Aivin

For owners: the second largest asset in the building has no current number on it.

An insurer’s schedule from 2019 is not a valuation. Aivin carries six bases of value over one cellar, shows the working on every lot with comparables by venue and date, and prints a document a credentialed appraiser can sign. From $750 published, against $2,500 to $6,000 for an engagement rebuilt from scratch every time.

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Photograph — Amin Zabardast / Unsplash

The four lines that survive a finance review

The asset is unmeasured
Most rooms can tell you last month’s beverage cost to the decimal and cannot tell you what the cellar is worth within thirty percent. One of those numbers is on the P&L and the other is on the balance sheet.
The exposure runs both ways
Under-insured is discovered at claim, with the adjuster holding a schedule you cannot substantiate. Over-insured is a premium paid annually for nothing. Both are arithmetic and one document fixes both.
The cost is bounded and published
From $750 for the document and $375 to re-certify. Compare that to the published $2,500 to $6,000 for an outside engagement where the appraiser rebuilds the schedule because nobody kept the last one.
The operating return is a separate case
Inactive inventory, shut windows and by-the-glass exposure are recovered by the monitoring, not the valuation. Do not let one line carry the other’s justification — finance will notice.

What an appraiser will check first

If you have not commissioned one of these before: a reviewing appraiser goes to the evidence before the total. How many comparable sales sit behind each lot, how recent, from which venue, and what the spread between them looks like. Then the adjustments — whether format and condition were applied at all, and in which order.

A schedule with a total and no working is a schedule that gets sent back. That is why every figure in Aivin opens to its derivation, and why the document prints the multiplier order rather than summarising it.

The objection

Agreed, and the document says so on its own face. What Aivin removes is the fortnight underneath the opinion: pulling comparables, applying adjustments, grading evidence lot by lot, and holding an effective-dated snapshot so next year reproduces rather than restarts.

The appraiser arrives at the judgment with the evidence already assembled and puts their name to that. That is a better use of their rate than data entry.

Software cannot appraise a cellar. An appraisal is a professional opinion.

Any credentialed appraiser

Questions people ask first

How much does a wine cellar valuation cost?

Nobody in this category will give me a number.

From $750 for a cellar under 400 lots, and $375 to re-certify against a new effective date. Published, not quoted. Larger cellars scale by lot count on the same scale. An outside appraiser runs $2,500 to $6,000 and rebuilds the schedule from scratch every time, because nobody kept the working from the last one.

Can software appraise a wine cellar?

An appraisal is a professional opinion. You cannot automate that.

No, and Aivin does not claim to. The opinion is an appraiser’s and the signature carries their credential. What Aivin removes is the fortnight underneath it: pulling comparables by venue and date, applying format and condition adjustments, and grading the evidence lot by lot. Unsigned, the document states on its own face that it is appraisal support.