How to Buy French Wine Online and Purchase Like a Pro

Think buying French wine online is a gamble? What if there’s a simple way to shop like a pro and always pick the perfect bottle? Uncover the insider tips to mastering online wine purchases!

Five Insider Tips on How to Buy French Wine Online

In this video, we offer our top tips for how to buy French wine online. 

(Transcript: How to Buy French Wine Online)

Hi, I’m Pascale Bernasse with French Wine Explorers. Our company provides wine tours in France designed exclusively to help wine lovers become connoisseurs.

This is our first video in a series we call Pascale’s Picks where we offer suggestions on wine-themed topics. And this month’s suggestion is a very popular trend: buying wine online.

Buying wine online is sometimes like buying a pair of shoes off the Internet. Sometimes you get what you expect, and other times you end up with sore feet and a heavy helping of regret.

Our partner friends at Millesima in New York are the sponsors of this video post. We’ve been working with Millesima in Bordeaux for many years for our Bordeaux wine tour programs, and we thought this was a great compliment to our video series.

So how do you make sure that the wine you’re buying online is right for you? There are several things that you need to consider to make sure that the quality of the wine is what you expect.

Here are the top five things to consider when you buy French wine online:

First things first, you want to make sure that you can purchase wine online to be shipped to your state. Some states do not allow shipping, so you want to make sure that you can receive the wine that you’re buying first.

Once you know for sure that you can buy wine online, to be shipped to your home state, consider the following:

1. First and foremost, reputable wine companies will not ship during hot or cold weather.
2. Secondly, do your research. If you haven’t had the wine you’re about to purchase, you want to check out online Twitter feeds with wine experts, anything you can find about the wine, and the vintage you’re about to buy. This will allow you to make sure that you are purchasing what you want.
3. Third, sites should be very clear about the condition of the wine. We call this provenance. What we mean by this is, we need to know exactly where the wine has come from. Is it shipped directly from the estates? Has it been from a seller that was bought? Those things are very, very important in determining the quality of the wine. So if you’re unable to know the provenance—or where the wine has been—before the wine store got it, you may want to think twice about purchasing the wine.
4. Fourth, you want to research the company you’re about to buy the wine online from. You want to know how long they’ve been in business, how they store their wine, and how they source their wine.
5. Last but not least, you want to know exactly what their return policy is. You should be able to find this on their website, and if you’re not, call customer service and see what the policy is.

Millesima USA satisfies these five tips for buying French wine online. So whether I’m buying a Sancerre from the Loire Valley or a Petrus, I know I’m buying from one of the largest and most reputable, direct from estate, online wine companies available.

Millesima guarantees authenticity and provenance. They store the wine in original boxes, in temperature-controlled facilities. And they have a great online concierge and a very knowledgeable staff in the New York store.

And that’s it! That’s Pascale’s Picks for this month. Stay tuned and subscribe to our YouTube channel and see our next video, which is Tips for Buying for Your Burgundy Wine Cellar.

And visit us at wine-tours-france.com.