Fine Wine Insurance: How Does Wine Insurance Work

Not having wine insurance could end up being expensive. A lot of wine lovers think their regular home insurance will protect their wine collections, but often it doesn’t cover things like flood damage, equipment failures, power outages, or wine breaking during shipping.

If you store your wine at a special facility, you might be able to get insurance for an extra fee. And if you keep your wine at home, you might need to buy more insurance to make sure it’s protected.

What is Wine Insurance

Wine insurance helps collectors if something bad happens to their wine collection. It covers things like if the wine gets damaged, stolen, or spoiled. So, if any of these happen, the insurance helps pay for the losses.

Why You Need Wine Insurance

The chances of things like damage, theft, or things going bad can bring big financial risks. That’s why paying for insurance makes sense. If you have a special place to store things with a controlled temperature, like a cellar, you might think about insurance even more.

If something goes wrong with the equipment and ruins your collection, it could be a big loss. Likewise, if you’ve inherited something valuable, you might feel both emotionally and financially attached to it. Insuring it can make sure it’s protected for the people who come after you.

Types of Wine Insurance

Different wine insurance plans offer various types and levels of protection. Here are four common options:

• Damage Coverage: This helps cover costs if your wine gets damaged because of things like natural disasters, fires, water damage, extreme weather, accidental breakage, or while being shipped.
• Theft Coverage: If your wine is stolen during a burglary or robbery, or mysteriously disappears, this coverage helps compensate you. It also protects against fraud during sales or trades and theft while your wine is on display or being stored.
• Transit Coverage: For those who ship wine often, this coverage ensures protection against breakage, theft, and temperature damage during transportation, whether for sales, trades, or regular shipments.
• Spoilage Coverage: This coverage kicks in if your wine gets damaged or ruined due to factors like heat, cold, power failure, or mechanical breakdown. It includes issues like temperature fluctuations, power outages, refrigeration problems, or poor storage conditions causing corking or seepage.

What Does Wine Insurance Cover/Work For

Additionally, when thinking about how insurance can help with unexpected events, you might want to think about adding these protections to your fine wine insurance:

• Auction and display coverage: If you display your wines at exhibitions or auction houses, this coverage protects against damage or theft.
• Agreed-value coverage: This is for wines that have a set value determined by an appraisal.
• Collectible components coverage: This covers not just the bottles but also things like labels, capsules, boxes, and other collectable parts.
• Replacement-cost coverage: This helps replace rare and valuable bottles if they’re damaged or lost.

• Worldwide coverage: For collectors who buy wine from around the world, this provides coverage internationally.
• Cleanup coverage: If there’s a covered loss, this helps with the cost of cleaning up and removing debris.
• Appraisal fee coverage: This helps pay for the fees needed to get appraisals for resolving claims.

What Wine Insurance Doesn’t Cover/Work For

Shipping insurance only protects against problems that occur during transportation itself. There are certain things it won’t cover. For example, if a bottle leaks because it got damaged in an accident while being handled, you might be able to make a claim on your shipping insurance, depending on your policy.

But if a bottle leaks because the seal breaks during transportation, the insurance won’t help. Some common things that shipping insurance doesn’t cover include:

• Exceeding the policy limit: If the value of the products lost or damaged is more than what the policy covers, the insurance won’t pay for it.
• Failure to pay or collect: If the shipper doesn’t pay for something along the supply chain and it leads to the loss or damage of the shipment, the insurance won’t cover it.
• Loss of market or profit: If the importer can’t sell their product because it’s damaged, the insurance won’t pay for any potential profits they might have lost.
• Negligence: If the importer or anyone else involved in the supply chain was careless with the shipment and that caused the loss or damage, the insurance won’t cover it.

How Much Does Wine Insurance Cost

It’s expected that you’ll pay between 40 to 50 cents for every $100 worth of wine you want to insure. So, if you want to insure $1,000 worth of wine, you might pay between $4 to $5 for insurance. Well, how much you pay for wine collection insurance can change based on a few things:

• If you include it in your home insurance or get a separate policy.
• The choices you make about what gets covered.
• How much your wine collection is worth.
• Where and how you keep your wine safe.

These factors, along with others combined, decide how much each policy will cost in the end.

Companies That Offer Wine insurance

Here are some companies that offer Wine insurance:

• Aon WineDirect
• AXA XL
• Insure My Wine
• Wine Insurance Services
• WineGuardian

These options are only a few, but there are many other insurance companies that offer Wine insurance. It’s really important to carefully look into and compare different policies to find the one that fits your needs the best.

Frequently Asked Questions