How vintage pu’er cakes are valued for insurance
Every cake stored across the tea.money network is meant to carry the same quiet promise — that if something goes wrong, its worth will be measured with the same care given to its leaves. Most collectors cannot easily prove the replacement value of a mid-aged Shēng Pǔ’ěr after a warehouse incident, and that gap is what this framework tries to close.
The method leans on comparable sales rather than a black-box formula: realised and estimated auction prices for lots we can verify — the same kind of dated, sourced records shown on the vintages page — cross-referenced against the cake’s own storage history, wrapper condition, and any prior tasting notes from the resident master overseeing its property. For cakes without a close public comparable, the appraisal leans more heavily on producer, region, and storage-microclimate factors and is correspondingly less precise. We say so on the report itself rather than presenting a false level of confidence.
An appraisal is a single-page document: valuation date, the comparable lots used and their sources, the storage condition at time of assessment, and a photograph of the wrapper. Behind it sits a human reviewer, not an automated pricing engine — currently senior tea expert Fang Ting, whose two decades of work with Shēng Pǔ’ěr from Hénán and Yúnnán ground the judgement calls a comparable-sales method can’t fully automate: the tightness that signals early Wò Duī influence, the faint change in a wrapper’s foxing pattern.
We do not yet have a large enough claims history to publish a reliable settlement-time statistic, and we would rather say that plainly than quote a number pulled from too small a sample. As real claims are handled, we intend to publish an honest track record here — when there is enough of one to mean something.
What this is not, yet
- Not an automated valuation algorithm — every figure above a modest threshold goes through Fang Ting’s review, not a formula alone.
- Not a live dashboard — appraisal updates travel the same way every other tea.money report does, by email, tied to a specific cake and a specific date.
- Not a secondary marketplace — a replacement-cost figure describes what it would cost to reacquire an equivalent cake, not a listing price for reselling yours; see the risk disclosure for what we do and do not run in that regard.
What changes as this matures
- Appraisal notes will be cross-checked against a growing set of comparable sales, prioritising the dated, sourced lots also shown on the vintages page, rather than an internal number nobody outside tea.money can verify.
- High-value cakes continue to go through human review with Fang Ting, not an automated cutoff.
- Once enough real claims exist to report a settlement-time figure honestly, we will publish it here rather than estimate it in advance.