Hey,
I’ve been steadily building my wine collection and am now looking into storage options outside my home. I cane across Domaine/Uovo and was curious if anyone here has experience with them. How has your experience been? Is their Premium service actually worth it?
Open to any thoughts or other suggestions too- thanks!
They are one of the largest. Highly professional and efficient. In/out/box fees are on the higher side, also 375ml fees. Longterm storage fees are reasonable if laying away. Just acquired by private equity, so we will see if pricing changes.
Hello, I work for Manhattan Wine Company, based in New Jersey. There is no indication so far of your geographic location. If you are in the greater NYC metro area you can visit Storage Services - Manhattan Wine Company for some basic information. As well as email Joel Rubins at jrubins@mwcwine.com for further information. There’s also numerous existing threads here on offsite wine storage so if you search for them you will likely find many opinions and personal experiences. Best of luck finding the right fit!
@S0p_h1e_S - I am a 5+ year customer with storage in both NY and DC locations. Very professional operation and I’m satisfied, though it’s not the cheapest option out there. In addition to not knowing where you’re located, you should also identify whether you’re looking for “self-service” or “full-service” storage, where self-service means you’ll deal with managing the collection in the storage location and full-service means the storage provider deals with that for you.
Be aware that Uovo has different pricing arrangements depending on the location:
NY location only offers full-service and has a yearly fee per 10 cases of storage plus additional fees for when wines come into the facility and when they are “pulled” to leave the facility. Those fees currently range from $3 (solid case of all the same wine) to $15 (mixed case) per case both in and out. There are additional charges for delivery, consolidation and other services. Consolidation is relevant as if you pull half the bottles out of a case and leave the other half behind, I believe it still counts as a full case.
The DC location (and most of the others I believe) have two options: The “Standard” option is a do-it-yourself scenario where you have to put the wines in storage and pull them out yourself. Note that in the location I’m in, these are cages that may be 6 feet up in the air and may hold 28 cases so this can be quite a bit of physical labor. The “Premier” option is full-service, meaning they store and inventory everything for you and there are no fees for wines coming in/out or any necessary consolidation, though there is a fee for the special boxes they use, which allow maximum storage in minimal space. I always pick up the wines myself, but I think delivery may also be included within a certain radius.
This is all relevant depending on how you plan to use the storage. If you’re going to throw stuff in storage and have it sit for years, the NY model is price-effective. I’ve got all my long-term Bordeaux and Italian wines there. If you’re going to regularly bring wines in and out and don’t want to deal with self-storage, the “Premier” model is great. I keep most of what I plan to drink in the next few years in DC and pick up 3-4 times a year. I just go on-line, tell them what I want, and a few days later it’s ready for pick-up. Given my collection is mostly 2-3 bottles of different wines and I have around 1,000 bottles there, the model works very well for me.
The other experience I’ve had is that if you’ve got off-site storage, you can easily find excuses to buy more wine than you might buy otherwise. You’re paying for storage in case increments, so it becomes easier to justify a purchase if you’re not “full” and there’s no additional storage costs. In addition, even if you religiously track your inventory like me, when it’s not sitting in front of you it is more of an abstract concept. Within a couple years, I ended up almost doubling the size of my collection, though this also coincided with Covid years.
In addition, note there’s a lot of other services. Uovo offers insurance options for your collection. They can transfer wines climate-controlled between Uovo locations for a fee. They run an excellent Cellar Trading retail operation that tends towards higher-end offerings. It’s quite convenient that you can purchase and have it moved directly into your storage.
One other note: A lot of people on the board here despise the Wine Owners software used to inventory the wines and place pull requests. I’m no fan of it either and so I end up duplicating the inventory in CellarTracker, which does allow me to “double check” their work but it’s a bunch of work to keep it in sync.
In my opinion strictly, there is one NY wine warehouse to avoid, unless one enjoys open-ended indemnification liability. 
I have been happy with the service associated with Marc Hanes.
I’ve enjoyed using Uovo Napa, and the pickup services are really invaluable if you do any cross-country buying, like at auction. A few nits, like, the Wine Owners UI being a bit clunky and wines taking a long time to catalog after arrival, but it all works. On the pricier side though.
I visited the facility last year in NJ. It is huge.
Based strictly on my experience with their retail shop, I strongly second checking them out.
Also worth thinking about: which inventory software each company is using – both its cross-compatibility with cellartracker, and your various options (or lack of) to access/export your inventory data.
I don’t remember the details, but I vaguely recall a recent thread here with some dealbreaker-level complaints about the software that some major storage company was using.
Also a fan. Moved from another warehouse a year ago, and delighted with service and promptness. Fees are a fraction of what I paid before.
I recently signed up with UOVO Napa for their Premier service. Great team, but the only thing that slightly bothers me is the timing it takes to catalog a wine after arrival. I’ve waited up to a full month for wines to be logged in. Other than that, it’s great not having to worry too much about shipments and pickups from the Valley. And, I also duplicate onto CT since I can’t seem to understand how to use WineOwners.