Save all wine sales receipts – this week’s #SAZTIP

Most of us buy wine with the intent of consuming it.  We do not expect to sell wine off in the future.  I certainly did not plan on it, but then I found myself in a position where it made sense to sell off a lot of my wine.  There are many plausible reasons you may elect to sell off wine, including:

  • Your taste has changed and you like different styles now
  • Your health has changed
  • You find you have wine coming to end of life and will not be able to drink it in time
  • You may just want to free up cash and realize that wine sales is a good way to raise funds

Provenance_stampAnd if you do plan to sell wine, you will be glad that you saved all your wine sales receipts!  There are several good auction and exchange firms to handle your selling needs (one of the best is Wickman’s Fine Wine Auctions), but most of them (and the ones you want to be doing business with) require provenance.  Provenance is proof that the wine has been stored under optimal conditions throughout its life and has the very best chance of being cared for as well as any bottle can be.  And the best source of provenance is your wine sales receipts along with journal entries and time-stamped photos of you taken delivery of the wine and immediately putting the wine in proper storage.  But the most important thing is your wine sales receipts.  It proves you bought the wine directly from the winery or a major wine retailer with some certainty the wine has been looked after properly up to the time you took possession of it.  To further strengthen provenance, you should have records of when you build or secured your cellar, have photographs of it and the wine in the cellar and records of having placed the wine in the cellar.  But none of this matters if you have not saved your wine sales receipts!

And even if you are certain you will never sell off wine in the future, your wine sales receipts provide a record of what you paid for wine which is useful in terms of understanding wine values and how much to pay for wine in the future.  It does not take a lot of effort to save your wine sales receipts.  If you are uncertain if you will need them, throw them into a box and store them for potential future use.  At least you will have them if you require them later.

 

Steve Shipley, author Wine Sense, out early 2014. Published by InkIT Publishing
© 2014.  Steve Shipley.  All rights reserved.
SAZ in the Cellar on Facebook
Wine Pinterest Boards
Twitter:  Steve Shipley @shipleyaust;   InkIT Publishing @inkitpub