What We Need to Know About Your Bottle
In order to make sure that the fine and rare wine bottles we purchase are authentic and meet our customers’
standards we inspect all bottles upon arrival or pickup. To that end, when inspecting the bottles we use our
experts’ expertise and typically focus our review on the condition of the label and capsule, the fill level,
the color and clarity of the wine and any other blemishes and/or conditions that may be present.
To help you better understand how wine is evaluated the following are the terms and abbreviations often used
when describing bottle conditions for fine and rare vintage wines:
Bottle Size
Wine Fill Level
- bn – base neck
- ts – top shoulder
- vhs – very high shoulder
- hs – high shoulder
- htms – high-to-mid shoulder
- ms – mid shoulder
- ls – low shoulder
Wine Label Condition
- bsl – bin-soiled label
- fl – faded label
- tl – torn label
- wasl – water-stained label
- wisl – wine-stained label
- wl – writing on label
Selling process
Please fill out the form on our website, or send us an email providing a full list of your wine bottles.
Please try to include information regarding the condition of the individual wine bottles to assist us in issuing the most accurate quote possible for your wine collection. This will help in providing the most accurate quote possible for your wine collection.
East Coast Wine Buyers will provide you with a timely response (usually within 24 hours) which will include our best appraisal estimate for your wine collection based on the information you provided.
An ECWB representative will contact you either by phone or email to obtain additional information regarding your location, preferred form of payment, and to schedule the pickup or shipment of your wine bottles. We may also ask you for additional pictures of the wine bottles to review their condition in more detail.
If we are able to arrange a direct pickup of your wine bottles we will provide all of the necessary packaging materials. You do not need to obtain boxes beforehand or worry about packaging of the bottles. We do ask however that you review your wine collection at least one more time prior to our arrival in order to confirm quantities and condition.
There is no additional costs to you if your wine collection needs to be shipped. We will provide you with the applicable Styrofoam wine shipping boxes as well as prepaid FedEx shipping labels. We also accept responsibility for the wine bottles while they are in transit as long as you use our shipping materials and labels. The entire shipping process takes approximately one week from beginning to end and we use either overnight or two day shipping when transporting rare or vintage wine bottles.
Depending on the transaction, we can offer: cash, certified check, wire, Zelle and PayPal as acceptable forms of payment. When picking up the wine bottles directly, we issue full payment at the time of pickup.
When shipping, wine bottles are paid for upon arrival and inspection.
