At an auction the hammer price is the smallest number in the transaction and the photograph is the most important part of the listing. Both facts surprise people the first time, usually after the invoice arrives.
Read the condition report first
For anything with age on it, condition matters more than the score. Fill level is the first thing to look at, because wine is lost slowly through the closure and quickly through heat, which is why buyers treat it as the best available clue to how a bottle has lived, as Decanter describes. Judge it against the age of the bottle: some loss over thirty years is expected, the same loss in a five year old bottle is a warning.
Then read the rest of the physical description. Seepage or a pushed cork suggests heat. A stained or moldy label suggests damp, which tells you about the cellar rather than the wine and is not automatically bad. A missing or damaged capsule tells you very little on its own. If a listing has no photograph of the actual bottles, you are bidding on prose.
The price is not the price
The buyer premium is a percentage added to the hammer price, and it is often substantial. On top of that there may be sales tax or VAT, a shipping charge, and sometimes storage if you do not collect quickly. A bid that looked like a bargain against retail frequently is not once all four are added.
Lot number and seller: Wine, vintage, quantity and bottle size: Maximum hammer price: Buyer premium: Tax: Shipping: Total, and total per bottle: Retail price for comparison:
Fill that in before the sale, not during it. The point of writing a maximum down is that the number stops being negotiable once bidding starts.
Shipping is a storage decision
A bottle that spends a week in a hot truck has been badly stored for that week, whatever the seller cellar was like before. Ask whether shipping is temperature controlled and whether the seller will hold the wine until the weather is reasonable. Many will. Collecting in person removes the question entirely.
When the wine arrives, treat it as a delivery rather than a formality: compare the bottles with the invoice, photograph anything that does not match, and record the condition you received, following the receiving checklist. If the bottles are staying with the auction house or a warehouse for now, give them a location of their own, as the undelivered wine guide describes.
Record what you were told, alongside what you got
Save the lot description, the stated provenance and the condition photographs with the wine record. Years later, when a bottle disappoints, that is the difference between a mystery and an explanation, and it is also what a future buyer will ask you for.
Photograph each bottle on arrival before it goes into a rack. It takes a minute and it is the only moment when the condition you received is still provable.
When to walk away
No photograph of the actual bottles. Fill levels not disclosed for old wine. A mixed lot described in one line, where the good bottle in the picture is carrying five you cannot see. A seller who cannot say how the wine was stored. And any lot where the math only works if you forget the premium.
There will be another auction. Bidding against your own worksheet is the entire skill.