I’ve just used CT and manually adjust for any egregious differences and they’ve accepted no questions asked
Surprised by the rates quoted here - I looked into this years ago and the math was basically that I’d need to lose the cellar not just once but twice in my life to break even on the premiums. I also just assumed they’d deny coverage for 9 out of 10 things likely to go wrong, but maybe that was overly cynical and it’s more like 8 out of 10.
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Chubb seems pretty good about paying out; I believe people have had shipments lost or stolen and they received a check for the replacement value of the wine.
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Yup, this about sums it up.
If the premium is 0.55% of replacement cost, that’s basically 7-8% of what I paid for the bottles on average, so would mean paying down the value of the wines every 15 years. Ludicrous. Especially when you consider that they’d probably refuse to pay anyway. Complete waste of money.
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This seems like the crux of it.
What does your homeowner policy cover (at least provided you’ve disclosed the collection to them when they set your rates)?
What other things do the Chubb et al policies recommended in this thread cover?
Fire, storm, theft, temperature damage (eg the A/C going haywire story above), breakage in transit, etc.
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If there’s a catastrophic event bad enough to destroy my cellar I’m going to have way bigger problems than having no wine.
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You don’t list the items for Homeoners (unless it’s a special wndirsenet, like Fine Arts or Jewelry). Just like you didn’t list your TV.
And the perils covered are the same as those covered by my TV.
I was told this for a prior policy (Farmers I think) but it didn’t seem right to me. So after asking a few times and getting the same answer, I put the question in writing along with a copy of my inventory with valuation, sent it certified mail and requested a written confirmation of the verbal answer that had been provided multiple times. That changes things.
When they finally got back to me (never in writing as requested), they told me that wine is a perishable product and falls under the food and perishable limits of the policy. If I wanted to insure it as a collectible, I could do so but it required both a separate rider and that I couldn’t drink the wine that is insured as well as that wine had to be stored separately from the wine that wasn’t insured that I planned to consume.
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I take it to mean that your wine is off-site in professional storage? Which means that you’re relying on the storage place’s insurance policy? But are you, the storage place’s client, the insured party? I would think not; the storage place is the insured. So if there is a loss, you would hope that the storage place gets an insurance payout, and then makes a payment to you. And if not, you would have to sue the storage place. And it would come down to the contract in place between you and the storage place, and what that contract provides in case of a loss. Is that a correct understanding?
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Yes, professional offsite. I’m not concerned about any potential issues.
They do offer insurance through a separate company not affiliated with the storage facility
That’s true, but you might as well get the wine covered too. Would rather have the house rebuilt with a full wine cellar than an empty one.
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While this is fair, for a car a lot of the insurance is in case you kill or, worse, badly injure someone. And easier for someone to walk out with jewelry than lots of bottles of wine.
Chubb I think is a leader in collectibles insurance, offered through agencies: Bluewater for wine, Hodinkee for watches, Wax for handbags, etc.
Like many others, ours is through Chubb. It’s a rider on our homeowners, just like we have one for art and jewelry. It isn’t cheap, it’s true, and it’s mostly for us a matter of catastrophic loss rather than a shipment damanged in transit. While I understand the mindset of doing the math and finding it doesn’t work out in a way that makes sense to you, the peace of mind is valuable to me, even if it’s a mostly emotional reaction. Perhaps the insurance companies count on this? I don’t know. I feel better with the coverage.
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This is true only if you value your wine at its cost. Your wine is now worth 15x its cost (based on your comparison). If you place only the purchase value of what was a $20 wine but now worth $300 on the market that’s obviously up to you . . . but in that case you have a lot of wine you could sell for much more than you value it!
Cellar insurance feels odd to me… if you can buy the level of wine where it’s even a consideration, you can likely self insure. And if your cellar is so chock full of extreme rarities, then there’s no chance insurance is going to be able to properly replace those bottles anyways. I’d plow the money into backup generators or redundant refrigeration…that to me is the real insurance for a cellar.
that doesn’t allow for risk spreading.
A large entity (say a university or company) may “self insure” for risks with relatively small monetary consequences - e.g., slip and fall, pipe burst flooding - because it’s a cost of doing business. They know there will be X slip and fall claims with an average payout of $Y each year on average, so they can account for $X*Y as a cost of business that’s cheaper to build in than to pay a third party just to have them pay out.
Or in a home, it might be passing on insurance for appliances. You know 1 is going to die every couple of years and need expensive repair or replacement, you don’t know which one, and you just budget to have to replace something for $1000 each year. Or even on wine, you might drop a bottle every year and break it. But you have a deductible - essentially self insurance - that you won’t collect on because the value is low and predictable.
But self-insuring against large risks or catastrophic risks is another thing altogether because you’re not going to incur such losses on a predictable regular basis.
Whether self insurance makes sense in any realm is a factor of distribution, not wealth. I know many collectors who have a large portion of their assets in wine, as do I. If 20-30% or more of your net worth is wine, self insurance makes no sense. If it’s 1-2% or something, of course you’re just going to self insure.
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Well, I sent my broker (State Farm ) an email and received confirmation.
I think claiming it’s a perishable might only apply if you have coverage for the peril of “power loss”.
Maybe Milton will come up from air and chime in.
My locker sent me a “hold harmless” document. I didn’t sign it.
Sate Farm and wine coverage has come up numerous times over the years. Suggest you do a search here for “state farm” as others claim wine isn’t covered under standard home policy. Maybe yours is but a quick search could help determine if you need to ask again or ask a different question. Hopefully, you are covered.