They actually have a ton of bottles like that in their warehouse that they are either not comfortable offering for sale due to quality issues, or there just isn’t profit in it. To be honest, most of those bottles are probably not particularly desirable to wine geeks like us, but who knows. No one here is going to buy cases of cheap grocery store wines. But there are plenty of good quality wines that for whatever reason don’t command much on the market. Even a good fraction of high quality domestic wines that aren’t in high demand. Would be nice if there was a way to facilitate those kinds of transactions. The “mystery case” approach that I’ve seen some mailing list retailers take might be a way to handle that.
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Selling that type of stuff as mystery cases seems to work reasonably well here too.
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How does that happen? Why would WineBid take bottles like that? Or are these the leftover dregs from more desirable consignments?
Exactly. Stuff people ship them as part of consignments that they have decided is not saleable. Either because of condition, or just not enough value to deal with.
If you send Winebid a list they’ll sometimes say they won’t take some wines because of too low value or whatever, I usually can’t be bothered to figure out which wines those are and pull them out and send them anyways. Sometimes they’ll try to sell them and sometimes they won’t. It’s weird what ppl pay for on Winebid though. I sent a case of random bastide miraflores that I bought at kl for $9/btl and someone bought the whole lot for $25/btl so I made money even with the $8 vig.
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Interesting. Makes me wonder how much they’re spending on storage.
Do they ever open-up their warehouse to walk-ins for the purpose of selling these low value wines they are storing? Seems that would be a good idea — maybe once every few months?
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If I recall correctly these are the two buckets.
NFA “Not For Auction”. Consignor sends in a list, auction house rejects certain bottles as unsuitable. Hence, NFA. Occurs prior to handing off property.
RTO “Return to Owner”. Auction house has received the physical property. During inspection a given bottle is then deemed unsuitable for auction. Hence RTO. The owner is given the option to have the bottle(s) returned to her. This typically happens at the owner’s expense (Assuming owner can’t collect locally.) If the owner says “keep it” then the auction house can destroy the property, etc.
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This is very interesting. One time I went to pickup some bottles from winebid and the (very nice) employee gave me a few extra bottles that he said were lying around. Some old vintage port, some old Riesling and some aged California Cabernet from a producer that no longer makes wine. I didn’t realize it at the time but they do probably have a lot of bottles just taking up space for various reasons
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I wonder if these loose bottles are what they pour at their semi-regular in-person “pickup parties”
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I didn’t stay but one time it was a selection of wines that were available for Buy Now
I’ve been to several of those, always fun, they put out a dozen wines or so, some nice food bites. Most of the wines I’ve tried have been good, might be imperfect in some way, like a capsule, label, or seepage, once in a while something that is hard to identify, but mostly perfectly good bottles they have around for some reason or other.
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When I’ve done as Michael mentioned above (not bothered to pull out a few low value wines when submitting a larger consignment), they always give the option of returning the non-saleable bottles to me or ‘disposing of them’. I would absolutely be fine knowing those ‘disposed of’ bottles were going to someone to drink, be it staff or whoever.
Be sure to include those bottles in your next WB consignment!
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Benchmark used to do that, or maybe still do. A room of lower priced wines thry didn’t want to list on their site, but you could browse and buy if you were therevfir a pick up.
Another explanation for lower end, lower priced wines is they could pick up a whole collection from someone managing an estate’s assets. If some bottles from a big acquisition work down to $15 from $25 or whatever, so what? Worst case if the $15 opening bid takes it is winebid makes money. Maybe 80% of the bottles from that collection that were initially set with a $25 reserve sold for that or more. Some portion of what’s left that gets knocked down to $20 and sells for that or more. Then some get knocked down to $15. You never know which will hammer at what price. That can vary week by week for any wine, depending on what eyes are looking.
I picked up bottles for $25 last year that are a steal at their release price of $55. Later, i noticed not all had sold and the rest were at $15, so snagged them. People pay well over $100 for wines that aren’t as good.
Private equity ownership may also play a role. One can only guess at how they may want to change the “brand image.” And/or optimize the business appearance/value for a sale.
A general rule of thumb is if it’s not broken why fix it. To WB’ers it wasn’t broken (of course, we do not have a window into operating expenses). If an auction has, say, jocularly, “HDH envy” then they want to be thought of as identical. A large part of it may be as simple as that. Who knows? (I think that technically it’s now New Winebid LLC since the acquisition.)
Yes, that is exactly what they do and are transparent about it at the tastings. They will open some of those that they deemed not suitable for auction. Some are ones that they buy from inventory at auction (they won’t bid against customers though).
BWG still has does have a room off the lobby with a large conference table in the middle and maybe 2 dozen-ish wines on racks around the walls available for purchase. Was just there in December to pick something up and popped in there.
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Same on Chrome, it doesn’t like something about the site.
Who still uses Firefox? 