I’m curious how experienced auction buyers approach this.
A current example is 1995 Château Troplong-Mondot on WineBid at a $115 minimum bid. The 17% buyer’s premium takes it to $134.55 before tax and shipping. The bottle also has a light capsule issue and base-neck fill. Recent sales of the same wine and vintage have mostly been around $115–$135 hammer.
For mature Bordeaux, do you work backwards from a hard all-in price, or start with recent auction results and then apply a discount for condition?
And once you have a maximum bid, do you enter it early and leave it, or adjust near the close? I’m especially interested in how much weight you give a base-neck fill on a 30-year-old bottle.
Well, each to their own. This is my position anyway!
Obviously, provenance is key, but today with online auctions it’s difficult, nigh impossible, to obtain. So I look closely at the bottle, level and label, looking for signs of humidity (good) or heat (bad), and I avoid low levels. The mouldier the label, the higher the level, the more I’m interested. Then when I’m not sure about a wine, I check recent CT reviews: I don’t attach that much importance to them unless I know of the taster, but it does at least give you a rough idea. If after all that I’m still keen, I just ask myself what I would be prepared to pay, which would not make me feel silly for having done so if I win, and bid my maximum accordingly. I never increase after the first bid, because there will always be other bottles on sale in the future.
I’m not a massive fan of Troplong anyway, but even if I was, I think I would steer clear of this one - recent CT impressions go from 75 to 93! The minimum bid of $115 would put me off.
Thanks, Julian. The rule of setting a maximum once and never raising it is especially helpful. Your point about fill level and signs of heat also makes me more cautious about this bottle.
For a 30-year-old Bordeaux with a base-neck fill, would you treat that as acceptable if the rest of the bottle looked sound, or would you usually pass?
This is a tough one to generalize about! If I knew the wine really well, loved it in the vintage, never had any problems, then yes, I’d go for it, otherwise I’d pass. Another bottle will be on offer soon enough
Lots to cover, and it’s great that you’re absolutely aware of buyers premium, tax and shipping. Some auction buyers aren’t, and by the time they discover these extra charges, it’s too late.
Base neck on 30yo wine? It’s ok. Higher better of course, but fills are often not uniform in the first place, so current position is not always a reliable guide to level of evaporation.
Knowing recent sale prices is a good measure of ‘market’, but it’s good also to focus on what it’s worth specifically to you. FWIW I never went to an auction feeling I needed to buy anything. I’d price up far more than I’d ever buy, looking for interesting (to me) lots, that I might be happy buying ‘at the right price’. This leans into the nature of auction sales, that prices aren’t a uniform % of supposed market value. I’ve seen stuff hammered well in excess of retail pricing, with fees on top of that. I’ve also seen (and bought) lots at a tiny fraction of retail price (e.g. 20% of retail). Spreading your interest can raise your chances of hitting a bargain, and working the fringes of the market (e.g. outside the big names wineries and regions) can result in some super buys.
For that bottle, yes that’s a reasonable assumption - look for TS, in neck etc. descriptions of what’s been sold to refine your knowledge of the market, but assumptions may need to be made.
Being at the auction in person is always best. For reasons. That might be last minute additions, corrections, seeing the colour, or even seeing what’s happening in the room. There are some dodgy shenanigans for sure.
Outside of that, I’m a fire and forget. Set a hard max as an absentee bid, and check the hammer price after the event.
I know you are trying to save money, but buying random older wines at auction is risky, and a good percentage are likely to fail. Provenance is absolutely key: storage and the way the wine was originally transported can have an enormous effect on the final bottle.
My own experience has made me especially cautious. I am embarrassed to say that I started collecting in 1982 and, for the first five years, I kept my wines in my Manhattan apartment with no cooling whatsoever. That was how it was in those days, when we knew absolutely nothing about proper storage. Wines were often shipped without refrigeration and could sit on the docks in the heat.
I remember one Memorial Day weekend when some 1990 Rhône wines essentially cooked, leaving collectors wondering why bottles with such strong scores tasted like hell. Experiences like that are a reminder that a wine’s history matters just as much as its reputation.
The Graham Lyons cellar was a good example of excellent provenance. I bought a number of wines from it, and with one exception—a corked bottle—they have been incredible. You will pay significantly more for wines with that kind of provenance, but you are much more likely to be happy with the bottles.
If you buy at auction, I would stick to the major houses and, where possible, look for wines from a certified owner or collection with a documented history of careful purchasing and storage. I have made exceptions, but that is generally how I buy. That said, I buy very little at auction now, because I have been burned even there. Increasingly, I prefer trusted European merchants who know what they are doing.
I like Julian’s advice about soiled labels. That usually goes hand in hand with little or no ullage, but I would also check the other details of the bottle and its history before buying.
