What Is My Wine Worth? Free Ways to Check a Bottle
Updated
Your wine is worth what a comparable bottle actually sold for: same producer, same vintage, same bottle size, same condition, in a sale that settled recently.
What is my wine worth gets answered, nearly always, with a merchant average, and a merchant average is the wrong instrument. Wine-Searcher documents what its number is: averages come from merchant lists, "auction prices are excluded", the figure is trimmed by removing the highest and lowest 20%, and all averages "exclude sales tax". That is an ask. Nobody has agreed to pay it. WineBid, which has auctioned wine online since 1996 and holds 52 auctions a year, works from the opposite end: it has "an internal algorithm that sets reserves based on a weighted average of final auction hammer results for each item in our database". Ask and hammer are two different numbers. Start from what has been paid, then take off the fees that come out of your side.
What do you need before you can look up a price?
Six things off the bottle and two you have to remember. Producer and wine name exactly as printed, the vintage, the bottle size, how many bottles you have, whether the case is original and unopened, and the condition of fill, label, capsule and cork. Then how you acquired it, and how it has been stored.
Those last two are not padding on a form. WineBid's estimate request marks both "at least one is required", with acquisition options that run from "Purchased Direct From Winery" and "Purchased Upon Release" to "Obtained By Inheritance", and storage options from "Professional Wine Storage Facility" and "Underground Wine Cellar" down to "Passive Storage". Wine-Searcher's paid valuation asks for the same shape of information: "number of bottles or cases, size of cases, bottle sizes, specific vintages, and any condition notes."
Bottle size deserves its own warning. Wine-Searcher converts everything so that "all units and prices are converted to a 750ml equivalent", so looking up a magnum against a per-bottle average tells you almost nothing about what the magnum would fetch. Fill level is the other input that decides the number, and it is the one the salerooms grade formally. WineBid calls top shoulder "an acceptable and normal fill level for wines 15 years of age and older", and mid shoulder a sign that "ullage has dropped during the life of the wine due to easing of the cork and/or inconsistent storage conditions". Read the ullage bands and what each one signals before you decide your bottle is in average condition.
Why is the price you found not the price you would get?
Because it is an ask, built to be found, and asks sit above the level at which wine changes hands.
Wine-Searcher's methodology page is specific about what its numbers are and are not. Wine-Searcher states that it excludes auction prices from the average. Wine-Searcher trims the average by removing the highest and lowest 20% "to prevent the average being skewed by pricing errors", and "when only a small number of prices are available the median is used". It trims minimum and maximum prices too, removing the top and bottom 10%. For a wine to appear on the Most Expensive or Cheapest lists on a region page, "a wine must have at least five offers". Price changes over time sit on the Analytics tab, behind a PRO subscription.
iDealwine draws the contrast itself. Its Auction Price Estimate is "based on a unique database of more than 3 million prices registered in French auctions since 1992", is "updated weekly according to the latest results", and, in its own words, "Unlike most comparison websites, which calculate the price of a wine based on just its current market price (not necessarily the price it is sold at), the iDealwine Price Estimate® calculates an average from recent transactions at auction". One more detail matters if you are selling rather than buying: that estimate "includes the buyer's fees deducted at auction", so to reach a seller's number "it's necessary to deduct the fees".
Liv-ex has tracked fine wine since 2000 using its Mid Price, which Liv-ex describes as independent and transaction based. Its Fine Wine 50 "tracks the daily price movements of the Bordeaux First Growths", covering the ten most recent vintages of Lafite Rothschild, Margaux, Mouton Rothschild, Haut-Brion and Latour, according to Liv-ex. An index tells you the direction of the market. It is not a price you can transact at, which is why how we label a price separates an ask, a bid, a hammer, an invoice and an index rather than blending them into one figure.
Which free checks actually work?
Four, and each answers a different question. Run them in this order and you will know more than the merchant average tells you.
| Check | What it is built on | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| iDealwine Price Estimate | More than 3 million prices from French auctions since 1992, updated weekly | What a buyer pays at auction, with buyer's fees already inside the number |
| Auction house results archives | Published results of completed sales, such as the latest results Zachys posts | What comparable lots hammered |
| Free estimate request | A specialist reading your list, offered by Sotheby's, WineBid and Zachys | What a house believes it can sell your wine for |
| Wine-Searcher Cellar Calculator | Merchant offers with auction prices excluded; free accounts limited to 25 wines, PRO accounts up to 500 | What replacing the bottle would cost you |
The free estimate is the only one of the four that puts a specialist in front of your actual bottles. Sotheby's states that "Complimentary valuations are provided for each bottle or case that we believe we can sell", and asks that you "simply submit photos and information about your wine to request an estimate". WineBid promises that its "expert consignment directors will reply with a free estimate of what your wine is worth". Zachys says one of its specialists "will be in touch within 24 hours" after you use its contact form, then asks for an inventory to appraise and will help you build one if you do not have it.
Two cautions. Someone who wants the consignment writes a house estimate, and Sotheby's phrasing carries its own filter: the house offers a complimentary valuation for wine it believes it can sell, so silence is itself information. And an estimate is a range, not a promise. The buying guide Sotheby's wrote for Wine-Searcher puts it plainly: "unlike in a retail store, there is no fixed or guaranteed price for a wine sold at auction. It is sold for the highest bid during the auction, known as the hammer price."
