I’ve almost totally sworn off Winebid. Maybe 50% of the bottles I’ve purchased from them have been obviously poorly stored. Admittedly, I didn’t focus exclusively on the sort of collector-interested categories; there was plenty of Friuli and Loire mixed in with Mosel and the Rhône. Some of them, especially from less collectable regions, were absolute steals I was happy to take a flyer on, and I get that someone selling Nüsserhof Lagrein might not be storing it as carefully as someone loading up on '78 Barolo. But it doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve had tired Sauzet and Dauvissat just as much tired Ronco del Gnemiz. It seems to have to do with the seller, because when I’ve purchased large tranches of a single producer that all went up the same week, that whole tranche tends to suck or be great.
And to be clear, I understand the aging curves/windows of the wines I was buying. I’ve been lucky enough to work in a lot of restaurants where I got plenty of exposure to well-stored, decades-old wines most collectors overlook, including Loire CF and Friulian whites and the like.
I haven’t purchased from Winebid in years, and I’ve resolved that if I ever do, it has to have been sourced by the seller directly from the estate. “Removed from professional wine storage facility” is no longer good enough for me.
Any better luck with the comparable-vintage wines at retailers or other auction houses? I am not sure if your results are specific to the wines or the sellers, or both.
I wish more people would swear off Winebid.
Especially those decrepit California reds.
If ironclad provenance is a concern for OP, check out Chambers St. or Benchmark who both offer guarantees in that dimension. That benefit is reflected in their prices as well.
I don’t know of another auction house anywhere that offers such detailed photos and descriptions of their wares. Great experiences buying from WineBid and I continue to be an active WineBid shopper.
Which then leads to risk-avoidance pricing issues. 
Why can people not have it both ways? ![[popcorn.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1ca9f29573458cca2424a66a50d6c1261081dd3e.gif "[popcorn.gif]"){kind=small}
Same experience here, with hundreds of bottles over 20 years. I have had maybe 5 bottles that were more advanced than I had expected based on the descriptions, but nothing obvious that Winebid would have known. But I don’t buy anything with low fills, seepage or other obvious issues.
NB if the bottle is considered to be in proper visual condition, the pictures presented on the site are representative. If there is a described issue (torn label, low shoulder, scuffed capsule etc.) then a specific picture of that bottle will be shown.
There’s risk with older bottles - from any source - and buyers ought to bake that into their bid. I’ve had bottles from own cellar show considerable variation after 20 years. Corks are natural and random in their oxygen permeability.
All I would really want from sellers like WineBid etc. is disclosure, and although I buy little from them, over only a few years, I have not noticed any unusual problems vs. any other agent. I had a tired NoRho last night (from them of all places) but I don’t attribute that to bad inspection/disclosure. Older wines always carry some risk of disappointment.
Against all this, enough people are willing to pay dearly for auctions houses with well-documented, persistent provenance issues.
Not Acker, of course. Never.
I don’t have a lot of experience with other auction houses, but yes, I have had much better results with similar wines from retailers like Chambers St, RSquared, Blacksmith, and Vine & Rare. And Winebid prices on a lot of those wines are only slightly better most of the time, certainly not enough of a difference to make up for the mixed results.
There’s always the chance it was also shipping, but it’s happened across at least four or five different shipments, all at Winebid’s recommended times, and when I was keeping a close eye on the weather. I wish it weren’t the case, but the only conclusion I’ve been able to come to is that Winebid’s provenance, especially for wines not considered blue chip, isn’t very dependable.
Looking at my records, I have had 4 bad bottles out of 6 cases of wines bought through wine bid. They were all corked which usually has nothing to do with storage.
Cycling back to this, if you feel they may have come from the same consigner and want to contact WB, it might be helpful for them to know.
WB is providing a useful service to the marketplace - one can buy the single bottle of Chinon or whatever ‘non blue chip’ that they desire, along with the rest of wines some collectors chase. Other platforms don’t care for this inventory. Generalizing, other auction houses have a much stronger preference to sell large dollar amount parcels - a case of first growth or a grand cru. It’s just as much work photographing / inspecting a $1000 bottle as a $20 one, so other firms business rationale is understandable.
The flip side of that is consumers have to exercise some awareness when buying too. Personally, I haven’t noticed any real difference between older bottles whatever the sources, but my sample set isn’t as large as others, and I’m not looking at big dollar bottles that might have some resale value. But I’m also much less likely/willing to backfill wines.
I take the animal shelter approach (I used to volunteer) - some of the prospective adoptees are there because it was truly their owners issues (eviction, military service, divorce etc.) and others are there for correctable behavior (elimination, barking, destruction) but a real fraction have an uncoachable animal issue that either has to be lived with (no kids as they are a biter, etc.) or its understood that they cannot be placed. So like that final category, one has to have some cognition that some wines sent to auction were packed up because they are indeed wrong/off/bad. They are not all selection bias free estate sales organized by a happy/sad widow getting rid of hubbys collection. A priori, one doesn’t know.
One defense against poor storage/provenance arriving as consignments is the minimum selling notional (which I thought was ~$2000 or so at WB). The random bottle (or many) found while cleaning up an uncle’s estate is unlikely to meet those table stakes, and filters out the dodgiest examples coming in by themselves.
Alex-just curious. The first line in ur post said that you had “almost totally” stopped buying from winebid. Then at the end of the post you said you hadn’t used them for several years. Are ur comments based on recent purchases or several years ago?
Thanks,
Curt
I’ve consumed several hundreds of bottles from Winebid and overall, my results were as good as retail and generally as good as bottles I store myself. It sounds like that is most people’s experience, but some have a very different experience.
How to explain it? Some possible factors:
(1) It depends on what kinds of wines you are buying. I always guessed that “good drinkers” were safer bets than “collector wines” in that there was less likelihood of fakes, bottles that had been bought and sold many times, or sellers dumping the rest of cases where the first ones were bad.
(2) How old are the wines you’re buying.
(3) What types of wines are you buying and how consistent are those in aging.
(4) Perception / confirmation bias. Maybe some people are pre-wired (or become wired) to look at their auction wines more critically or skeptically?
At the end of the day, I guess everyone should adjust based on the experiences they perceive. There are many other ways and places to buy wine if one of them doesn’t feel like it’s giving you the results you want.
Global warming is causing more stored wines to become heat damaged! ![[swearing.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8a0d3f3461d40641d294442fc2be78039bf94d19.gif "[swearing.gif]"){kind=small}
Does somebody who is familiar with selling on WineBid know how they go about verifying provenance? I’ve heard that they are not very rigorous with checking this, as I would imagine you kind of have to be if you are consigning wine that has been stored in personal homes.
My success rate with winebid has been north of 95% and the vast majority of my purchases have been wines with 10+ years of age on them. That said, I am pretty particular about bottle conditions and storage, and I won’t ship unless temps are ideal all along the route.
If I had to ball park it, for all wines that are around 10 years old or so I tend to have a 90% rate of ‘performs as expected and I’m happy’. Likely that drops to 80% or so for 20 year old wines.
We met a bunch of friends recently and there were lots of 50+ year old wines there, and many were tired, so perhaps the rate would have been 50% less than delightful (although a 1964 Villadoria Barolo was great!).
That’s a basal rate across all sources, including my own purchased from release (not 50 years though). Old wines can disappoint, bake that into bids.