Thanks, Julian, Ian and Mark. This is exactly the distinction I was trying to understand. A base-neck fill by itself may be acceptable at this age, but the capsule and storage history matter, and a recent hammer price says little about the condition of this particular bottle.
I’ll treat the all-in figure as a starting point, then set a firm maximum that reflects those risks—or pass when the opening bid already exceeds it. I also appreciate the point about looking beyond the obvious labels rather than feeling obliged to buy any particular lot.
A follow-up example that helped me apply the distinction you all made: when I checked on 30 September, WineBid listed two 1990 Lynch-Bages bottles at the same $320 minimum. With the listed 17% premium, each came to $374.40 before tax, delivery and any other charges.
Item 10910774 noted light capsule and label issues; item 10910779 noted a light capsule issue. Both mentioned GSN storage. These figures were checked on 30 September, not live quotes.
My takeaway is that the arithmetic produces a tie, not a verdict on the bottles. Present storage doesn’t tell us the earlier transport/storage history, and the shorter condition note doesn’t necessarily make the second bottle better. I’d want to check the exact photos, fill and any seepage, then ask about the earlier history before setting a ceiling.
For transparency, I’m building CorkAlpha, an auction-cost worksheet, and I’ve kept those unknowns explicit in its worked examples. Is there another specific question you’d put to the house for this pair? If anyone wants to work through a different mature-Bordeaux lot, feel free to share its public link here; I’m happy to help lay out the costs and unanswered questions.
I look at Wine Searcher low and calculate what bid would result in that number after adding the buyer’s premium and any difference in tax and shipping between retail and auction. I then multiply that by some number between 0.75 and 0.9, depending on how much I want it and the dollar savings.
If I can’t find the wine available at a reputable store on Wine Searcher, I look at the Wine Market Journal data in Cellar Tracker and decide whether those numbers are in my comfort zone. Totally a vibe thing.
My max bid is not influenced by bottle condition. If the fill is below expectations for age, if there is any suggestion of seepage, or if there isn’t at least some minimally informative reference to cool storage, I simply won’t bid. Label condition doesn’t influence me.
Celebrity collector status doesn’t influence me, even though the provenance risk is presumably lower. Which means I never win any bottles from the cellars of renowned collectors.
Price aside, when buying older Bordeaux (or any wine) my number one criterion is the ullage. Regardless of the pedigree of the auction house, as long as they have pictures, I’ve had tremendous luck through the years backfilling 80s Bordeaux buying only as long as the fill was at least baseneck, preferably well into the neck.
Ullage won’t tell you everything but i think it is very hard to poorly store a wine for 40 years and still have a perfect fill.
When I am interested in a lot at an auction, I like to make the 1st opening bid . Once in a while no one else bids and you get the wine for a lower price. Not that often mind you but it does happen.
Also I figure what my max bid is. I calculate this based on the all in cost (hammer price + buyers commission + GST). In NZ this works out to be about 21% on top of the hammer price.
I only ever rebid in the last 2-3 minutes of the auction. I prefer not to reveal my upper price limits to other bidders by submitting a max bid earlier on. If it is a competitive bid situation with multiple bidders, you are effectively allowing other bidders get an insight into your price limit by putting in a max bid. The less information you share the better in my experience.
I am very cautious about bidding on older wines, too many bad experiences. Very few folks have had temp controlled storage for 30+ years and so you are hostage to the risk of poor storage conditions in many older lots.
Like others have said fill level is a good proxy but so is colour (but this is not possible to assess properly without seeing the bottles in person).
There are always more wines coming into the auction market so be patient and try not to overbid.
Thanks, David, Pat and Brodie — these are helpful distinctions.
David, your condition filter corrects how I framed the original question: first decide whether the bottle is acceptable at all, then work out a price. A cheaper bid doesn’t resolve seepage or an unconvincing storage history. Comparing retail and auction after accounting for the different tax and delivery costs also makes much more sense than comparing sticker prices.
Pat, thanks for sharing your experience with the 80s bottles. I’ll pay closer attention to the actual fill in the photos, while keeping Mark’s point about the earlier storage and transport history in mind.
Brodie and David, it’s useful to hear the different approaches to timing. The common thread I’m taking away is to settle the all-in ceiling beforehand and be willing to lose the lot. That seems the most useful discipline for someone starting out.
Agree, any wine that looks brown or faded would be an immediate no-bid.
In practice, for red wines in green bottles, it is difficult to assess color differences from photos unless the change is dramatic. In my experience (and I am likely looking at fewer >40 yo bottles than you), ullage and signs of seepage are almost always the disqualifying factors.
How does one choose a purchase based upon a largely unknowable criterion? If I’ve had a 1928 Calon Segur that displayed an almost purple color, yeah, I’ll know well-preserved bottles from the same vintage might be drinkable. But to have a clue as to its storage, ullage is the best clue I know of, along with the label – and the label could be new.