A guide for bidders
Once a month our auction opens on a Friday evening and runs for nine days. In between are a few hundred bottles that have all passed across the same table in Groningen — checked, weighed up, photographed and described by the people who will also pack them for you.
Bidding itself takes about ten seconds. This page covers everything around it: how to find the right lot, how our bidding actually works, what you pay on top of the hammer price and what happens once you have won.
Nine days of bidding
A new auction every month
10% buyer's fee
On top of the hammer price
Every bottle in our hands
Inspected and photographed by us
10 weeks free storage
Combine auctions into one shipment
Why bid here
Nothing goes into our catalogue sight unseen. Every lot is delivered or collected, unpacked in Groningen and checked one bottle at a time: the seal, the fill level, the label, the box, the little imperfections that photograph away if nobody points them out. Only then is it photographed and written up.
That matters more than it sounds. It means the description you are bidding on came from somebody holding the bottle rather than from the seller, and it means the bottle is already with us when the hammer falls — not still sitting in a cupboard somewhere waiting to be posted on.
We also point out what is wrong. A torn label, a slightly low neck, a missing tube: it goes in the description and it goes in the photographs. We would rather lose a few euros on the hammer than have a parcel opened in disappointment.
And because everything is under one roof, your winnings can stay there. Bottles from three consecutive auctions can travel to you in a single, properly packed box rather than in three separate parcels — cheaper for you, and a good deal safer for the whisky.
From account to hammer
Four steps, and the first one only ever happens once. After that a bid is a matter of seconds — the time goes into deciding which bottle you want, not into the bidding itself.
Bidding requires an account, and opening one costs a one-off € 5,00 excluding VAT. It is a verification fee rather than a subscription: it keeps anonymous accounts out of the bidding, which is exactly what you want when you are competing for a bottle.
You confirm your e-mail address and your details, and from that point the account stays yours. There is no charge for taking part in an auction, no charge for watching one, and nothing to pay if you are outbid.
The catalogue can be sorted by name, by current price or by the number of bids, and filtered down by distillery, bottler, year of distillation and age. Most buyers arrive with a distillery in mind and leave with something else entirely.
Open a lot and read it properly. The photographs, the fill level and the notes on condition are the whole story — our guide on inspecting a lot walks through what to look at before you commit.
Every bid here is a maximum bid: you enter the most you are willing to pay, and from that moment the system bids for you. It answers other bidders one bidstep at a time, spends as little of your maximum as it can and never goes past it.
Decide that figure before the closing evening rather than during it. A bid is binding and cannot be withdrawn, and auctions have a way of talking people past the number they had in mind.
Win a lot and the invoice reaches you within a day of the auction closing: the hammer price, our buyer's fee of 10% and any shipping or duties that apply. It has to be settled within three working days.
Then you choose. Have the bottles packed and sent, come and collect them yourself, or leave them with us free of charge for 10 weeks and combine them with what you win in the auctions after this one.
Step three, in detail
You will not find a button here that raises the price by one step. Every bid on our platform is a maximum bid: you set the furthest you are willing to go, and from then on the system defends that position for you as economically as it can.
It is the fairer arrangement for everybody. The bottle goes to whoever genuinely values it most rather than to whoever happened to be awake, and you never pay a euro more than it took to stay in front.
There is only one kind of bid here, and it is your ceiling: the most you are prepared to pay for that bottle. You are not bidding that amount — you are telling us how far we may go on your behalf before we stop.
So pick the number that would still feel right the next morning, not the one that gets you in front today. Deciding it in advance is the whole point of bidding this way, and it is a great deal easier than deciding it at half past eleven on a Sunday evening.
From that moment the system watches the lot for you. Each time somebody else bids, it answers with a single bidstep — never more than it has to, and never a cent above your maximum. If nobody comes near you, the lot is yours well below the amount you set.
Two details worth knowing. A maximum bid beats a later bid of exactly the same amount, because yours was there first. And you can raise a running maximum whenever you like, which is the honest way to go past a number you have changed your mind about.
