I just had one of my wine buddies have a BBQ fire on his back patio, propane tank caught on fire, took three goes with a fire extinguisher to get it out. His cellar value would be a very painful number to replace, given the Cult Cabs and bottle count. Made me really start to ponder not having insurance, as I wouldn’t want to have a total loss not covered.
Yet another thing to do…
In the grand scheme, insuring a collection is not a lot of $$ annually. Sleep a little better. Buy some wine insurance. Protect your vinous babies.
Would you mind sharing why you chose Chartis over InsureMyWine.com? Is the relationship between CT and InsureMyWine an endorsement, paid advertsement, co-branding partnership or something else?
Thanks,
fred
Marc Lazar helped to create InsureYourWine a couple of years after I had already secured coverage for my collection. Originally I tried to get a Chubb standalone policy and literally could not get a call back after 4 tries to 4 different brokers from the Chubb site. Then I tracked down Sandy Leone at HUB Intl. via a referral from Scott Manlin. She was able to get me Chubb coverage but only if I was willing to consolidate ALL coverage to Chubb. Chubb was even willing to put a standalone rider in place for the time it would take to deal with the underwriting and appraisal of everything else (at that time a house, 2 cars, umbrella, excess coverage for sitting on non-profit boards, and coverage for a condo that we had for my mother in law). However, a couple of months later Chubb would not ultimately offer us quake coverage on our home unless we did a huge additional restoration, so we dropped them and when to AIG Private Client (now called Chartis).
Frankly, it was a LOT of hassle. I sleep better know since we are covered more adequately than before (we were pretty underinsured on our home). Nonetheless, all I was really looking for in the beginning was a simple, standalone wine policy. I simply could not get that after trying on and off for 18 months. InsureYourWine, had it existed, would have been PERFECT for my needs. I do see that in Washington it is $0.67 per $100 so a bit more expensive than my Chartis insurance, but again I had to go through a lot to get the Chartis insurance in the first place.
I do get a small kick for people who are referred via CT on this page for example: Wine Insurance - CellarTracker Support
Let me look that up in Quicken. Here we go. I have earned $418.83 in three years. Not especially earth shattering.
Eric - this of course makes sense. My question is - how does one decide if there is a loss (other than the obvious). Say your power goes off for a week in the summer - say the temps in the cellar get to 80 degrees. Is that a loss? Is it a partial loss only for bottles that have seepage or something similar? A total loss? How does it work for your policy? I would think this would be the most common case - as opposed to a fire where your house burns down or similar.
I was not trying to insinuate anything because no efforts were made to veil the fact that they are on your site. The transparency on the financials is refreshing, but not essential to make your point, which you did.
Cheers,
fred
Fred, no insinuation taken. I try to be as transparent as I can when possible. The snark at the end was more of a harrumph to myself, since at one point I thought that something like this could actually make me real $.
Loren, that is a really good question for an agent. In my case, we built a cellar not having any idea how it would poerform. Right after it was done we had our only hundred degree day ever in Seattle. No wine in the cellar yet. No cooling turned on. Temp in the cellar was 61.5 degrees… So the only way I will cook wine is with a fire. I am more worried about theft, quake, or wall collapse.
I need this on my to do list. Even though I store offsite, it is a good idea.
Does anyone know if Chubb covers professional offsite storage if you already have a policy with them?
If I understand your question correctly, the answer is yes. I have Chubb for homeowners and a rider policy for professionally stored wine in another state - sent Chubb an inventory list and provided them with security and temperature control back-up measures of the facility. My rate is $.50/$100.
not sure that’s true. It of course depends on the value of the cellar.
alan
I’m reading the disclosure sent by insureyourwine.com and it’s saying the insurance policy is issued by an insurer not licensed by the state of California which makes it a “surplus line” insurer. Basically that means there is no insurance guarantee if the company becomes insolvent.
Is this also true for Chubb or Chartis?
Fwiw, they define loss as broken glass, pushed corks and or significant leakage (not sure how significant is defined).
I am presently switching to Farmers for my overall insurance. Their wine insurance seems simple and is cheaper than the others quoted here (which are already reasonable). They also offer earthquake insurance for wine at about the same rate as their regular accidental wine coverage. I may do it.
I believe they’re covered through Lloyd’s of London. Of course you would have to verify this. A friend of mine broke some Gentaz Cote Rotie and was covered immediately.
Damn it, now the jingle is running through my head.
Dum da dum dum, dum dum dum.
