The recent thread on the breakage of bottles with Bergman Estates made me wonder just how common breakage is with shipping in either wood or cardboard boxes. Honestly, I have never had a problem and I am sure I am over a thousand bottles shipped over the years. Just today I had Detert (wood cases), Realm (cardboard), and Impensata (wood cases). Also had some Bedrock which was in cardboard shippers. I was really impressed with the Detert - shipped in a plastic sandwich. The Impensata had that cellulose stuff that is supposed to melt with water (or whatever), and the Realm was heavy cardboard with some foam inserts. Anyhow, no breakage. Your mileage clearly may vary…
Received a package today that was thrashed, containing Rousseau chambertin and Yquem mags 
luckily there was excellent additional packing inside the box and the bottles were unscathed.
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Well that is certainly balling when you would rather have the d’Yquem Mag break!
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I had a pallet of wine fall off a forklift. Most of the bottles smashed, those that survived had labels completely stained. Luckily, it wasn’t anything rare, and insurance took over.
Have also had a few bottles on the bottom corner of pallets break because of bad stacking, or forklifts just missing the mark and punching through the box. At least its only been one or two bottles when this happens.
wow thats bananas. whose insurance has to cover that?
I think it was the shipping company. It happened during shipping when they were loading a LCL load. Negligence by the forklift driver. Not much we could do about it, but I was made whole.
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Surprisingly, I’ve only ever had one package get damaged during shipping and had to be shipped back to sender. It was with Fedex. Anyways, I think it’s like a 1% chance. I’ve had two other instances where bottles froze during shipping and pushed the corks out, but I think that’s more on the winery deciding to ship in the dead of winter…
I went to pick up a pallet of 1982 Sassicaia at Customs at SFO. We air freighted everything from Europe as reefers were not reliable going via ship thru the Panama Canal.
I was standing behind the yellow line as the fork lift was bringing the wine the last hundred feet of its journey.
As the forkllift made the right turn to bring it in squarely to the pick up area the palllet slipped off the forks landing on its side with the sound of smashing bottles. We lost just under one hundred bottles.
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I once received notice that some containers had gone overboard from a boat carrying a shipment of mine. Fortunately my boxes were spared. Prior to this I had no idea that it was such a common occurrence for shipping containers to be lost at sea. While % is pretty low, estimates still range from around 600-2,000/yr going over.
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I have only had one shipment with breakage and that was a Bedrock years ago. A bottle on the corner of a case. When you think about it, that is pretty amazing considering all the bottles received over the years.
I’ve had a few packages that were damaged during transit that never made it to me; usually ups or fedex just has a status update about package damaged and returns it to the sender.