Vintage Port for sale - from an ignorant perspective

[MattBentley]

Hi - I am selling some Port on behalf of an old chap that has had some bottles for a long long time - gifts from when he was in business

If anyone feels that a bottle is one they would like to own please contact me
I am in Stoke on Trent. All bottles have been lying down for as long as I have known them (nearly 20 yrs) in the bottom of a wardrobe

Taylors 1970 Vintage - the wax? at the top of the bottle is cracked revealing the cork
Warres 1975 Vintage - the label has been reattached with tape where it has started to peel, but the glass has the date within it showing that they do belong together
Taylors LBV - 1981
Cockburns 1975 Vintage

Thanks

[jdaw1]

Hello and welcome to ThePortForum. You have come to the right place.

You have a mixed bag of bottles.

â—Š Taylor 1970 can be excellent, and retails for about £85 per bottle. Vendors, whether selling to a retailer or at auction, typically bag about half retail, being £40ish. Yours is not well stored, and is a single bottle, so this might be an upper bound.

â—Šâ—Š 1975 was a modest vintage with much to be modest about. These are not valuable: I’d be impressed if you could sell them for £15 each.

â—Š LBV is junior to proper Vintage Port, though the Warre 1981 LBV is delicious. Again, small money.

It seems that the best course would be to drink them. Festive season and all if good, they will give you more pleasure than would the money.

For your information, below is our standard general-purpose advice to would-be vendors.

Standard advice to would-be vendors

Some new members of ThePortForum.com join because they have a bottle, or some bottles, for sale. So we have jointly composed this standard advice, that covers the most frequently-seen situations. Of course, some more specific advice might follow after.

First, hello and welcome. We welcome such visitors, from the likes of whom we have bought bottles and cases in the past.

Second is less good. Your bottles are unlikely to be worth a lot. Selling at auction, through one of the big auction houses, is likely to net you about half the retail price. (Auction prices are less than retail which is why wine merchants buy at auction, and there is the seller’s commission and transport costs.) Selling to a wine merchant is likely to net you about the same, half retail. As a guide, vintage port (rather than LBV, Crusted, or other types), of a good name, from a good year, four or so decades old, of good provenance, might be as much as £100 a bottle. If not all these ducks are in a row, it will be less. So this will not pay for a car or a holiday: sorry.

So our usual advice is not to sell.

If you were given these bottles as a christening present, we advise that you hold them. When you are thirty or forty years old it will give you great pleasure to open these bottles with friends bottles you will have owned since you were a toddler. (Recall Alan Clark on Heseltine: ‟he had to buy all his furniture”. Your friends will have had to buy their own wine; yours came to you as a child.) Selling will net you small money; holding and drinking later can give you great pleasure.

If you are the father of the vendor, a teenager with non-vinous uses for money, then you are probably the best purchaser. Buy, and share with your offspring when they are old enough to regret having sold.

But if, despite all this, you still want to sell, then we might be the best purchaser. Please describe what you have, and post a picture of the bottle or of the unopened case. When did you acquire it, and where has it been stored? And where is it now located: which country (UK? USA? Other), and approximately where within that?