Wineries and vineyards face risks that most other small businesses don't. A wildfire can wipe out an entire harvest. A guest can get hurt in your tasting room. A broken refrigeration unit can ruin a batch of wine. The right insurance protects your business, your property and your customers.
Work with an agent or broker who specializes in the wine industry to get the coverage you need. That includes:
- General liability insurance or a business owner's policy (BOP). This covers you if someone is injured on your property or if your business causes property damage. If you own your winery building or store equipment there, a BOP bundles property coverage and liability protection in one policy.
- Property and equipment breakdown insurance. This covers your buildings and fields and the things inside them, with some exceptions (most notably, your crops themselves). Equipment coverage insures your production equipment — like fermentation tanks, bottling lines and chillers — if those machines fail. Again, there are some exceptions.
- Workers' compensation. Most states require this once you have at least one employee. It pays for medical bills and lost wages if a worker gets hurt on the job. This includes seasonal harvest workers in most states.
- Liquor liability insurance. If you operate a tasting room or serve wine at events, you need this. It protects you if a guest drinks at your winery and later causes an accident or injury. Many states hold alcohol sellers legally responsible in these situations.
Read on for our recommendations.
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Best insurance companies for wineries and vineyards
NerdWallet’s editorial team chooses the best business insurance companies based on several factors. For wineries, we focused on insurers that:
- Get few complaints from customers, based on data from state insurance regulators.
- Are financially strong, meaning they're likely to pay claims.
- Offer coverage types that wineries specifically need, like liquor liability, crop insurance and spoilage coverage.
Here are our picks. We always recommend getting quotes from more than one insurer to find the best deal.
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Philadelphia Insurance
Best overall insurer for wineries
Philadelphia Insurance earns our top overall rating for wineries. Credit rating agency AM Best gives Philadelphia its highest possible marks for financial strength, and the company gets very few customer complaints. Philadelphia offers a winery-specific insurance package that can help protect you from property and liability risks. You'll need to work with an independent insurance agent to get a policy.
We haven’t written a review of Philadelphia Insurance yet.
Chubb
Best for estate wineries
Chubb is a great choice for wineries with a lot of valuable property. It also earns a “superior” financial strength rating from AM Best and has the fewest commercial property complaints of any insurer in our analysis. Chubb can cover grapevines and trellises, wine in production and business income loss if you face a disaster, like a wildfire or earthquake. This insurer works best for estate wineries and larger operations.
The Hartford
Best for small wineries
The Hartford is an easy insurer for small or newer wineries to work with. It has solid financial strength and customer complaint scores. If your winery has a tasting room or hosts events, The Hartford’s BOP and liquor liability insurance are a good place to start. The Hartford offers online quotes for some types of coverage. But a vineyard’s needs are complex enough that you’ll likely have to call or work with an agent.
Travelers
Best for large manufacturers
Travelers is our top pick for mid-size to large wineries. It has a dedicated winery and vineyard program. And in general, Travelers Agribusiness has deep experience covering agricultural risks, like spoilage, leakage, chemical drift and extreme weather. The company earns a “superior” AM Best rating, has strong complaint scores, and offers nearly every type of insurance coverage.
What is winery and vineyard insurance?
Winery and vineyard insurance protect these businesses financially from legal claims, property damage and more. Viticulturists, estate wineries, tasting rooms, wedding venues and boutique wineries need coverage.
Winery and vineyard insurance can cover you in cases like:
- A wildfire damages your tasting room building.
- Smoke drifts over your vineyard and ruins your harvest.
- An employee harvesting grapes suffers heat exhaustion.
- Someone files a lawsuit alleging that your event venue is out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
- A patron drinks in your tasting room, then gets into an auto accident after leaving.
- A wine club member’s credit card gets stolen in a cyberattack on your point-of-sale system.
What insurance policies do wineries and vineyards need?
What insurance you need depends on what exactly your winery does.
General liability insurance for wineries
Every business should have general liability insurance. It covers claims from people outside your business for bodily injury, property damage or personal injury. For a winery, that could mean a visitor who slips near the crush pad, a guest injured on a vineyard tour or a delivery driver who falls at your loading dock.
Though it’s usually not a legal requirement, most business licenses and distributor contracts won't happen without proof of general liability insurance.
Commercial property insurance
Commercial property insurance covers your buildings, equipment, inventory and other physical assets if they're damaged by fire, storms, theft, or vandalism. For a winery, that means your tasting room, production facilities, barrel storage, bottling lines, fermentation tanks and bottled wine inventory.
If your business earns less than $1 million to $2 million in revenue, you can combine general liability insurance and commercial property insurance into a business owner’s policy.
One important gap to know about: Standard property policies don't cover your grapes while they’re still in the ground. You need a dedicated crop insurance policy for that.
You likely need a few other supplemental property insurance policies too. These cover risks that property insurance generally excludes:
- Equipment breakdown insurance. This covers fermentation tanks, chillers, bottling lines, pumps and other production equipment when they experience a surprise failure. (Normal wear and tear isn’t covered.)
- Contamination and spoilage coverage. This can pay out if you lose wine or ingredients to refrigeration failure, power outage or contamination.
- Inland marine insurance. These policies cover your wine while in transit to a distributor facility, warehouse or special event.
Workers’ comp insurance
Most states require workers' comp for any business with employees, and seasonal harvest workers typically count. If you rely on seasonal or H-2A agricultural workers, check your state's specific rules. Requirements for temporary employees vary.
Workers' compensation pays for medical bills and lost wages when an employee gets hurt or sick on the job. And winery workers face lots of risks. These include harvest workers doing repetitive labor in the heat, forklift and heavy equipment accidents and chemical exposure from sulfites and pesticides.
