While online shopping has many similarities to shopping in a traditional brick and mortar outlet, there are still precautions to take. You need to follow some basic guidelines to make your shopping experience pleasant. Provided you purchased your wine from a reputed online vendor, the wine bottle or crate should arrive intact within a couple of days.

You need to be careful while opening the case. The first thing you need to do is ensure that the bottle is intact and not broken or cracked. You should also check the bottle seal to ensure that the contents are intact.

Once you are sure that the bottle has not leaked in any way, you can then go on to check the actual contents of the bottle. In the meantime, you should keep the delivery documents of the package safe in case there had been an inordinate delay in delivery.

If the online store specified a particular date for delivery and the delivery was made late, you can use the documents to repudiate issues. But if everything went smoothly, you still need to ensure that the vendor sent you the exact wine that you ordered.

When you perform your wine testing, you need to check the wine to see that you received a quality product. There is a traditional way to test the wine the way wine experts do. While you may not be as accurate as the experts are in testing the wine, you can, to some extent, determine the quality of the wine.

The first thing to do is to "nose" the wine. Until more modern and scientific methods for wine testing are invented, this is the most exact procedure used to test a wine. You need to first smell the wine before swirling it. This will reveal the delicate aromas within the wine. The aroma originates basically from the smell of the grapes used in the wine.

Next, you need to swirl the wine and then smell it again, after it comes to rest. If there is a profound change in the smell after swirling it, then it means that the wine is mature. This is known as the bouquet of the wine and it differs from the aroma. While the aroma is the smell of the grapes used, the bouquet arises as a direct result of the aging process. As young wine will have only an aroma, they would not smell very different before and after swirling. A mature wine on the other hand will have a profound difference in smell.