STEP 5: CHECK THEIR LIQUOR LICENSE

Another thing that you want to double-check is whether a potential broker has a valid a liquor license. If you’re going to physically touch a bottle of wine (in the United States), and you’re going to make it publicly available for purchase, the law requires you have to have a license.  DO NOT skip this step.

Why? This tells you that the person has a high likelihood of being a legitimate operator and has a clean history. If you obtain a liquor license, you have to have a clean criminal background check. If you’ve been arrested for a felony, theft, or something else, it’ll show up, and you will not be allowed to get a liquor license.

If they have a liquor license, there is a governmental authority you can appeal to if any dispute arises. And they must take this seriously, much more seriously than even a civil lawsuit. A revocation of a wine broker’s liquor license is a direct threat to their livelihood, so the broker will not do anything to jeopardize that.

If they do NOT have a liquor license, then you only have conventional legal methods, which are often not enough.

We say this from experience. We got screwed by two “wine brokers” who were operating without a liquor license. Both are documented in the Wine Spectator forum, actually, but we will quickly tell the stories here.

The first was a gentleman who was operating out of Scottsdale, Arizona. He had allocations of Marcassin, and he sold the same case of wine to ten different people. He collected the money, and then when his scam was discovered, he promised to pay everybody who didn’t get their allocation. But he paid them out over a period of six months, so he basically took an interest-free loan from us and eight other customers. But at least we got our money back in that case.

Then there was another guy, named Joe Le (aka JVL Consulting or Thiet Van Le). He’s a professional con man. He did five or six seamless transactions with us, all legitimate. Then he went to a restaurant, took pictures of two bottles of Romanee Conti, and tried to sell them to me. Because we’d done business with him, we thought we could trust him. But he took our money and never sent us the wine. He’s still out there wearing slick suits that we paid for. Yes, we pursued him criminally, but the amount we had paid was so small that the FBI was not interested, and the state police basically dropped the ball.

Learn from our mistake. Make sure you deal with professionals only, and a liquor license is a must for a professional.