Wine Condition and Provenance: The Buyer's Master Guide
Updated
Condition is what the bottle is. Provenance is where it has been. You pay for both, the catalogue guarantees neither, and the space between those two sentences is where most of the money in old wine is won or lost.
Wine condition and provenance are two separate tests applied to the same bottle, and they fail in different ways. Condition is the physical state you can inspect before you bid: fill level, cork, capsule, label, glass, and the case it travelled in. Provenance is the documented history: who owned it, where it was stored, and whether the chain from the estate to this saleroom has a hole in it. Condition records what has already happened to the wine. Provenance tells you how much of what happened you are still going to find out about. Auction houses publish condition in an abbreviated shorthand, mention provenance only when it flatters the lot, and disclaim both in the terms of sale. Tennants says it in one line: "Lots are sold as seen and with no guarantee of the condition of the contents." The buyer carries that risk. Your maximum bid is where you charge for it.
What does a condition report actually cover?
Six surfaces and one absence: fill, cork, capsule, label, glass, packaging, and everything the house chose not to look at.
The vocabulary is more precise than most buyers realise. WineBid describes labels that are "bubbled, faded, folded, loose, nicked, scuffed, soiled, stained, tissue stained, torn, worn, wrinkled", plus any label carrying writing the producer did not put there. Capsules get their own list: "chipped, corroded, cracked, missing, nicked, oxidized, scuffed, soiled, stained, torn, worn, and wrinkled". Corks get two words only: "depressed or elevated". Seepage has its own entry, which WineBid defines as "the slow escape of wine due to natural cork lifecycle or storage conditions".
Sotheby's adds the two terms that matter most for authenticity rather than condition. "Fully branded cork indicates the producer, vineyard and vintage are legible on the cork." A merely "branded cork" carries "either the producer, wine and/or vintage being legible". That is the estate's own mark on the one component a counterfeiter has to replace.
Here is how to read the common signals, and what each one stops short of proving. How to read a wine condition report takes the document apart line by line.
| What you see | What it can mean | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| A fill running ahead of the bottle's age | Heat, or a cork that has already eased | Much about the liquid. Zachys calls the level "one indicator of quality of an old wine, but not the only one" |
| A corroded or stained capsule | Seepage, the "slow escape of wine" in WineBid's phrase | Whether the loss was slow and decades old, or fast and last summer |
| A cork sitting proud of the glass | Movement. The AWRI ties heat to "leakage of wine and/or movement of cork stoppers due to thermal expansion of wine" | That the wine is cooked. Some bottles survive the same trip that ruins their neighbours |
| A bin-soiled, damp-stained label | A damp cellar, which is the condition a cork wants | Anything bad. Cellar dirt is the cheapest evidence of a real cellar |
| A bright, clean label on a fifty-year-old bottle | Careful storage, or a new label. Decanter reports that Cheval Blanc's reconditioning puts on "a fresh label and capsule" | That the bottle holds what the label claims |
| "nop", no original packaging | The case was broken up somewhere in the chain | That the wine travelled badly. Most old bottles lose their case eventually |
| A bracketed vintage, "" | Sotheby's telling you it believes the vintage rather than reads it | That the vintage is wrong. It means nobody would stake the description on it |
Sotheby's also publishes the packaging shorthand you will meet in every catalogue: owc for original wooden case, opc for original presentation case, oc for original carton, wc for wooden case, and sc for a case the auction house packed itself. Waddington's lists a further abbreviation worth knowing on sight: rc, reserve château.
What does the catalogue not tell you?
Its silences are policies, not verdicts, and they differ by house.
Sotheby's "does not indicate levels under 3 cm in the necks of the bottles inspected", so a blank fill field on a sloping-neck bottle means better than 3cm rather than unexamined. It also "does not comment on either back labels or importer labels", which removes from the record the single clearest indication of which market a bottle has passed through. Zachys "provides a fill level for all bottles older than and including the 1990 vintage", so silence on a 1995 means out of scope.
Two more defaults deserve attention because they are about provenance rather than fill. WineBid states that "stock photos may be used for bottles that have lightly depressed corks, lightly elevated corks, light capsule issues, and light label issues", which means the image you are looking at may not be the bottle you are buying. And Tennants publishes the sentence that makes the original wooden case a genuine dilemma: "It is not our policy to inspect every unopened case, however those that have been inspected may no longer have an intact lid."
