STEP 3: CHECK THEIR PRICES

As you are checking the price trends of the wines your potential wine brokers recommend, you should also be checking the actual prices they are quoting you. As you look up every wine on their lists on Wine Searcher and Wine Market Journal, look to see if their prices are at the proper levels. If they are within 10 percent of the lowest three confirmed price quotes, then that’s about right. If they are consistently higher than that, something is off.

A note on "confirmed prices": many wine retailers will advertise highly desirable wines at extremely low prices in order to drive traffic to their websites, only for the user to discover that the wine in question is not available, has noted condition issues, or is only available at the advertised price in very large quantities.  Beware of deals that seem too good to be true - to confirm a price, ensure that the wine is actually available from the retailer at the price quoted on Wine Searcher.

Remember, if you are going to be buying $10,000 worth of wine a year or more, your wine broker should be giving you good prices, close to the best you can find on the wider retail market.