What the two mean
- Duty paid
- UK alcohol duty and VAT have already been settled. The wine can be delivered to your door and the price is the price.
- In bond
- The wine sits in an HMRC-approved bonded warehouse with duty and VAT suspended. The price excludes both. They fall due when the wine leaves bond — and not before.
Why we print both figures
An in-bond price and a duty-paid price side by side in a grid, with nothing saying which is which, is the browse-level version of drip pricing: the extra lands at the invoice. UK catalogues often mark in-bond lots with a symbol the buyer is expected to decode, so the usual outcome is that people find out afterwards.
Every card here names its basis, and where the duty is known it shows the duty-paid equivalent beside the in-bond price. The arithmetic is the same one HMRC uses: duty first, then VAT on the hammer plus the duty.
Buying in bond
- Leave it in bond and the stock transfers inside the warehouse. Nothing moves, nothing is at risk in a van, and duty stays suspended.
- Take it out and you pay duty and VAT on the way, plus the warehouse's release and handling charges.
- In-bond stock has a paper trail — a warehouse account, a rotation number — which is part of why serious provenance tends to live there.