Wine is a perishable thing, irrespective of its reputation or price. If you’re buying it to drink, or as an investment you will sell later for someone else to drink, it’s essential to realise that as a drink, wine is only as good as the way it has been kept or transported.
A huge and unknown proportion of the wines sold through the various secondary market channels in Australia – by auction, through clubs, private cellars and commercial cellaring operations – are absolutely stuffed, to phrase it as politely as possible. And most auction houses don’t ask questions. Changes in storage temperature, daily or seasonal, will diminish a bottle of wine more quickly than you can imagine.
A good cellar is not an option – it’s essential if you wish to keep wine for any length of time. Too much wine on the secondary market has either been kept under the bed, under the staircase or worse. And you don’t realise this until you open it.
By and large, unless you have a personal relationship with the seller or an agent representing the seller, buying wine on the secondary market is a matter of caveat emptor, or buyer beware. Because the issue of provenance is indeed the sleeping volcano beneath the secondary wine market.
I used to buy wines at auction all the time, only to find a shocking percentage were either unrepresentative of their label or just totally unfit to drink. By and large, poor cellaring was the cause. I’ve nearly lost a load of friends by pointing out the inadequacies of their special, but poorly cellared, wines once they’ve done me the honour of opening them in my company.
Sadly, perhaps, many of the wines traded on the secondary market will never actually be opened until well after their drinking peak has passed, but that’s the nature of collecting a perishable product that will inevitably become scarcer as bottles are opened or, dare I say it, broken.
Around twenty years ago I reported that ‘Better-connected customers from virtually all Australia’s auction houses are warned from buying certain lots, or have else been told after discovering that a batch tasted very prematurely aged, that ‘Oh yes, we weren’t too sure about that lot’. While credits are then typically given, it’s interesting to contemplate the retrospective nature of much of this advice.’
In other words, it’s easy to pay top dollar for wines that secondary market operators know full well are in no condition for sale, or just don’t care. Although you should never, ever buy a bottle of wine that appears to have leaked from its bottle, it can be very difficult tell from looking at most bottles of badly cellared wine they are useless to drink; you only find out by opening them. Sooner or later this issue will come home to roost. My advice has always been not to spend up big on back-vintage wine unless you have the cellaring history set in cement, or else can accept the risk.
As far as is humanly possible, we want to de-risk this process for every buyer of our Old and Rare wines. That’s why at we have created our one-of-a-kind Oliver’s Wines Provenance Classification. It’s a means by which we can verify and share our very own, independent and expert assessment of each for each bottle we list for sale, benefiting all potential buyers of our Old and Rare wines.
The photographs we show for our old bottles are of those exact same bottles. If we find any additional provenance-related information, we publish it with the bottle to the being sold. Our team of expert cellar managers sources only from validated top cellars. We refuse to list bottles whose contents are obviously flawed unless they are of exceptional historic importance and are only being traded as collectors’ pieces. And in these cases we will of course describe all the issues we find.
We hope that through the integrity and honesty behind our approach and the trust we hope to build in the marketplace, Oliver’s Wines can take a leadership position in the sale of Old and Rare wines in Australia.
To get an idea of what we’re doing, take a look at how we’re presenting this exceptional bottle of perfectly cellared Penfolds Grange. It’s a unique wine with a great story which you can view here.
