My First Bid, and Win, on Winebid.com

I decided to take the plunge into the auction market.  Not in the traditional sense, but in a Web 2.0 kind of way.  Using WineBid.com, against the recommendations of several vocal WineBerserker forum members, I purchased several bottles of wine in the auction that ended on 4/22/12.

So why an auction?  Difficult question with a shockingly easy answer — I wanted to try to find older vintages of good to great wine at a value.  Not a discount per se, but at an average or better-than-average price.  

How do I determine if any given bottle of wine is available at a fair, or hopefully better than fair, price?  I checked the average price paid for the wine on Cellar Tracker.  On top of that I also had to be unable to find the wine for purchase directly from a traditional retailer or the winery direct.  I made the assumption that these checks and balances would be enough to ensure a moderate level of success.  Easy enough so far?

So how did I choose the wines to bid on?  Well that was really tough to do.  Turns out there is a lot available on WineBid and no real easy way to start — other than to jump right in and browse.  So after a little bit of reading on WineBerserker and some research on CellarTracker I decided that a beautiful bottle of Bedrock Lorenzo’s Heirloom blend from 2008 was the prize I needed to have.  Only problem is it didn’t pass the checklist.  The bid price?  $40.  Average price the CT community paid?  $34 and change.

So I moved on to the next wine, which turned out to be a Zin blend from Ridge.  The 2007 Lytton Springs was a steal at $30 versus the CT average of $30.28 gave me the thumbs up for the “at-value” test, albeit barely.  I also couldn’t find the wine direct from a retailer.  So I pulled the trigger on two bottles.

What happened next?  I won.  And then I discovered the enormous amount of fees that get attached.  A 15% Premium & Insurance fee plus $5.22 in taxes took the amount to $74.52.  Roughly $37/bottle.  Not the best deal, but after not terrible.  I haven’t got the bill for shipping yet, but I imagine I’ll be up around $45/bottle when all is said and done.  Not perfect, but good.  I’m not disappointed.

In fact I’m happy, so far.  As long as everything works out with shipping this will have been a good experience.  I might just look for a little more value next time.