I notice on Winbid that the prices on a lot of wine keeps going down…does anyone know how they determine prices? For example - in Jan of 2022 SQN Distenta I was going for $439…now it’s down to $200/bottle. I was curious if they like ask the consigner if they can lower it? I also found it interesting they have the same price across all lots.
Generally curious about the platform. Bought a few bottles from there no problems at all…
The default is to set the opening price based on past sales, keep it for 4 weeks, and then decrease one increment until sold. The consignor can choose to impose their own price but after a certain period unsold it will revert back to WB’s algorithm. It doesn’t seem to be worth keeping an eye on something and pressing your luck on a price cut very often. Usually one or two increments is enough to move it. I’ve seldom had any consignment take more than a few weeks to sell in full.
I buy from Winebid on a regular basis and have for years. Never a problem. Never a bad bottle. Great source to backfill, find good wines at below release pricing.
How do they define an “increment”?
Depends on the price of the item, just look at the bid increment on the listing.
They dont lower by bid increment, those are here:
Id say they drop the opening price by 5-10% give or take, so may $5 ON A $50 bottle or $10 on a $100 or $200 bottle.
I agree with Keith, i dont wait for reductions, if i want a wine at the price then i bid. Its generally lower than retail, and they appear to be good about following demand and lowering prices over time, as the SQN price trend indicates.
I’ve just bought a bunch of wine from WB and it’s a drum roll as I drink them. All of mine has been red burg, mostly btw 2005-2015.
Have you been pretty careful looking at the notes of how (supposedly) the owner stored it? How sketchy do you think is ‘protected passive shortage’?
I have some 75 bottles that I’ll be chipping away at. Fingers crossed!
Personally, I wouldn’t bid on a protected passive storage bottle. Then again it’s not like winebid really tries very hard to verify provenance so we probably are drinking and enjoying poorly stored bottles and not thinking much of it.
I do buy from Winebid somewhat regularly, at least over the last 5-7 years. Great web-site and no issues receiving what I won in auction. Have definitely had some bottles that were not sound, but these have been the minority. I just bake the variability it into my pricing and risk/reward calcs now as I doubt there is much diligence done.
How familiar are you with the regions and the vintages? Most of what I buy I have experience with so I pretty much know what I am getting into.
Some of the terroirs Im trying for the first time. Have a pretty good handle on vintages.
I have been buying at WineBid pretty consistently since 2008 and overall it has been an amazing source for backfilling and bargain hunting. I’m strict about only buying bottles with excellent ullage and that approach as served me well as the vast, vast majority of wines sourced there have been in great shape, including bottles 40-50 years old. Ullage isn’t a perfect barometer but a mistreated bottle with any significant age will usually reveal its history with its fill.
Reserve prices for the wines I look for are high these days — but that’s the game, not the player — so bargain hunting isn’t as easy as it used to be, but they still have a huge selection of stuff hard to find anywhere else. Being able to buy single bottles at a time is also such a perk of WineBid compared to most auction sites, which bundle things into 6 and 12 bottle lots all too often.
In what ways does poor storage cause low ullage?
Not an attack, honest question. I always thought of it the other way — low ullage leads to accelerating oxidation of the wine. Not that it’s something which was caused by and reveals poor storage.
It doesn’t seem to me that ullage reveals the bottle condition except in very old bottles. I guess if it were low in a younger bottle that would be a bad sign, but in 20 years on winebid, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a wine under 25 years old have any sort of notable lower ullage. Or any bottles in my own storage either.
I disagree. Ive been buying from WineBid regularly for years now and often purchase bottles from passive storage. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten clearly flawed wines, but it’s definitely not any greater than other auction houses that claim 'perfect provenance '.
It all depends on your risk tolerance of course, but if the price is right, passive storage bottles don’t scare me at all. If i was a betting man…id say your wines will be just fine @PaulN 
I am very wary of passive storage and will seldom touch them, especially on older wine where Americans spent several decades assuming a wine cellar just meant a wine had to be in the basement and not that the basement had to be, you know, cool. But if it’s something you really want you can email WB and they are often able to supply some information like the general location. Passive storage in Wisconsin is a different proposition from passive storage in Georgia.
Oh interesting! I didnt realize that, but it makes sense given WineBid has pretty great customer service IMHO.
Good tip for sure on bottles that are more questionable.
Richard Gold addresses this in his book “How and Why To Build a Wine Cellar.” Assuming less than a hermetic cork seal (otherwise, how does ullage occur?), he sees greater fluctuations in temperature and higher temperatures as increasing the rate of evaporation and fluid loss.
I consider a good fill reassuring. More ullage than I observe with bottles I’ve personally stored for similar lengths of time is a warning, even if there are no signs of seepage noted.
It’s far from a perfect correlation. A mid-shoulder fill when my own bottles are still in the neck is likely to be advanced for age, and at higher risk of being oxidized or faded. Nevertheless, I’ve had more mid-shoulder winners than losers, and even an occasional low-shoulder winner. Too small a sample size, though, for me to place a big bet on a bottle with more ullage than expected.
Aside from the question of ullage, I think type of wine matters too. I’m buying Bordeaux, which is probably one of the more durable categories. Champagne, OTOH, is at the fragile end of the spectrum.
Honestly, it’s probably just my own personal prejudice, which certainly shouldn’t outweigh your many (judging by your TNs of aged wines) first-hand experiences. However, my thinking process was: if they can’t even be bothered to lie to Winebid about how they stored it, then they probably really treated it like crap.
FWIW, I’m not a huge believer in absolutely needing to have climate-controlled storage for everything, especially for short- to mid-term consumption. However, for 20+ year old wines I do suspect that the importance of climate control comes to the fore, although maybe not as significantly as we tend to assume.
Here’s the foolish guy (me!) who didn’t realize until about 40 bottles in that they even had those littie storage notes on Winebid when you click through on the bottle to see more detail! My friends call me Ricardo Retardo.
Out of my ~80 bottles (ALL red Burg) from Winebid, some 20 of them are from ‘protected’ (protected from what? Mice?) passive storage. A couple of you seem to think this is devastating and a couple seek to think it’s no issue whatsoever. I wonder if the ‘nothing to see here folks’ voices consider that several of these bottles are from 1999-2002, quite a bit of time, if the average temp in that ‘storage’ place has been around 64-66 degrees?
Will be drinking some of these over the coming weeks and will report back to base.
You really don’t know where the wine has been stored, and neither does Winebid. It theoretically could have sat anywhere and then the last week put into a temp controlled wine cabinet.
And yet, over many hundreds of bottles I’ve bought and opened, the success rate has been roughly the same as bottles I’ve stored myself and older bottles I bought from retail.
Of course, it depends on what kinds of wines you’re buying. I mostly buy “fun drinkers” at low and mid price. I don’t think the owners of those bottles were closely tracking flaw rates and deliberately pawning off their riskiest bottles and so forth.