About ANNO

ANNO sells bottles of wine from a particular year. Not a region, not a grape, not a score out of a hundred. A year. The one someone was born in, the one they married in, the year they left home or finished their degree or opened the shop that is still going. We find a bottle from that year, check it properly, and send it to you.

That is all of it. Everything else on this site exists to explain how we do it and why you can rely on us to do it well.

Why a year

Most gifts are chosen from what is available. You walk into a shop, you look at what is on the shelf, you pick the best of it. The person receiving it can tell. They know the gift came from a range of options, and that they were somewhere in the middle of your thinking.

A bottle from 1964 works differently. It could not have been bought for anyone else. It was made in a particular autumn by people who had no idea it would matter to your father sixty years later, and it has sat somewhere cool and dark ever since. When it arrives, the first thing the recipient does is look at the year, and then look at you. That moment is the product.

We are quite deliberate about this. We are not in the business of persuading anyone to appreciate wine. Some of our customers know a great deal about Bordeaux and some have never bought a bottle over twenty euros. Both are buying the same thing: a physical object from a year that means something to them.

Who is behind ANNO

ANNO is run by a small team of wine professionals who have spent their working lives around old bottles: buying them, cellaring them, opening them, and learning to tell a sound 1961 from a tired one by the fill and the capsule, long before the cork is touched. Bottles like the ones on this site have passed through our hands for years. It is a narrow craft. Very few people anywhere practise it full time, and fewer still do it for one bottle at a time, for one person, for one reason.

That experience is what you are buying, as much as the wine. It is what tells us which years to trust and which to be careful with, which producers made wine that lasts, when a stained label is a good sign and when a perfect one is a warning. It is also why we can answer your questions ourselves. There is no call centre and no chatbot between you and the people who handle the bottles.

You can write to info@anno.wine or call +39 342 639 8349, Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 18:00 CET.

How we work

Every bottle is checked by hand before it leaves. We look at the fill level, the label, the capsule and the seal, and at what is known of where the bottle has been kept, and we write down what we find. Anything we would not accept ourselves does not ship. The mechanics are set out in full on our How it works page, but the principle is simple: nothing reaches you that one of us has not looked at properly.

Delivery takes 7 to 10 working days, tracked. At checkout you can add Transit cover, an optional service costing about 5% of the order value, so that if a bottle arrives broken or a parcel is lost we replace or refund it within 48 hours of your photographs reaching us, rather than after a courier investigation.

The years are not evenly represented, and we would rather you heard that from us than found it out at checkout. The early 1940s are thin everywhere, because very little was made and less of it survived the war. Several years in the 1960s and 1970s were poor across most of France, and what was bottled was drunk young. Where a year is difficult, we go to the wines built to outlast it, and we tell you why we are suggesting them.

What we promise

Four things, and we would rather state them narrowly and keep them than promise widely and disappoint.

The year is the year. Every bottle we send is from the vintage stated. We check the label, the capsule, the cork branding where it is visible, and the provenance paperwork. If any of those disagree, the bottle does not ship.

The condition is described honestly. Fill level, label wear, capsule, cork, and what is known of the storage. We do not use flattering language for a tired bottle. Our guide to bottle condition explains what each of these terms actually means, so you can judge for yourself.

A person answers. Write to info@anno.wine, call +39 342 639 8349 or use the chat on this site, and a member of the team replies. Ask for photographs of the actual bottle and its condition report before you commit, and you will get them. We would rather spend twenty minutes on a question than take an order somebody regrets.

If we cannot supply a bottle, you are refunded in full, at once. Should a bottle turn out to be unavailable or fail our final check, we cancel the order, refund every euro straight away and come back to you with alternatives from the same year. No fee, no restocking charge, nothing held back.

What we will not claim

Anything bottled before 1990 is sold as a collectible object. We do not guarantee that it will be pleasant to drink. Nobody honest does. A wine that has spent thirty-five years in glass is at the mercy of the cork it was sealed with, the cellar it slept in, and the ordinary chemistry of time. Some 1961 Bordeaux is still magnificent. Some is brown and finished. There is no way to know without pulling the cork, and pulling the cork ends the gift.

We would rather say this at the start than bury it at the bottom of a terms page. It is also, in our experience, not a problem. Someone opening a bottle from their birth year is not writing a tasting note. They are marking something. The wine can be past its best and the evening still be the one they remember.

Delivery takes 7 to 10 working days, because checking and packing an old bottle properly takes as long as it takes and we will not hurry that part.

That is ANNO. A small team, a long list of years, and a strong preference for telling you the truth about what is in the bottle. If you would like to test that, write to us with a year and see what comes back.