Lots do not close one by one. The auction has a single clock, and a bid on any bottle in it holds that clock open for everything: from seven in the evening a bid in the final minutes pushes the closing time back by ten minutes, and after ten in the evening by five.
So the auction ends only once a whole extension period has gone by with nobody bidding on anything at all — and then every remaining lot closes together. Extensions stop at two in the morning, which is as late as an evening can ever run.
The bidsteps
A bid never moves the price by an arbitrary amount. The step depends on where the bidding has got to: a bottle at forty euros climbs in modest increments, one at four hundred in larger ones, and one heading for five figures in altogether bigger jumps.
This is the table the system uses when it bids for you, so it is also the table that decides how economically your maximum is spent. If the price sits at € 95 and you have set € 200, the next answer on your behalf is € 100 — not € 200.
It is worth a glance before you settle on a figure. A maximum that lands just under a step is a maximum that will be beaten by a single euro of difference.
| Current price | Bidstep |
|---|---|
| € 0 – € 10 | € 1 |
| € 10 – € 20 | € 2 |
| € 20 – € 100 | € 5 |
| € 100 – € 500 | € 10 |
| € 500 – € 1.000 | € 20 |
| € 1.000 – € 2.500 | € 25 |
| € 2.500 – € 5.000 | € 50 |
| € 5.000 – € 25.000 | € 100 |
| € 25.000 – € 50.000 | € 250 |
| € 50.000 – € 100.000 | € 500 |
| € 100.000 and above | € 1.000 |
Your maximum itself stays private. Other bidders only ever see the current price, never how much further you are prepared to go — which is exactly why naming a real ceiling costs you nothing.
The bid column explainedThe rhythm of it
An auction opens on a Friday evening at eight and runs for nine days, closing on the Sunday evening of the following week. That gives you two full weekends to go through the catalogue at a sensible pace instead of deciding on a bottle in a hurry.
There is a new auction roughly every month. The catalogue of a coming auction stays closed until it opens — the lots are still being inspected and photographed right up to that point — so these dates are all there is to see in advance. Miss a bottle and something comparable usually comes along, often sooner than you would expect.
All times are Central European Time. Closing evenings begin at seven and run for as long as people keep bidding, so treat the closing date as the start of the last stretch rather than as a deadline on the clock. The auctions further ahead, and the dates we have already fixed for the rest of the year, are listed on our auction calendar page.
The money side
One fee applies to every lot, and that is our buyer's fee of 10%. Everything else on this list depends on choices you make afterwards: how the bottles travel, whether you insure them, how you pay and how long they stay with us.
None of it is a surprise. The lot page tells you the applicable charges before you bid, and the invoice sets them out line by line so you can check it against this page.
How and when you pay
The invoice arrives just after the auction closes and has to be settled within three working days. Dutch buyers pay by iDEAL, Belgian buyers by Bancontact, the rest of Europe by credit card, and a bank transfer works from anywhere.
Payments run through our payment partner, so your card details never reach us. There is more about that on our secure payments page.
After the hammer
Once the invoice is paid the bottle is yours, and where it goes next is entirely your call. You can change your mind, too: whisky sitting in our storage can be released for shipping, collected in person or — if it turns out not to be the one — put straight back into a later auction from your dashboard.
The default, and for most buyers the sensible one. Your bottles stay in our storage in Groningen free of charge for 10 weeks — long enough to cover two or three auctions — in a room that is dark, dry and kept at an even temperature.
It lets you gather up a few wins and have them travel together in one properly packed box: one shipping cost instead of three, and a great deal less handling. After the free period the storage fee applies, and we will tell you before that happens.
Say the word and we pack them ourselves — every bottle wrapped and braced so it cannot move, in a box built for glass rather than for books. We ship with DPD, PostNL and DHL Express depending on where you are, always with track and trace.
Packing takes about five working days, and the first batch of an auction goes out on the Friday of the week after it closes. Insurance is optional and worth it: a parcel that goes missing is a bottle that cannot be replaced.
You are very welcome to come to Groningen and pick your bottles up in person. It costs nothing, it removes every transport risk there is, and it is by appointment — which you can make from your own dashboard once the invoice is settled.
