Benchmark Wine Group

Buying Wine

We are not the typical wine shop; the majority of our inventory is in our 15,000 square foot temperature controlled cellar and not available for causal perusing. Benchmarkwine.com lists our entire stock of rarities in real time, giving access at your convenience. Visiting customers are welcome to pick-up orders they have placed via our website, e-mail or phone. For more on visiting Benchmark, click here.

Benchmark is open Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm (PST). Our offices are closed on Saturday, Sunday and major holidays.

Unique circumstances sometimes allow us the opportunity to pass-on special pricing from a trusted source. Usually this occurs with high volume acquisitions as opposed to rare wines with limited production and/or availability.

Our website provides live quotes on shipping directly from FedEx and GSO based on the number of bottles and your shipping zip code. We only charge what it costs us to ship your wine, so discounts are not available. To get the best possible per-bottle price on shipping, customers should ship in increments of 12. We are happy to hold and combine multiple orders until you have a 12 bottle case ready to ship. For more, click here.

We do our homework on all collections that we purchase. We send a representative to inspect and pick up many collections, allowing us to have firsthand knowledge of storage conditions. When the wines do arrive in our temperature controlled facility, we inspect each bottle by hand and often taste sample bottles to assure the overall condition of the cellar meets our strict standards. We also offer a Provenance Guarantee for each bottle we sell, click here to read more.

Customer Service

Our Acquisitions team will occasionally purchase wines from trusted European and Domestic sources which may not arrive in our facility for 30 to 120 days. For wines sourced in Europe, we arrange 3 to 4 shipments a year via refrigerated freight. If you purchase a pre-arrival wine, our customer service team will contact you via e-mail upon arrival to arrange delivery.

For more information about pre-arrival wines offered by Benchmark, click here.

Call our customer service team at 707.255.3500. They will send you a shipping label to ship the bottle(s) back at no cost to you. Once we receive them, we will send replacement bottles if they are available or credit you for the loss.

When wine is shipped via ground service, we must take into account the weather conditions through the entire route. If your wine encounters hot conditions mid-route, there is a chance of irrevocable damage. If there is a risk of this, we will recommend shipping via air service to avoid adverse conditions.

Selling Wine to Benchmark

Since 1997 our affiliate has built a proprietary software database that determines the valuation of a submitted wine collection. This extensive tool uses a complex algorithm to determine bottle values based on several factors:

Historical valuation of every bottle of wine sold at auction since 1997 (international and domestic...an immense database)
Current US retail
Benchmark sales history
Benchmark purchase history
Current company inventory
Professional scores
Regional and vintage weights and measures
Quality of the collection

We offer different payment options depending on the collection. They range from cash after inspection to consignment. We purchase most collections outright, at an agreed upon price. Clients who choose to sell their collection outright receive payment on the date specified in their agreement, instead of waiting for an auction house to sell their wine and then receiving payment from the buyer.

Absolutely not. Once identity and condition of your collection is confirmed, you will receive the final quote price within the specified payment terms.

We thoroughly inspect each bottle by hand to assure the overall condition meets our standards. We check for the following bottle conditions: fill, capsule, cork, label damages, and any seepage. If any of these conditions are found to be unsatisfactory, the bottles will be returned to seller at their cost.

We can handle all of the shipping and logistics for transporting your wines to Benchmark Wine Group. We use our contacts in the industry to provide the most efficient and reliable shipping solution for your wine collection.

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