To Fred C and any others interested in “surplus lines”
The first and foremost thing to understand about the so-called state backstop for admitted paper (meaning insurance policies which ARE NOT surprlus) is that the policy limit is $500,000 per account in California. Other states vary, some have no guarantee fund, and of course, regardless of the existence of a fund, good luck getting paid.
Second, a non-admitted carrier does not mean non-regulated. They must still file proof of financial health, capital requirements, etc. They do not however file a rate schedule, which allows pricing flexibility based on underwriting (upward or downward)
The insureyourwine product is underwritten by RSA, which is one of the largest insurance syndicates in the world. they carry an A rating from AM Best. Thus, I would put the financial health of RSA against the state of california or dept. of insurance any day!
Chartis, Chubb, FF, and the others use both admitted and non-admitted paper. They have policies issued in many states (for example, my missouri homeowners is issued by a maryland based affiliate of firemans fund…you can be sure that structure is not designed to someone be beneficial to me!) and even on a homeowners policy, may insure parts of the package in different ways.
I am not in anyway saying that chubb, chartis, etc are bad products or dangerous…in fact they were the blueprint for starting IYW. The simple fact is that many people cannot, or rather not, bundle their wine with homeowners at reasonable rates. IYW is simply a standalone alternative.
thanks,
Marc
I am looking into insuring my wines as well. What are people’s thoughts -
Is there any point in insuring for the total value of the cellar? If I have a case of 2010 BV that I got for $8 a bottle, do I really want to include that in the value and pay to insure it. What do you think about insuring a percentage of the total value? The only issue would be if something happened to cause total cellar loss (and even then, do I care about the QPRs?)…I’m torn - help me out!
I actually just took out a new policy with a Fireman’s Fund sub about 2 weeks ago…A few details for any interested, hopefully it’s at least a little helpful:
They wouldn’t do a standalone policy unless the cellar value was $100K+, not surprising really, and it’s been pointed out already in this thread many companies do that…Since I’m not quite there yet 
I needed to roll it together with my homeowners insurance. I actually had no problem with this, as I had been meaning to increase my insurance coverage, get an umbrella policy, insure separately some other collectible items, including my wine, and our old insurance policy was about to expire anyway.
When all is said and done I’m paying .45 per $100 for both an itemized coverage policy, in which I have my high value bottles that are in professional storage itemized and I just can update that when necessary with a cellar tracker spreadsheet, and a blanket coverage policy for the wine I keep at my house. Just as a side note on storage, I was also told that having my wine in professional storage actually didn’t matter on the insurance pricing until the value got over $100K. Of course I’ve only had it 2 weeks, thus I haven’t filed a claim, and hope I never will, so I have no insight into how the claim process would work, but I definitely feel better that all my wine is well insured now.
Sure, my premium jumped very significantly, but that’s more of an indication of how under-insured I was before, than FF being expensive. Fair warning on this though, I’m near Washington DC, not the West Coast, so the premiums are probably somewhat different.
These are basically the FF highlights from the brochure my agent sent:
Blanket and itemized coverage options
Choose blanket coverage or itemized coverage or a combination of the two. With blanket coverage, your entire collection is covered under one limit, with a generous single bottle limit of up to $50,000. Itemized coverage is recommended for wines valued at $10,000 or more and can be combined with blanket coverage to provide the best protection for your collection.
Power outage and mechanical breakdown
This coverage includes loss due to power outage or mechanical breakdown of heating, cooling and humidity control equipment - critical coverages for oenophiles.
Wide spectrum of perils
Coverage spans a wide spectrum of causes of loss including fire and theft breakage, flood, and a range of others.
New purchase protection
For new additions to itemized collections, Prestige Collections® coverage automatically provides up to 100% of the itemized limit for wine on the policy for new purchases for up to 90 days, giving you plenty of time to report your new acquisitions to us. Compare this to 25% or a maximum of $50,000 offered by leading competitors.
Worldwide coverage
Your wine is protected worldwide and while in transit.
No deductibles on standard policies.
Since I’ve seen others posting disclosure stuff; I’m not in the business, just love wine, and I’m definitely not an insurance salesman
Am getting Fireman’s Fund insurance at a great rate. They do standalone above a certain amount, at least for the time being (homeowner’s with the luxury insurers like Fireman’s and Chubb is wasteful unless you own a mansion, or several). I had to contact these guys on the East Coast, believe it or not:
http://www.ellisinsurance.com/articles/home/wine_hub.htm
I first tried calling a local agent for Fireman’s, and the guy I talked to was a moron who clearly didn’t want my business (I savaged them on Yelp FWIW).