominent collector, avoid buying wine cases to avoid losing money in vain. Furthermore, a smart person should always pose the question whether the good or poor condition is the main reason why a certain wine is being offered.

As with everything else in life, a wine auction can also become a place and occasion when you find yourself barking at the wrong tree and instead of getting something to cherish, you pay dearly for someone’s bottled garbage. Yes, the wine might have been opened before and damaged or even past prime.