Which one?
A morbid topic and more appropriate to winter than spring.
I say leave it to the court: there are plenty of lawyers who would love to represent the bar.
I am an estate lawyer. I have yet to handle an estate with a wine collection. I suspect the family usually drinks it up without telling me.
Phil Jones
I thought the entire purpose of
A) Cellaring wine, and
B) Having heirs
was so that
C) The heirs [and/or the heirs’ heirs and/or the heirs’ heirs’ heirs] could DRINK the dadgum wine.
Why in the name of God almighty would you want to sell it?
I wish everyone would do this. I can’t tell you how many clients I had who had inherited a cellar. Somehow they found their way to an auction house, oftentimes, as a referral to us from a different department in our auction house. Most times, the heirs were just clueless and had no idea how to proceed.
Great thread- and these days an important consideration.
When I started appraising cellars in the late 90s, there were very few options for selling collections. Plus there was not a whole lot of interest. That has changed dramatically. As everyone on this board knows, prices have skyrocketed, there is a highly efficient secondary market and a lot more people are collecting wine. I have done appraisals on a couple of estates where the value of an old wine collection was second only to the house.
True story- a few years ago I did an appraisal and brokering referral for a divorce case. The party in possession of the home secured court approval to sell the collection. Said party first went searching online and found an operation out in California- one of those “we will do all the work for you” kind of operations. The quote was $40,000.
Luckily, a second opinion was sought and I was referred by a friend of the party. I carved out two parcels which were sold to secondary retailers in states where it is legal to purchase wine from individuals, and the rest was sent to an auction house- again in an entirely legal manner- that was particularly well suited to sell the types of wines being offered.
Final result- net cash in hand to client- was just over $90,000, and my total appraisal fees were under $3,000.
With so many people out there who find themselves with collections they do not know how to get rid of, there are an increasing number of operations that are fully ready to take advantage. And it is not always a ridiculously lowball offer. Another common trick is to get the owner of the collection to do a delivery on demand consignment arrangement. The broker/retailer puts a list out to clients and/or on winesearcher, collects cash, and then pays the owner for whatever is sold and takes delivery- essentially cherry picking the collection and taking no risk whatsoever. That too can be very costly to the owner of the cellar in the form of unsold bottles that are now harder to sell because there are no cherries to offer a broker or retailer in selling a collection as a whole unit.
The other issue you can run into is getting involved in transactions that are technically illegal- person to person sales etc. If anything goes wrong, you are stuck. Prosecution is unlikely, but you could lose the wine- either to seizure or to the possession of someone who entered into the transaction with ill intent and knows that there are no legal grounds to force payment.
This may sound paranoid- but I have seen it. And considering how much an old cellar can be worth- it never hurts to be a little paranoid, plus it is essential to plan ahead in case of the worst.
Final note- from a more general personal experience- if you know your kids do not want the cellar, the best thing you can do is make arrangements where they do not have to bother with it. I have not seen it much with wine- but certainly with quilts, furnishings and other collectibles; if you just leave it to uninterested heirs to “sort out”, the chances if it going in the trash bin or getting sold for a fraction of its value is very, very high.
Ugh. If wine becomes a material portion of what you leave to your kids then you’ve planned badly.
Yeah If it’s a bunch of daily drinkers 
Nope. All of it.
Most fellow wine collectors give me a strange look when I tell them I am drastically slowing my purchases now that I am almost 45 and will stop buying cellar-worthy wines entirely in 2-3 years.
My decision is based largely on 20 years experience appraising wine collections as a side job. The more wine becomes a collectible than something to drink- the more I think we will see people leaving behind some pretty serious cellars.
My wife enjoys wine but is as happy drinking a house Bourgogne rouge or Oregon Pinot as an upper level Red Burgundy. One of my two daughters is getting into wine and the other is less interested. Anyway, a while ago I printed out an inventory list and used different color highlighters to categorize the wines into different levels of value they might have at secondary retail or auction…those less than 100 dolllars a bottle that they would probably drink without hesitation, those in the $100-250 range, those in the $250-500 range, those in the $500-1,000 range, and those wines over $1,000 in value. I placed the list with my other documents for my heirs such as life insurance policy, deeds, etc. Since I am not buying much anymore in the way of new vintages, although the list will not remain completely accurate as wines are consumed or a few added here and there and of course as the values rise, it should remain fairly useful and a darn site better than nothing
My cellar is almost all Burgundy, and I do not expect my wife or daughters to know enough about the region and producers to know whether they are grabbing an everyday wine or something pretty damn special off the shelf on pizza night. I don’t care if they sell or drink and enjoy the wines, but I wanted them to decide for themselves whether it is worth it to them to drink those Rousseau Chambertins vs. selling them for $1,500-2,500 per bottle. I also included the name of a wine advisor who could, for a small percentage fee, sell the wines at different auctions or on consignment where they would bring in the best return. Should I go first, I would predict that my wife, and then my daughters, would probably keep and drink the domestic pinots and perhaps some of the premier crus, but I think they would choose to sell any wines that were worth a few hundred dollars or more. If I am lucky enough to consume those special bottles myself before my demise, that would be great.
This is pretty much a useless chicken-sh*t kind of comment. I am sure that there are a number of people on this board with wine collections worth between $50,000 and $500,000, in other words, a significant sum of money. It does not become a less significant sum of money if your other net worth is $500,000, $5,000,000 or $50,000,000. You still want to see it benefit your heirs.
I feel like my kids will be able to figure out what to do with the crap I’ve collected over the course of my life whether or not I leave them detailed instructions. And if you leave them $50m in cash I don’t think they will be particularly concerned with $500k of wine.
My wife and 3 kids all like wine. The kids get all of of the wine from their respective birth years, '96, '98, and '01. Before my heart surgery 2+ years ago, I put a link to the cellar tracker app and TCWC auction site on my wife’s PC. They can figure it out from there…
Howard, I think zachys/HDH might be the best option locally at the moment I think, but I have not called the other local possibilities to inquire. I know Schneiders buys cellars as does Wide World, but I am not sure whether they would be interested in mine.
Whichever one goes best with a Jets SB win and a Mets WS win.
Timely thread as this has been on my mind a lot lately. Having bought more wine than it looks like I will drink with my current consumption rates. My wife was actually very worried about having a large cellar to deal with if something should happen to me. My kids are still too young to know if they will be interested in wine in the way I have been.
So for me the decision was to divest a large chunk of my cellar. This was a difficult decision for me, to be honest, but I can put the funds to use for my family and myself now. I’ll also still have enough wine to suit my needs. And it shows my wife the process to divest further wine in the (hopefully) distant future on my demise.
John
I have one bottle of Wine for Dummies Cabernet Sauvignon. I’ll set it aside for you.
Interesting color, thanks for sharing.
I just think it would be helpful for the family left behind, assuming that they drink wine and are not as wine savvy as you are and probably won’t really know which bottles are for easy drinking and which are very valuable and perhaps worth more to them as cash and less as an upper level drinking experience, to be offered some guidance in that department. If they do not drink wine, they will just sell the whole lot. If they are very knowledgeable wine drinkers, they may already know. Just as you would probably let someone know that the glass bowl on the cabinet is a $30,000 Chihuly and not just a bowl to give to Goodwill.