Oct 30
Wine Insurance
Suppose you’re one of those people who enjoy a glass of dry chenin blanc with lunch and an adequate merlot with dinner. If you are, it’s altogether possible that you have a room, or cellar, or a climate controlled room in the cellar that houses your wine collection. Some say that wine collecting is the junction of affluence and idleness, but others point to the venerable European history of the crushed grape and claim its product to be worthy of a connoisseur’s attention.
In either case, if you’re a collector of wines that tend to gain value as they age, you ought to have your collection insured. For a small collection, not too expensive and primarily for consumption, insure your wines under your homeowners’ policy. Just check to make sure you have enough contents coverage to include your wines. This particular hobby illustrates the importance of a yearly inventory of your home’s contents for purposes of homeowner protection.
If your wine collection is large, you should probably invest in a stand-alone “valuable articles” policy, which gives you broader coverage than your home policy does. You can insure a collection up to a certain blanket amount (say $25,000). For collections more valuable than this, it starts to make sense to insure the wine on an itemized basis, bottle by bottle.
Stand-alone wine policies cost about 40 to 50 cents for every hundred dollars’ worth of wine. If you have a wine collection worth $100,000, your annual insurance premium is around $420. If you’ve gotten to the point where each label must be itemized, there are small specialty houses that provide wine insurance to the truly obsessed vinophile. But doesn’t that seem like buying a car that’s too rare to drive?
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October 31st, 2007 at 12:09 am
Insurance for wine? That leads me to think that it makes as much sense as insurance for really-really rare baseball cards… or any other valuable collection. Which is to say, it makes a whole lot of sense! These are considered investments, I would think, so they need coverage.
Jerry
http://www.leads4insurance.com