Liquor liability insurance for tap rooms
Liquor liability insurance covers injury or property damage caused by alcohol you sold or served, including accidents that happen after a guest leaves your property. If you run a tasting room, host events or sell wine by the glass, this coverage is essential.
If you only produce wine and sell it wholesale to distributors or stores, you may not need it. Talk to your insurance agent about your state's laws to be sure.
Product liability insurance for wine producers
Product liability insurance covers injury or property damage caused by a problem with your wine. That might include contamination during production, glass fragments from a broken bottle or improper labeling that fails to disclose allergens.
General liability insurance usually includes some product liability protection. But if you distribute your wine, you probably need more protection. Your agent can help you evaluate your options.
Business interruption insurance
Losing prepared wine to a wildfire or having a fermentation tank fail at the wrong moment can cost you months of revenue. Business interruption insurance covers that lost income. Business interruption insurance is typically tied to your property insurance policy, so if the property damage is covered, the income loss usually is too.
Note that business interruption insurance generally doesn't cover a bad harvest on its own. That requires separate crop insurance.
Crop insurance for grape growers
The USDA's Risk Management Agency (RMA) manages federal crop insurance. It is the main tool grape growers use to protect against wildfire, smoke taint, frost and other weather events that damage your crops.
Even if the grapes survive, they might have absorbed too much smoke to produce good wine. In 2020, for instance, $601 million worth of California wine grapes went unharvested because they were exposed to wildfire smoke. The USDA paid out more than $227 million in crop insurance claims that year.
When exactly the damage happened matters for a smoke damage claim. If the grapes were stained while still on the vine, that’s a crop insurance claim. But if it happened after they were harvested, like during transport or storage, that might be a property insurance claim. Talk to your agent about making sure your property insurance policy covers those losses.
To get crop insurance, you’ll have to work with a crop insurance agent who sells policies for a USDA-approved insurer. Find one using the USDA’s local agent locator. The government sets rates, so you don’t need to shop around for multiple quotes.
Special considerations for wineries that host events or tasting rooms
If your winery hosts weddings, private parties or concerts, you face much greater liability risks. Consider adding:
- Cyber insurance. If a hacker steals your wine club members’ credit card numbers, this can cover the cost of notifying them and even paying a ransom if necessary.
- Special event liability insurance. This covers lawsuits arising from special events.
- A commercial umbrella policy. This is a good idea for most midsize businesses. It adds to the amount your insurance will pay out on top of your other liability policies, including general liability, liquor liability and product liability.
Make sure your outside vendors have their own insurance too. You can ask them to add your winery as an additional insured. That way, if a claim names you both, their insurance policy will pay out first.
How much do wineries and vineyards pay for insurance?
NerdWallet doesn’t have data about insurance costs for wineries and vineyards. But all of these factors will affect your premiums:
- Size of your operation. More acres, higher production volume and more employees all mean higher premiums.
- Location. Wineries in high wildfire-risk areas like California, Oregon and Washington pay more for property and crop coverage than wineries in Michigan.
- Whether you have a tasting room or host events. This adds liquor liability and event liability costs.
- Value of your equipment, wine inventory and finished products. The more valuable your assets, the more coverage you need.
- Your claims history. Past claims will increase your premiums in general.
- Seasonal vs. full-time employees. The mix affects your workers' comp premiums.
- How you sell your wine. Estate wineries that sell directly to consumers face more exposure than growers who only sell to other wine producers.
Insurance costs for businesses in wildfire-prone areas have been rising in recent years as climate change makes fire season longer and more intense. In 2024, a California legislator called it a “winery insurance crisis".
If you struggle to find an insurer, work with your agent to explore excess and surplus lines carriers. These companies take on the insurance policies that other companies think are too risky. They’re generally not household names, although large companies like AIG and Chubb write some excess and surplus lines policies. These carriers have increasingly picked up slack as traditional insurance companies get more cautious in areas like California.
To control your insurance costs, we recommend working with an insurance broker who specializes in the wine industry. An industry expert can help you find programs designed specifically for wineries. These probably have more competitive prices than putting together a hodgepodge of other insurance policies.
How to get insurance for your winery or vineyard
Winery and vineyard owners should work with insurance agents. Because of how many types of coverage your business needs, I don’t recommend trying to get insurance on your own.
Follow these steps to get your winery or vineyard covered:
- Find an agent or broker. Ask around in the industry to see if any of your peers can suggest someone with expertise. Take time to find a good broker who understands wine-specific risks, like smoke taint and equipment breakdown, to ensure you get complete coverage.
- Map out your operation. Think about every activity that takes place at your winery — growing, winemaking, bottling, operating a tasting room, hosting weddings — and every job someone does on site. Your agent can help identify all the risks you need coverage for.
- Find a crop insurance agent and get coverage. USDA RMA crop insurance has enrollment deadlines specific to different crops and states. To have grape coverage for the 2026 growing season, for example, Washington growers needed to buy insurance in fall 2025. Northern California growers needed to buy before the end of January. Your crop insurance agent may not be able to help you with other policies, though.
- Get quotes for everything else. Your agent or broker can help you get quotes from one or several insurance companies that offer the coverage wineries need.
- Review and update your coverage annually. If your business grows or you start offering new services, you’ll need more coverage. Meet with your broker to see if your coverage is still sufficient or if you need to make changes. If costs feel like they’re getting out of control, they can help you shop around for alternatives.
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- 1. Choices, a publication of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Wildfires and Smoke Exposure Create Contracting and Crop Insurance Challenges for California's Wine Industry. Accessed Jun 10, 2026.
- 2. USDA Risk Management Agency. Beginner's Guide to Crop Insurance. Accessed Jun 10, 2026.
- 3. Marie Alvarado-Gil, California State Senator. Uncorking California's Winery Insurance Crisis. Accessed Jun 10, 2026.
