We acquire our unparalleled stock of fine and rare wine from well-maintained private cellars and reputable wholesalers, top importers, brokers and directly from producer stock, but only when provenance can be verified by our team of acquisitions professionals. Before purchasing a private collection, a Benchmark representative will often travel to the site of a cellar to meet the collector and inspect storage conditions to verify provenance. In other cases, we will carefully inspect photos of bottles before bringing them in-house. All wine is transported under ideal conditions to our facility. Once received, we meticulously hand-inspect every bottle for the slightest sign of sub-optimal storage and handling and reject any such bottle or collection showing a significant number of such bottles. In some cases, we will test representative bottles to ensure optimal condition. As a result, we guarantee the provenance of all wines that we sell. If you open a wine purchased from us within six months of the purchase date and the wine reveals signs of damage due to improper storage or transport, we ask that you re-cork the bottle with the remaining wine inside and contact us immediately.

Each bottle of rare and back-vintage wine is unique. When a new collection arrives, we inspect each bottle by hand to assure the overall condition of the cellar meets our strict standards. When an individual bottle has a cosmetic blemish or other condition, our cellar team provides that notation. If no condition is cataloged, the bottle may still contain minor conditions, which are reflective of the bottles value and/or age. Minor conditions include cosmetic conditions such as nicked labels or chipped wax capsules.

Our staff collectively draws on decades of experience when inspecting the rare bottles we procure. When we cannot authenticate an especially rare and valuable wine, that bottle is immediately returned to the source from which it was acquired.

Following are the terms and abbreviations we often use when describing bottle conditions: