Wine Cooler advice

ryder72

The original post is a few years old. Since then there are are many more products on the market.

The 15 and 30cm wine cooler market is dominated by chinese made products, almost all made by the same manufacturer and rebadged. Generally speaking, very poor quality so really a case of 'get what you pay for'.

The Samsung unit is freestanding and not great, BUT if you can buy it from JL with some sort of extended warranty, they can be decent value for money. What put me off was the very strong odour of stain applied to the wine shelves. These are wood (typically acacia) to help with odour control. Putting in stained wood shelves with strong odour is a waste of time.

Without a doubt the best ones out there are made by Miele/Liebherr and Eurocave.

revgraham

Transtherm are also very good and marginally cheaper than Eurocave. Like Eurocave they only make wine stores.

THe expensive coolers make a big thing of minimising vibration as well as maintaining constant temperature and humidity. Vibration will age wines as quickly as high/variable temperatures.

If you're just cooling wines to drink more or less immediately, it won't matter a huge amount, but I'd like to be able to lay down wines for several years - it's a lot cheaper to buy them at 1-2 years old than when they're mature.

As others have commented, you can buy a lot of good wines for £1000 - you'd need to store a lot of fairly expensive wine to justify the cost.