The Journal
What we know, written down.
A house that sells one bottle at a time has to explain itself. These are the notes we would otherwise repeat on the telephone: what a bottle costs to land in Switzerland, what a fill level is worth, how a collection is best sold, and why some vintages were never made at all.
Buying and owning in Switzerland
Switzerland · Practical
Bonded storage, and what the freeports really are
Geneva's Ports Francs, Chavornay, Embrach: how a Swiss customs warehouse works for a private wine collection, what the 2016 reform changed…
Switzerland · Practical
Selling a cellar: auction, merchant or private placement
The three ways a wine collection is sold in Switzerland, what each one actually pays after commission…
Provenance
Ten questions to ask before you pay
Counterfeit and mishandled bottles concentrate on exactly the names collectors want most.
Switzerland · Practical
What your household policy covers, and where it stops
Standard Swiss household insurance pays for fire, theft and water damage on a wine collection at reinstatement value.
Reading a bottle
Reading a bottle
Fill levels: what top shoulder is actually worth
What the fill-level vocabulary of old Bordeaux means, how Burgundy and Champagne are measured instead, what level is normal at what age…
Reading a bottle
Capsule, cork, label and glass
What a corroded capsule, a stained label, a branded cork and the shape of the punt tell you about an old bottle, and which of those signs are good news.
Reading a bottle
Why the wooden case is worth more than the wood
What OWC means on a wine listing, why a sealed original case sells above the same twelve bottles loose…
Reading a bottle
Moving old bottles without killing them
Why a summer delivery van ruins forty-year-old wine, how long a bottle needs to stand before it is opened…
From this cellar
From this cellar
Sassicaia, every vintage from 1968 to 2023
The complete commercial run of Sassicaia, fifty-two bottles, vintage by vintage: how the wine began, why 1985 became the most famous bottle in Italy…
From this cellar
Monfortino, and the years it was not made
Giacomo Conterno's Monfortino is declared only in the vintages that earn it and spends around seven years in cask.
From this cellar
Pétrus 1946, and what a post-war bottle is
Eleven hectares of blue clay in Pomerol, a tiny war-shadowed crop, and an estate that was not yet famous. What a 1946 Pétrus is, and what it is not.
From this cellar
The Argentine bottles nobody kept
Mendoza made age-worthy wine for decades before anyone abroad noticed, and almost none of it was stored.
From this cellar
Old Champagne, and why disgorgement matters
Why two bottles of the same Champagne vintage can be a decade apart in character, what a declared vintage means, and the great old years: 1964, 1966…
From this cellar
What a complete vertical is, and why it cannot be rebuilt
Every vintage of one wine, in sequence, with the missing years missing for a reason. Why a complete run prices differently from its parts…
From this cellar
The 312 vines that out-scored Bordeaux
A 2.2-hectare block in Gualtallary, farmed as three parcels. The smallest one, 312 Malbec vines, gave Tim Atkin his first 100-point South American wine…
From this cellar
Cuvée Cathelin, and why it does not exist every year
Jean-Louis Chave's rarest bottling, named after a painter and declared only in the years that earn it.
The market
The market
Why one bottle prices differently from twelve
The published wine indices track cases of recent vintages in bond. Most of what a serious cellar contains is single bottles of old vintages…
The market
Wine inside a Swiss patrimony
What holding wine as part of a Swiss patrimony actually involves: wealth tax, capital gains treatment, storage and insurance costs…
The cellar
Every bottle, one by one.
Sixty wines from a single private cellar, from 1815 to 2024, each with the vintages we actually hold and the condition of every bottle.