This guide assumes the hardest starting position: you're in a relative's basement or dining room, there are more bottles than you expected, you recognize almost none of them, and everyone in the family has an opinion. Here's the order of operations.
Step zero: touch nothing yet
- Don't open anything to smell it. A broken seal moves a bottle from sellable to sentimental.
- Don't clean or dust anything. On old glass, dust and intact paper strips are proof of an untouched bottle, and wiping can damage both.
- Don't peel at labels, stickers, or the paper over a cap.
- Don't let the confident cousin start handing bottles out until you know what's on the shelf.
Sort by one question: sealed or opened
Opened bottles are for the family: pour them at the memorial, share them, keep them. Sealed bottles are the ones with a decision attached. That single split takes twenty minutes and turns a chaotic wall of glass into two manageable groups, and only one of them needs any more of your attention.
Photograph shelves, not bottles
Your first pass is wide shots: whole shelves, whole cabinets, the group standing together. That's genuinely enough for a first read, and we'll tell you which bottles deserve close-ups. When individual photos become worth taking, the photo guide shows the exact shots and the inventory template keeps a long list organized. But wide shots first. Never let cataloging become the reason this doesn't happen.
What tends to surface in inherited cabinets
The bottles families almost throw away are often the ones that matter: dusty wheated bourbon like old Weller and Old Fitzgerald, a workday single barrel like Elmer T. Lee bought before it turned scarce, decanters wearing paper strips over the cap. None of this requires you to recognize it on sight. It requires photos, and someone whose whole job is recognizing it.
Getting paid without getting burned
The safe shape of this transaction, from us or anyone: the quote is free and in writing, you never pay a cent at any step, shipping runs on the buyer's prepaid insured label, every bottle is photographed on arrival, and payment comes promptly after inspection from a company where a call reaches a human. A buyer who breaks any one of those, who wants fees, your shipping arrangements, or payment-app secrecy, is answering a question you should stop asking them.
When you're ready, or just curious what the shelf is worth, start with one photo on the inherited collection page. Unhurried is the house style.