So our AC unit compressor failed in our AZ house in July and we went without AC for 14 days. My wine cooler can only keep it 20 degrees cooler than the air temp–so all of my wine sat in 80+ degree heat for 10-14 days.
I filed a claim with our insurance company for the damage to the wine but they have been troublesome to say the least.
Does anyone have any experience or suggestions that could be offered up to me on how to get them to cover the damaged wine. They hired a “forensic chemist” to investigate what happens to wine when it get too hot. I have send them research papers, articles etc but they just don’t seem to get how the wine goes bad.
I have a conference call tomorrow with the claims adjustor and his boss to discuss this claim
You most likely have two issues. The first as you already noted is to get them to even acknowledge that harm was done to the wine. Assuming, you can win that point, the second is as David noted, it depends on how wine is treated in you policy. If this is a standard home owners policy with no riders or extra coverage for your wine, then the most likely case is that wine will be treated as perishable food up to the limits of you policy. This could be a problem if your perishable food clause is specific to contents of a freezer as I have seen in some policies. Most home insurance companies don’t cover wine as collectibles without special coverage and then it often comes with specific conditions such as segregation from other wine that is for consumption and possibly storage condition requirements of course with special premiums for the coverage.
The above is based on my personal experience with home owner’s insurance and having agents tell me my wine is covered when I was sure it wasn’t. After having been told this repeatedly, I mailed my agent a full inventory of the cellar with current valuation and requested that they reiterate the previous claims that I was covered in writing. Only at this point did they pursue the answer and determined I wasn’t covered.
Unless you have wine specific coverage I suspect you will have a hard getting a claims payout.
Honestly, you might even consider withdrawing your claim, if homeowners policies are hard to obtain in your region. Getting approved for $x of wine, and then getting dropped for homeowners policy, and entered into the CLUE database, could long run cost you more.
Normally, spoiled good due to refrigerator going out will only be covered if there is a covered loss. Failure of the fridge just due to mechanical failure not triggered by something else (like a power surge) is not covered.
In any case, there might be a very modest sub limit as well.
Ouch. That is tough. I asked my insurance company about coverage for wine in the event of fire or earthquake. They said we’d get a blanket amount for items in the house (assuming total loss). Since we don’t have jewerly, art, and fancy cloths, cars, and furniture, the amount would more than make up for the wine. But your loss is very specific and likely not specified in the policy.
Here are some things that the claims adjuster said. Quite funny…but he kept trying.
We don’t cover a refrigerated product
Wine has bacteria in it so we don’t cover anything like that
Wine has yeast in it, so we don’t cover that either.
The only reason the wine went bad is that our AC compressor failed and because of supply/demand, we couldn’t get it replaced for almost 2 weeks. I’m like Chris in that we don’t have jewelry, art etc. Only about 200 bottles of wine in our 2nd house.
I’ll let you know what happens after tomorrows conversation.
So–what is the consensus on the board for wine cellars? Should we all have specific riders on our policies, much like art or jewels? Those bottles and $$ add up over time.
Depends on the value of those 200 bottles, and how frequently you turn them over, and I’m sure other factors I’m unaware of. There are specific policies that would serve you better, it’s unlikely a general home policy will cover this.
General home owners policies are not meant to cover specialty collectibles. It sounds like OP is trying to pursue a claim under a general policy which is why they are encountering pushback.
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For normal collectors who are NOT in the business of deriving income from their cellar, or for those where wine is NOT a large share of their overall net worth, I don’t even think it makes sense to obtain that specialty insurance like Chubb offers. It costs 75 bps to 400 bps of cellar replacement value (from quotes I have heard bandied about) which seems like a very high imputed expected loss rate.
I’m using American Collectors Insurance for a wine specific policy that covers three different storage locations. They cover many types of claims mentioned above (temperature, earthquake, etc) but thankfully I never had to file a claim so I don’t know if they actually will come through.
Are any of the corks pushed up? Is there seepage on any of the bottles? Was it 80+ degrees or 90+? If it there are no pushed corks, and no seepage, and temps were in the 80s, I suspect you’ll be surprised to find that your aging curve is slightly accelerated at worst. The wine is unlikely to be ruined, IMO. It may be a bottle-by-bottle situation and I’d likely start drinking the more fragile bottles (older wines, dry whites, Champagne, etc.) sooner rather than later. There are some threads here where people have left wines in garages in the summer, etc., to test the effects of heat and often were surprised by how little the wines were impacted. It’s obviously not ideal, but I do think wine is sturdier than we tend to expect. Good luck!
Since we are rapping about wine insurance, if a claim is indeed paid out for the value of someone’s wine collection, what happens to the bottles?
It seems like the insurer would take them, though I’m not sure what they would do with them then. If you crash your car and the insurer just pays out the value, you don’t get to keep the car, they take it.
If this were the choice, do you even want to hand over your collection in exchange for a check from the insurance company?
I mean, if the corks are pushed out and they’re all leaking, or you try several and they all taste ruined, then sure, but if not …
I have send them research papers, articles etc but they just don’t seem to get how the wine goes bad.