Knowing this before you order should help you get the best out of our website:

• VAT is included (at 20%) in all prices

• Delivery is free in the listed postcodes (see "Delivery"). If you're not in the current list please do give us a call, we'll try hard to sort something out.

• The photographs do not necessarily show the currently supplied vintage.

• When you order you will receive an automatically generated email right away, which lets you know the order has gone through. We will then send a second email, hopefully within one working day, to confirm availability and delivery details.

• Special Offers continue till the date specified or while stocks last.

• Throughout the site "bottles" refers to the standard 75cl size unless stated otherwise.

• We do our very best to ensure the wines we list are readily available, but as the Chilean earthquake showed in 2010, it's just not always possible.

• We need to confirm that you're old enough to purchase alcohol which is why we ask you to open an account with us. We hope it's pretty quick and hassle-free.

• There are a couple of annoying glitches (well, they're certainly annoying us) that we haven't fixed quite yet:

1. When you register for an account the software gets bossy over the State/Province field (we haven't yet persuaded it to understand counties); entering "Great Britain" here sorts it out.
2. You can, of course, specify a different shipping address to the billing address, so you can have your wine delivered to another person, say, or to your workplace. PayPal doesn't handle this brilliantly: when you go to pay by card it puts the shipping address where you need the billing address. Only cure is to re-input the billing address. Sorry. We (and lots of other people) are asking PayPal to sort this out, so hopefully …