What does a paid valuation cost, and when is it worth it?
From US$600, and it is worth it when somebody other than you has to accept the number.
Wine-Searcher prices its professional service openly. Valuations "start from US$600", pricing reports "start at US$600 plus US$120 per 1,000 products", and your list is matched against "a global database of 18M wine and spirit offers". Read what the certificate contains before you buy one. According to Wine-Searcher, it shows "the average retail price for a point in time/given day", and prices "exclude tax and help to provide an authentic 'sell' value". Wine-Searcher's own label for that figure is a sell value. It is built from retail offers on a single day, so read it as a documented, dated ask: right for an insurer, wrong for a sale.
Sotheby's separates its formal valuation work into "Valuations for Insurance Purposes", "Taxation Valuations (Inheritance, Estate, Donation, Gift and Capital Gains Tax)", "Valuations for Loan Collateral (depending on jurisdiction)", "Valuations for Collection Management Purposes" and "Estimates for Sale (Private Treaty and Auction)". Five products, because five different readers need the number to mean five different things.
Which number does an insurer or HMRC actually want?
Not the same one, and this is where free lookups stop being enough.
An insurer is buying you a replacement, so the figure that matters is what it would cost to acquire the bottle again today. A merchant ask, the thing that is wrong for a sale, is the right starting point here.
Inheritance Tax works from open market value. HMRC's Inheritance Tax Manual defines that under IHTA84/S160 as "the price it might reasonably be expected to fetch if sold in the open market at that time", and adds that "the costs incurred in making the sale are not reflected in the open market value of an asset", so the commission you would pay a saleroom does not come off the figure. GOV.UK tells executors to list the assets, then "find out or estimate the value of each on the date the person died". For items like "cars, jewellery, and paintings" it says to "work out how much you would have got if you'd sold them", adds that "you can also get a professional valuation for anything worth over £1,500", and tells you to keep "records showing how you worked out the value of assets in the estate". Whether a cellar crosses that £1,500 line is the first thing to settle, and the record of how you reached the figure matters as much as the figure.
Selling is the third case. HMRC's Capital Gains Manual states that "bottled wines and spirits are chattels (tangible moveable property) so disposals for £6,000 or less will be exempt under TCGA92/S262", and warns that bottles disposed of to the same person "may form a set", which turns on whether they are "similar and complementary", a test that "would require the wine in them to have been produced from the same vineyard in the same vintage year". A twelve-bottle case of one wine from one vintage, sold as one lot, is that fact pattern. The same manual draws the wasting-asset line: the fifty-year test "would certainly not apply to port and other fortified wines", while for fine wine which not unusually is kept... for substantial periods sometimes well in excess of 50 years HMRC would "normally contend that wine is a wasting asset". None of this is tax advice. Take advice before you rely on it.
What moves the number most?
Condition, format and provenance, and a person judges all three before your lot is priced.
Estimates are not generated from a database alone. The buying guide Sotheby's wrote for Wine-Searcher describes the range in a catalogue as "determined by experts who have inspected the wines", and tells buyers to "be very wary of any outlet where critical information about the wine's source, condition, or authenticity is withheld". That is a two-way statement. What a buyer is warned to demand is what a seller is expected to supply, which is why WineBid will not take an estimate request without storage history.
Maturity moves it too. A wine drinking now and a wine ten years short of its window are different propositions to a bidder in the same vintage, which is why we publish drink windows next to prices and keep a list of what is ready to open now. Vintage reputation moves with it: the market prices a case from Bordeaux 2015 against that vintage's record, not against the label alone, and the Bordeaux producer atlas shows which neighbouring estates the room treats as comparable.
Is your wine worth selling at all?
Often not, and the houses tell you where the floor is if you read their forms rather than their marketing.
WineBid states a "$2,500 minimum total value preferred" on its estimate request. Sotheby's offers complimentary valuations only for what it believes it can sell. Below those lines you are not in the auction market at all, whatever a merchant average says the wine lists for.
Then there is the wedge between the two sides of the room. The buyer pays the hammer plus a premium that the Sotheby's buying guide puts at "usually 15-25 percent of the hammer price", plus "any applicable sales taxes", and WineBid charges buyers "a 17% premium in addition to the final price of the wine". You pay commission out of the hammer at the other end. Our landed-cost calculator runs the buyer's half of that arithmetic, and what you will net selling your wine works the seller's half line by line.
Time is the last cost. WineBid states that it issues settlements "30 business days (4-6 weeks) after auction close". Zachys pays "the initial proceeds collected at 35 days after the sale and the remaining at 65 days". And the number that protects you, the reserve, stays private: the Sotheby's buying guide defines it as "the minimum price that the seller will accept for that lot, and is not publicly disclosed".
Stop looking your wines up one at a time
You do not need a valuation every quarter. You need to know the week your wine moves, because that is when selling, insuring or buying more of it stops being a guess.
Put the bottles you own on a watchlist and we will tell you when a comparable lot hammers, when the spread between the ask and the hammer opens up, and when a wine you hold crosses into its drinking window. The fine wine market index shows the level for the market as a whole. The alert tells you about your cellar, which is the only part of it you can act on.