You've inherited 400 bottles of wine. Now what?
We've just inherited 400 bottles of wine.
Well. The royal we.
One of our clients has taken ownership of a rather large cellar, which sounds fabulous right up until you're standing among 400 dusty bottles thinking: what on earth have I actually got here?
Somewhere down there could be something extraordinary. Something that should have been drunk in 1997. Something worth a small fortune. Or quite possibly a great deal of perfectly nice claret, collected by someone who knew exactly what he liked.
There's no inventory. Nobody knows. Which is rather the fun of it.
It's also a surprisingly common situation. Cellars get inherited, houses get bought with them, collections get split in divorces and downsizings. And almost everyone's first instinct is to start pulling bottles out to have a look. Here's what we'd do instead.
First: don't move anything
It's tempting to start carrying boxes upstairs. Don't, yet.
With wine, where it's been and how it's been kept matters almost as much as what it is. A buyer or valuer will want to know about the conditions, and a bottle that's been sitting undisturbed at a steady temperature for twenty years is worth more than the same bottle that's just been rattled across London in the back of a car.
So before anything moves:
Photograph everything where it sits: racks, cases, labels, any paperwork or old receipts.
Note the conditions. Is the cellar cool and steady? Damp or dry? Any obvious leaks or heat sources?
Look for paperwork. Original invoices, merchant letters and case markings all help prove where the wine came from.
Keep original wooden cases intact if there are any. They can add value on their own.
Then: call a specialist
The answer to "who do I call?" is a wine specialist, not a friend who knows a bit about Bordeaux.
The major auction houses, including Christie's and Sotheby's, have wine departments that will assess a private collection, as do several established London wine merchants. A good specialist will walk the cellar, pick out the bottles worth closer inspection, and give you a sense of what you're dealing with long before anyone counts all 400.
Worth knowing: a valuation for insurance and a valuation for selling are different numbers, so be clear about which you need. And if the cellar has come to you through an estate, the executors may need a formal valuation for probate. That's a conversation for the solicitor handling it.
Then decide, bottle by bottle
The good news is that it doesn't need to be one decision. Most inherited cellars end up split several ways:
Drink. Anything that's ready now, or past its best, should be opened and enjoyed. Some wine is only valuable if somebody drinks it.
Keep. The bottles you love, or that will get better, deserve proper storage and a proper list.
Sell. Through auction or a merchant. Ask about commission, estimates, reserves, insurance and collection before you agree anything.
Store professionally. For anything valuable you're keeping, specialist storage is usually safer than a domestic cellar, and some of it can be held in bond.
Give away. The bottle from someone's birth year, or the one that has a story attached, often means more as a present than it would ever fetch at auction.
The bit nobody tells you
If you do keep a cellar, catalogue it. Bottle, vintage, quantity, where it is and when it should be drunk. The whole point of owning good wine is knowing what you've got when dinner happens. A cellar nobody can navigate is just a very expensive cupboard.
What we're doing next
For our 400 bottles, step one is finding the right specialist to go through the cellar properly. Then comes the decision list: what should be drunk, kept, sold, moved, given away, or perhaps opened immediately in celebration of surviving the inventory.
The specialist values the wine. Our job, as part of looking after the homes and estates of the people we work with, is making sure the whole thing actually gets finished: the appointments, the collections, the storage, the insurance, and the list everyone can find afterwards.
We'll report back. Hopefully with good news about 1990.
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