Bring something to carry them in and, ideally, someone else to drive. Buyers who make the trip tend to stay for a look around, and we are usually happy to be interrupted.
Shipping spirits across a border comes with rules that vary by country, and a few destinations we cannot serve at all. Check the special shipping rules before you bid if you are outside the Netherlands.
The things buyers ask first
Nothing. Bidding is free, watching an auction is free, and being outbid costs you nothing at all. The only charge before you win anything is the one-off € 5,00 excluding VAT to open an account, which exists to verify that you are a real person.
When you do win, our buyer's fee of 10% is added to the hammer price, along with VAT on that fee and whatever shipping or duties apply to your destination.
No. A bid is binding the moment it is placed, because the seller and every other bidder are relying on it. That is also why we ask you to settle on a maximum before the closing evening rather than during it.
The one exception is an obvious error — a digit too many, or the wrong lot entirely. Contact us straight away and we will look at it. Leave it until the auction has closed and there is very little we can do.
You enter the highest amount you are willing to pay for the lot. The system then bids on your behalf one bidstep at a time, only going as high as it needs to in order to stay in front, and never past your limit. If nobody challenges you, you win for far less than your maximum.
If somebody later bids exactly your maximum, yours wins — it was entered first. You can also raise a running maximum at any time, which is the proper way to go past a number you have changed your mind about.
No — the maximum bid is the only kind of bid we have. It sounds restrictive and turns out to be the opposite: you never have to sit and watch a lot, and you never pay more than it took to stay ahead of the next bidder.
If you do want to move the price by a single step, set your maximum to exactly that amount. It behaves the way you expect, and it can be raised later.
By a bidstep, and the size of a bidstep depends on where the bidding has got to. A bottle at forty euros climbs in small steps, one at four hundred in larger ones, and the increments keep growing from there. The full table is further up this page.
That table is also what the system uses when it bids for you, so it decides how frugally your maximum gets spent. Worth a glance before you settle on a figure.
Because somebody, somewhere in the auction, was still bidding. The auction runs on one clock rather than a clock per lot, so a bid on any bottle in the final minutes holds every lot open — including yours, even if nobody has touched it for days.
The extension is ten minutes for bids placed from seven in the evening, and five minutes once it is past ten. When a full extension period goes by without a single bid anywhere in the auction, everything closes at the same moment. Extensions stop at two in the morning, so that is the latest an evening can run.
It is deliberate, and it is why sniping does not work here: the bottle goes to whoever was willing to pay most, not to whoever clicked last. It is also the best argument there is for setting your maximum and going to bed.
Every bottle is in our hands before it is catalogued. We check the seal, the fill level, the label and the packaging ourselves, describe what we find — including the flaws — and photograph the bottle from every angle that matters.
So read the description and open the photographs full size before you bid. Our guide on inspecting a lot explains what we look at, and what a low fill or a slightly lifted label actually means for a bottle.
The invoice reaches you just after the auction closes and has to be paid within three working days. Dutch buyers use iDEAL, Belgian buyers Bancontact, buyers elsewhere in Europe a credit card, and a bank transfer works from anywhere in the world.
Payments are handled by our payment partner, so your card details never touch our systems. Non-European and business credit cards carry a surcharge of 3,5%, because they cost us more to process.
Packing an auction takes around five working days, and the first shipments go out on the Friday of the week after it closes. You get a track and trace code the moment your parcel is on its way.
There is no hurry if you would rather wait: bottles can stay with us free of charge for 10 weeks and travel with whatever you win in the meantime.
Often, but not always: some countries do not allow spirits to be imported by private buyers at all, and others charge duties that make it a poor idea. Check the special shipping rules first, and ask us if your destination is not listed.
Yes. You have to be at least 18 to bid or to sell with us, and where your own country sets the age higher than that, its figure is the one that counts.
It applies to the account rather than to the bottle: the person the account belongs to is the person we hold to it, and an account opened on somebody else's behalf is not something we can accept.
Have a look through the catalogue first — it costs nothing and commits you to nothing. And if a bottle turns out to be the one, the account you need takes a couple of minutes to open.