Read that twice. A sealed OWC is the best packaging provenance there is, and it is also the reason nobody has looked inside. You can have the intact lid or the inspection. Not both.
What counts as good provenance?
A chain with no unexplained gaps. WineBid's definition is the working one: "The ownership history of a particular wine is called the provenance of the wine. The provenance includes information about how the wine was acquired by the current owner and under what circumstances."
Tennants tells you where to find it, and it is not the lot description: "Any notes regarding provenance can be found in the condition reports available at www.tennants.co.uk." Provenance is rarely in the headline. It sits in the report you have to click through to, or it does not exist.
Ranked by what it is worth when you resell, rather than by how it reads:
- Bought on release and never left bonded storage. One warehouse, one account, an unbroken paper trail.
- A named single-owner cellar with an inventory. The collection itself becomes the reference.
- Direct from the estate. The producer is the first and only seller of record.
- Original packaging intact. Case, tissue, banding, in Sotheby's shorthand owc or opc.
- Fully branded corks. Producer, vineyard and vintage legible on the closure.
- Nothing at all. "From a private cellar" names no cellar. That is a description of a lot, not a history.
The last one is not automatically a problem. Thin provenance on a £60 bottle is a rounding error. Thin provenance on a case of Pétrus or a mature Romanée-Conti is the whole trade, because those are the labels worth faking. Start with what wine provenance means if you want the chain broken down step by step.
Why is provenance also an authenticity question?
Because the fakes that get through inspection are the ones that arrive with a story.
Wine Spectator reported that as much as 5% of the wine sold in secondary markets could be counterfeit. That figure dates from 2007, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a current reading. The two cases that shaped how the market now behaves both turned on records rather than on tasting.
Rudy Kurniawan was sentenced on 7 August 2014 to ten years in federal prison. His method was mundane: buying "inexpensive, though old, Burgundy wines and re-labeling them with prestigious producer names and vintages". When agents searched his home they found "inexpensive Napa wines with notes indicating they would be passed off as older vintages of Bordeaux, corks, stamps, labels, and other tools involved in counterfeiting wine". What stopped him in 2008 was not a palate. He consigned Domaine Ponsot Clos Saint-Denis with "vintages ranging from 1945 through 1971", and Laurent Ponsot pointed out that the domaine "had never made a Clos Saint-Denis prior to 1982". The lots were pulled.
Hardy Rodenstock's Jefferson bottles went the same way. A 1787 Lafite sold at Christie's on 5 December 1985 for £105,000, Michael Broadbent handling the gavel and Christopher Forbes buying. Bill Koch later alleged that "the engravings were made with an electric power tool, which would not have been possible in the eighteenth century". Benjamin Wallace's 2008 book on the affair reports a tritium test and two carbon-14 tests dating the wine to around 1962.
Nobody cracked either case by looking at the wine. Both cracked when someone checked the bottle against somebody else's record. That is what provenance is for, and it is why how to spot a fake wine bottle belongs in the same reading as fill levels.
What did the storage actually do to the wine?
More than the fill level will tell you, which is why provenance carries a price at all.
The Australian Wine Research Institute's guidance is that "bottled wine be stored with the cork in contact with the wine in a cool (15-20°C), dry location", and it sets the failure points precisely: "any storage place where the temperature exceeds 25°C for long periods and 40°C for short periods can affect wine quality". Above 40°C, heat "will induce visual and sensory changes to a wine in only a matter of days". Swings are their own hazard: "thermal cycling where the temperature varies significantly between day and night should be avoided". Light does damage of a different kind, the AWRI notes, producing the volatile sulfur compounds behind a lightstruck bottle.
The scale of the problem is why buyers ask. The AWRI cites Robert Parker's 2008 buyer's guide, which suggests that "somewhere between 10 and 25% of wines sold in the USA have been damaged due to exposure to extreme heat".
A bottle cannot report its own temperature history. Provenance is the only proxy you get, and a fill level is a lagging indicator of a heat event that may already have finished its work. That is the entire argument for paying more for a documented cellar. Full treatment of the scale itself sits in ullage levels explained.
Does recorking repair provenance or break it?
It repairs the condition and puts a hole in the provenance, unless the estate did the work and documented it.
