A few months ago I discovered the concept of wine auctions for myself, introduced to by some friends. Most of them are only in contact to me via the internet, on apps such as Discord and other social media. I saw how some of them were buying some high class wines for prices that were often way below the market price. I knew that some auctions offered prices that were simply impressively cheap, yet it took one faitful evening with a friend who I just met, for me to get involved in auctions myself. We had a wine tasting, nothing out of the ordinary, just some really great wines, like the Borgogno Barolo Riserva 1971 and the Pio Cesare Barolo Ornato 2017. Two impressive wines, the first of which was also bought on auction. The Borgogno Riserva was the wine which pushed me to actually go ahead and try out buying wines at those ominous events, hearing that my friend bought a bundle of three bottles for 150€, with all of them having a heavily damaged label, was simply amazing, when I considered that usually one bottle costs just as much, as long as the label is intact.

I remember the first thing I bought was a bottle of Yquem no. 10 by Chateau Yquem, for about 100€ including shipping and fees, which are a common site, usually between 10% and 20%. The bottle would have cost me more than 200€ otherwise. I was amazed, so I bought more, a champagne and some old sweet wines, which tend to not gain much attention at all in the current state of this industry. And recently I bought this:

Weingut Tement – Weissburgunder 2005

The lot consisted of 6 bottles, and it cost me 18€ to claim, 3€ per bottle. Ridiculous if you think about it. Nowadays the same, or atleast a similar wine by Tement is sold as Ton & Mergel and costs about 17-18€, the same as I forked out for 6 bottles of the same wine, albeit much older. I bought the Weissburgunder solely for the reason of having an experiment, a grape that isn’t necessarily meant to be aged anyway, and in the style of a basic estate bottling. How does something like that age? How can it hold up? I would be able to answer all these things today, if the wines had arrived the way that I ordered them, at all.

Instead when I opened my box I was greeted by 6 green-ish shimmering bottles of Sauvignon Blanc Steirische Klassik by the same winery, which was quite surprising to me. I wasn’t mad or disappointed, I didn’t care really, I would have even been happy if I had been send 6 bottles of Pinot Noir instead. 18€ is a price that is so unspeakably low for 6 bottles, especially from a winemaker of this scale and prestige, that I couldn’t complain about anything. I still felt the need to send an E-Mail to the auction house however, and promptly got a very positive response. It ended up being an honest mistake, and the purchase would of course be refunded, I even got to keep the bottles. The case was handled well, I would even go as far as saying that refunding and letting me keep the bottles in question was too much to ask for, and almost unecessarily kind. I would have been happy if I just knew what happened, but instead I was treated better than ever expected from any such place. I was almost treated well enough to feel the need to make this post about it. The whole thing only took place today, not even 4 hours ago.