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France, March 19th 2008
Chateaux owner insures his nose
by Sophie Kevany
A Bordeaux Chateau owner has insured his nose for €5m ($7.87m) with Lloyd’s of London. Dutch-born Ilja Gort, who signed the insurance contract on 17 March, owns Chateau de la Garde on Bordeaux’s left bank. “Winemaking and tasting is all done with the nose,” Gort said, saying the nose is essential to guarantee the quality of his wines. “There are only five different zones on the tongue, but in the nose there are about 50 million sensors. You actually taste with your nose.”
When his wines, classified as Bordeaux Superieur, began to win prizes the Dutchman decided his nose was worth insuring.
“We invest a lot in winemaking and my nose is used for judging the assemblage for example,” said Gort, who has just won a gold medal for his 2006 and 2005 Chateau de la Garde vintages at the Concours Général Agricole in Paris.
Gort, who bought the Chateau 10 years ago, produces about 80,000 bottles a year, all of which are sold by Sainsbury’s supermarkets in London.
He said his nose is now insured against both loss, and loss of smell. Asked the cost of the insurance, for which premiums are paid annually, Gort would only say it was somewhere in the thousands. “Between Jennifer Lopez’s behind and David Beckhams legs.”
Jonathan Thomas, the lead underwriter at Lloyd’s Watkins Syndicate, said Lloyd’s specialises in these kinds of bespoke insurance policies.
Thomas told American news agency, AP, that his company had already insured the senses of taste and smell of wine taster Angela Mount for €12.7m in 2003, for her bosses at British supermarket chain Somerfield.
Certain conditions are included in the insurance, however, and Gort is now forbidden from riding a motorcycle, boxing, being a knife thrower’s assistant or fire breathing. But none of that is, literally, any skin off his nose.
