How it works

Buying a fifty-year-old bottle should not feel like a gamble. This page sets out exactly what happens between the moment you choose a year and the moment the parcel arrives, including what we do on the rare occasions when things do not go to plan.

1. You choose a year

Start with the year, not the wine. Type it into the search on the home page and you will see every bottle we have from that vintage, from the most affordable upwards, with the price for each. Depending on the year, that might be a handful of options or a few dozen: Bordeaux and Burgundy, Champagne, the Rhône, Barolo or Barbaresco from Piedmont, Tuscany, Rioja, Port, or Armagnac.

Some years are plentiful. Others are thin, either because the harvest was small or because what survived has already been drunk. The war years are the hardest of all. Between 1940 and 1944 very little was made in France, and much of what was made never left the country. The great exception is 1945, and it is priced as one.

Where a year is difficult, Armagnac and Port tend to answer. Armagnac is distilled every year without exception and stops changing once it is in the bottle. A Colheita Port comes from a single harvest and takes decades in its stride. Between them they cover the years in which no table wine is worth giving. The neat example is 1963: a washout in Bordeaux, and one of the great declared years in the Douro.

If you cannot see what you want, or you would like a second opinion before choosing, write to info@anno.wine or use the chat on this site. A person answers, and it is usually quicker than three rounds of email.

2. You order the bottle

You order and pay at checkout like any other online purchase. For deliveries within the European Union prices include VAT; outside it, import duties and taxes of the destination country are payable by the recipient. Shipping costs are shown at checkout before you pay. At the same step you can add Transit cover for the full value of the order, which costs about 5% and is entirely optional: more on that under Delivery below.

If you would like to see the bottle first, ask before you order and we will send photographs, front and back, with a written condition report. Plenty of customers do. It is never any trouble.

3. We check the condition

Every bottle is examined before it ships. Not glanced at. Examined, against a light, by someone who has done it thousands of times.

We check the fill level, which is the clearest evidence of how a bottle has been kept. We check the label for wear, staining and damage, and confirm it is the correct label for that producer and vintage. We check the capsule for corrosion, splitting, or signs of having been lifted and pressed back down. Where the capsule top can be pressed gently, we check whether the cork has risen. We check the glass and any sediment, and on a red wine we look at the colour where it meets the shoulder.

Then we look at provenance: where the bottle has been, who held it, whether the storage was cellar-cool and stable, and whether the documentation supports the story. A bottle in beautiful condition with no history is treated more sceptically than a slightly tired bottle with forty years of paperwork behind it.

Our bottle condition guide explains every one of these terms in detail, and sets out exactly what we reject. It is worth reading before you order.

4. If something is not right

Occasionally a bottle does not pass the check, or turns out not to be available after all. Here is precisely what follows.

We refund you in full, straight away. There is no fee, no handling charge, no partial deduction.

Then we write to you. Not a template, an actual message explaining what we found and what we suggest instead. Usually that means one of three things. We may have another bottle of the same wine from the same year, in which case we tell you the price and the condition and you decide. We may propose a different wine from the same year, which is the most common outcome and often a better bottle for the money. Or, for a genuinely difficult year, we suggest a Port or an Armagnac, which will have kept far better than any table wine from that harvest.

If none of that suits, that is the end of it. We would far rather lose an order than send a bottle we are not confident in.

5. Packaging

Bottles that pass are packed upright, cushioned on every side in moulded pulp, inside a rigid box that goes into a plain outer carton. Nothing that happens to the outside of a parcel should reach the glass.

No prices travel in the parcel, so it can go straight to the person it is for.

6. Delivery

7 to 10 working days from order to doorstep, tracked and signed for on arrival. That covers the check, the packing and the transit. We could quote a shorter window by cutting the checks short. We will not.

Transit cover is optional and costs about 5% of the order value, added at checkout. With it, a bottle that arrives broken or a parcel that goes missing is replaced with another bottle from the same year where one can be found, or refunded in full, within 48 hours of your photographs reaching us. Without it, we still handle the claim with the courier for you, but replacement or refund follows the courier's own procedure and liability limits, which typically takes several weeks.

If you are working to a date, a birthday or an anniversary or a wedding, tell us when you order and we will confirm whether it is realistic. If it is tight, we will say so rather than take the order and hope.

When it arrives, stand the bottle upright somewhere cool and leave it a day or two before opening. Transit stirs up sediment that has been settled for decades, and the rest lets it drop again.

Questions

Write to info@anno.wine or use the chat on this site. A person reads it and a person replies, usually the same day. Ask about a year, a producer, a bottle's history, or whether an old wine is likely to still be drinking well. You will get a straight answer, including on the occasions when the straight answer is that we do not know.