Wine Insurance

Serious wine collectors should consider insuring their wine. If you store your wines at wine storage facilities, such places will (on the whole) already have insurance arrangements in place. If you store in your own cellars, you need to be sure you are adequately covered.

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.

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.