Penfolds leads the recorking pack, in Decanter's phrase, and publishes the most detail about how it works. Penfolds states that its clinics are free and accept "all cork closure Penfolds red wines, aged fifteen years or older" that have not been re-corked before, sorted by a four-zone fill measure: light green "doesn't require re-corking", green makes it optional, amber "requires re-corking", and red means the wine "is no longer certifiable and will not be re-corked". Penfolds opens and assesses the qualifying bottles, and then "the bottle is then topped up with the current vintage of that wine, arresting any further deterioration due to leakage or low levels". The bottle leaves with "a certification label on the back of the bottle signed by a winemaker".
Bordeaux is stricter, and getting stricter. Cheval Blanc still recorks for customers on a limited basis. In one case Decanter documented, the château fitted "a fresh label and capsule, adding a traceability sticker and engraving the glass as anti-fraud measures". Lafite has withdrawn its customer service altogether. Eric Kohler's reasoning is the sentence to remember before you buy any reconditioned bottle: "We wish to protect the identity of our wines as originally bottled and their authenticity, but we can't give a fresh authentication once the bottle has been sold and left the estate." When Lafite does recondition in-house, it recorks "with the vintage on the cork and a certification to say that it's been reconditioned at the châ".
Undocumented reconditioning is the other case entirely. Jamie Ritchie, head of global wine at Sotheby's, puts it plainly: "If it cannot be verified, there is a missing link in the provenance." The wine authenticator Maureen Downey describes counterfeiters relying on "special bottlings" like recorked bottles, which reputable resellers then often reject "as even less reliable".
So a perfect fill on a fifty-year-old bottle is not automatically the best lot in the room. It is either exceptional storage or an intervention, and only the paperwork separates the two. Recorked and reconditioned bottles goes through the estate programmes one by one.
What does condition do to the price?
It moves the estimate before the sale and the hammer during it, and no auction house publishes the size of the adjustment. That is the number we track.
Set the condition discount against the market index, which tracks the same wines undifferentiated by condition, and the adjustment becomes visible as a gap rather than a feeling. The regional split matters too, because the two markets do not price damage the same way. Bordeaux trades in depth, with published shoulder bands and enough matched lots to see the discount; Burgundy trades thin, in centimetres, and on names rather than grades. The Bordeaux and Burgundy producer atlases show which estates have enough secondary-market volume for a condition discount to be measurable at all. A case of Bordeaux 1982 is the standard test of the whole scale, old enough for the grades to bite and famous enough to be worth faking.
One line that does not move with condition: the fee stack. Premium, VAT, duty and carriage all apply to the hammer whether the capsule is perfect or corroded, which is why a condition discount is worth less than it looks once you run it through the landed-cost calculator. Work the whole stack into your maximum before you bid, not after.
How do you protect the provenance of what you already own?
By treating your own cellar as a record that a future buyer will audit.
Keep the wine in bonded storage if you can, on one account, and resist moving it. Every transfer is a temperature exposure and a line in the history that somebody will later ask about. Keep purchase invoices with the lot rather than in a drawer. Leave original cases sealed, accepting the trade-off Tennants describes: an intact lid is worth more than a look inside. Avoid summer movements, given the AWRI's short-period limit of 40°C. And do not clean labels. Cellar soil reads as authenticity, and a stripped label reads as a question.
Two disclaimers should shape how you handle a bottle on arrival. Waddington's warns that "corks over 20 years old begin to lose their elasticity and levels can change between cataloguing and sale", that "old corks have also been known to fail during or after shipment", and that "under no circumstances can an adjustment of price or credit be made after delivery except under the terms of the warranty stated in the Conditions of Sale". Tennants is blunter: "Tennants cannot accept responsibility at any point for failed corks, and no refunds will be given."
Inspect on delivery, and photograph what you receive before you move it anywhere.
Bid on the condition-adjusted price, not the headline one
The useful number is not what a wine trades at. It is what your bottle, at its fill level, with its history, in its case, trades at. Every wine here carries condition-adjusted price history, so you can see what a clean lot fetched, what the same wine and vintage fetched a grade down, and whether that gap is widening or closing.
Our weekly note goes to buyers who want that gap before the sale rather than after it: the lots where the condition is normal for the age but priced as though it were not, and the lots whose provenance is thinner than the estimate assumes. Join it, and stop paying clean-bottle money for a bottle nobody inspected.