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Wine Appraiser


dlebby

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My wife is a family lawyer and needs to have a 500 bottle or so fine wine collection appraised for a divorce case. Anyone have any experience or a good recommendation for a qualified appraiser?
why not send a PM to starfish? He may be able to be of assistance. Or, you could set up a Cellartracker account on the web, pay a modest fee, and enter the bottles into the cellar. CT has an automatic valuation feature that takes average winebid.com prices for the bottles. Not a super-exact science, but it would at least provide a baseline. I'm fairly sure that any of the major wine insurers (like Fireman's Fund or Chubb) could provide one as well.
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why not send a PM to starfish? He may be able to be of assistance. Or, you could set up a Cellartracker account on the web, pay a modest fee, and enter the bottles into the cellar. CT has an automatic valuation feature that takes average winebid.com prices for the bottles. Not a super-exact science, but it would at least provide a baseline. I'm fairly sure that any of the major wine insurers (like Fireman's Fund or Chubb) could provide one as well.

While you could use the valuation from cellartracker, that would not provide a true estimate of the value of a wine cellar. A wine cellar's value differs from the value of the sum of individual bottles. Because of the time involved with selling each bottle individually, it would be incorrect to assume that the cumulative value equates.

Feel free to drop me an email, or PM and I would be happy to discuss the matter further with you or your wife.

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When I received an inheritance of 169 bottles mostly of 50 year old Burgundies, I consulted the wine guy at Andy Bassin's MacArthur Wines & Beverages. I'm sorry to say his name escapes me at the moment. After I showed him a list, he graciously came to my house and gave me an estimate on each bottle, several of which I sold at the level he suggested or a bit better. After a couple of dozen went out the door, I ended the sale and started presenting them to friends, who, after imbibing the contents, filled them up with Two Buck Chuck and put them out for show. My best customers were Vietnamese, who wanted products from their birth years. There are still 60 or 70 bottles in the basement.

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While you could use the valuation from cellartracker, that would not provide a true estimate of the value of a wine cellar. A wine cellar's value differs from the value of the sum of individual bottles. Because of the time involved with selling each bottle individually, it would be incorrect to assume that the cumulative value equates.

Feel free to drop me an email, or PM and I would be happy to discuss the matter further with you or your wife.

Very good point. I hadn't thought about that...I use the CT estimate for insurance purposes (e.g. replacement value)
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