Never!
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Obviously those who share allocations promising they will drink the wines, and then sell it are disgusting, and should be tarred, feathered and then forced to listen to CSPAN for fifteen hours a day for a month. When I promise to drink a wine, then I am going to damn well drink it.
Being on a mailing list is different. You are making no such promise. It might make it interesting if a winery asked you to sign a paper saying on the honors system you will not to flip the wine for profit, although you can offer bottles to friends at cost.
Auctions etc. are completely there to be exploited, but frankly it’s almost impossible to make money. Auctions whether they are obscure or Christie’s are known by most wine people, and prices are pretty close to on another. You can try and flip, but unless you really know what you are doing you won’t succeed. And even if you do, thanks to the net, you are going to lose more in one bad transaction than you will make in five normal ones.
LOL some peeps don’t like my opinion, eh? In some ways it’s like “if you have to explain it” but what the heck. Enough good examples listed by others. Just for clarity, I don’t think “flipping” is selling wine you’ve been storing years later or because you don’t like it anymore. This forum is WINE berserkers, not traderberserkers, so I would think the majority of people here are mainly into the wine…
My initial reaction is…,who cares?
Harlan or Screaming Eagle ain’t worth $750 a bottle, IMO, and if you are on the list and someone wants to pay you $1250 a bottle, great.
There is no relation to what is in the bottle anyway.
Well done, Mark.
I had to check the date on this thread to make sure it wasn’t from the 1990s.
Capitalism and property ownership are wrong. (Just not as wrong as the alternatives.)
My Bro in law is the lucky beneficiary of 2 Masters tickets (4 day passes) for life…or at least until he loses his ethical compass.
Every year, about a month before the tourney, he receives a letter from the powers that be from Augusta National asking him if he wants the tickets this year (DUH!) and has to sign a form saying he will NOT resell the tickets. Lucky for me, Tony is a very ethical human being and when he signs a form saying he will not re-sell the tickets, that means he will not re-sell the tickets. More times than not he offers them to me at cost.
I have to admit I have been tempted to sell these tickets at about 15 times face value but I just enjoy pimiento sandwiches and Masters golf too much. In any given year go to EBay, StubHub or any other scalping site and they are flooded with tickets. We are surrounded by a lot of unethical people.
My experience with reselling wine has been basically I over bought a certain type of wine over the years, fell out of favor with that type and sold either on CC or auction for market value (usually higher, sometimes much higher, occasionally lower). At the end of the day I probably break even when you factor in shipping, tax, personal wine cellar costs including electricity, countless hours inventorying, etc.
If I was a flipper I would be buying middle to high end Burgundy and sitting on it - it seems to keep going up no matter what.
yep. Happy to buy an appreciated home at acquisition cost from some of the ethical people here!
I think this is the major area of difficulty / disagreement.
Whilst I applaud the intention of a winery trying to keep themselves grounded and ensure their customers get a fair deal, if the difference between sale price and market price is large (e.g. > avg 15% difference) then it’s creating the opportunity for people to treat it like a free cash machine.
If the winery just carries on regardless, giving ~ 25% discount to mailing list members, then it would be foolish to drop off the list (albeit honourable if you really don’t like the wines). I doubt death would prevent the relatives continuing the membership as if nothing had happened! So a honourable intent from the winery is going to end up with a lot of flippers - even if many always intended to buy to drink, but now feel compelled to buy and flip for the free money.
Options for the winery:
- Keep the discount fair but modest. Would 10% avg discount be worth the risk to the flipper? Probably not.
- Make re-sale (perhaps within a period of time - say 5 years) be an act that results in removal from the list. This could certainly get silly and has already resulted in a heated thread here when a winery did that. What if someone gives a bottle to a friend who then sells it & gets the list member booted off? Does the winery number all bottles & monitor auctions etc. Is that really worth their effort?
- Use mailing lists with deep discounts only for a limited period of time - say 5-10 years. Reward people with a strong discount for committing to the early years, but make it clear from the outset, that is the deal.
- (joking) you only get to order if you return at least 6 empties back to the winery
- Any other options?
For me 1) and or 3) is the way to go. A winery needs to focus on making the wine, not on policing after-sales transactions.
You buy the bottle of wine, you have the right to do whatever you want with the wine. Drink it, sell it, mix it with Coca Cola - it’s yours.
Two questions
1 - You buy a wine from either a friend or winery with the intent to drink it, few years later your tastes have changed. Is it flipping to sell at that point and take that profit from appreciation ?
2 - What about sharing your allocation at cost, either partial or total, is that flipping ? You are technically allowing someone to jump a wait list for allocated wines.
I belive both of the above are morally fine, however specifically buying from winery or individual to knowingly sell immediately for profit is wrong.
Not true. It’s on loan until you ingest it.
Alan - I think both those situations are fine, of course with the proviso the person you’re sharing with is of good character and a “true” wine lover, i.e. you can suspect on reasonable grounds that your allocation of the wines is at least as good as decisions the initial allocator would make 
. I don’t consider those things “flipping”. The ethical problem I see with flipping is where you’ve essentially represented yourself as a private wine consumer who wants the wine for personal consumption. Sure, if your tastes change sell the lot at the best price you can get, but I would not elevate continuing on the list and annual straight flipping to the level of ethical behaviour. It might be the smart, capitalist thing to do, it’s your right and not illegal yadda yadda, but it’s not “right” either - IMHO as these things tend to be. And that’s before you get to sales tax and capital gains…
i wonder what some of the people here think of home flippers!?
I always prided myself on not being a flipper until I received an offer of $1,850 per bottle for 2000 Lafite I purchased at Costco for $239. I couldn’t see consuming the wine at that value.
A couple of friends here in Manila have been amassing their collections for decades (I, myself, do not collect - I just buy to drink) - one of them has over 13,000 bottles at last count (among other interests, he part owns a wine shop and wine storage facility). Every once in a while, when I “need” a particular vintage of Bdx, Burg or Napa that I don’t have on hand, I ask and they graciously sell me what I “need” - the pricing “rule” is always “whatever the average price of winesearcher shows”. I greatly appreciate their accommodating my occasional requests.
The home flipping analogy is apt for some circumstances, not as much for others. If you’re on a mailing list like Screaming Eagle or SQN and immediately flip for a profit a short time later, the closest analogy with homes would be if you won a lottery to buy a below market house or condo and then flipped it for a profit.
It’s a little odd to tout the virtue of a free market on the back end in cases when it wasn’t present on the front end.
FWIW, I’ve never signed up for the Screaming Eagle or SQN lists, just can’t help myself from commenting.
-Al
How often is flipping a consistent option with a particular winery. Sure, if you are on the Screaming Eagle list, you have not lost any money buying and trying to flip. Is there any other winery that this applies to? Maybe SQN, but all of the others I can think of can have off years in which you are not going to recover your investment. Seems like much ado about nothing at this point.