Toxic Wine

The good news is that my wife and I moved to a new home yesterday.
The bad news is that the movers broke my 12 year old beautiful Dometic silent wine cave literally causing a toxic mess in the new home.
I have taken care of the toxicity problem but am now sitting with about 250 bottles in my living room and am in need of a new wine cave.
I could use some berserker advise.
The old Dometic had no compressor so it was absolutely silent…a nice feature. I need a unit that can hold about 200 bottles or more. Something quite, well made and attractive would also be nice. Recommendations? Please help wine berserkers…the summer season will be here soon and cooked wine is no fun… thanks

What was the toxic part?

Also, probably change the title to reflect your desire for cooler recs.

Well, if you were a redneck, then you’d hop on board Craigslist and see what’s happening.

I got more than 700 hits on “wine cooler”, but just on the first page of hits, I saw these two commercial units, over in a restaurant supply store, very roughly at the border between Brooklyn & Queens [assuming the map can be trusted]:

https://tinyurl.com/y4jj3dmy

If those were legit made-in-the-USA commercial units, from a legit USA refrigeration manufacturer [which had downloadable PDFs on its website, for specs & service & spare parts], and if those units were in good condition, then I’d be all over them like White on rice.

I would always purchase used commercial gear before I considered new [or used] consumer-grade gear.

PS: And I didn’t even scroll all the way down the first page - there must be 675 more ads which I didn’t look at.

Broken cooler lines in the back of unit fractured and released unknown type of coolant that had extraordinary concentrated ammonia fumes.
Nathan, thank you for the suggestion, and I may take a look. However I am hoping for specific recommendations of brands/models that people on the board own and like.
I am

Peter, edit the title of your first post if you want it to show up that way on the main page of the forum.

Being a redneck, I take the opposite approach - I look to see what’s available [at what prices] on Craigslist & eBay, and then work backwards to figure out which is the best value.

You can get one or two $100 consumer-grade Whirlpool refrigerators off of Craigslist, and they’ll keep your 250 bottles perfectly cool all summer [even just in your garage], until you can figure out which $20,000 luxury wine cellar you want to spend your Goldman Sachs paycheck on.

[If you’re worried about humidity with your wines, then you can put a big bowl of water in there with them. Pierre Rovani used to recommend a further trick, where you suspend a towel hanging up out of the water; the water gets sucked out of the bowl, into the towel, and then evaporates off the towel and into the rest of the enclosure.]

But, again, being a redneck, I’d get a $1000 used commercial-grade refrigerator before I spent $10,000 or $20,000 on a new consumer-grade wine cellar.

The commercial units aren’t going to be as quite or as pretty and in a NYC apartment, that may be a consideration. If he has a brownstone with a basement, that’s a better choice as the commercial units are typically more robust as they get harder use. I wouldn’t worry about humidity at all and until a new unit comes, I’d leave the AC on once the temps outside start heading into the mid 70s-80s.

Oh, almost forgot. In answer to the question about what I have and like, I have a Vinoteque that is nominally for 250 bottles. The problem is it’s over 20 years old so I have no idea if they are comparable today. it doesn’t have a blower and a fan like Whisperkool; it has a plate in the back, just like a regular fridge and it can be serviced by any refrigerator repair guy. Last guy who looked at it said it was a great unit since most fridges don’t last 20 years any more. No idea if that’s true or not, or if current models are as good.

Keep in mind that for any of these, the bottle count is not going to be what you get. It only works if every bottle is a Bordeaux shape and they are identically sized and packed super tightly. Larger shoulders, Rhone shapes, Riesling shapes, fat bottoms, all of those will make you lose space. So figure that any capacity quoted is about 25% overstated.

Clicked on this thinking it was about chemical/pesticide residues in wine…

That’s why people live on Craigslist & eBay.

Everything in the mainstream consumer segment of the economy is made-in-china junk now.

Nothing works anymore.

Everything breaks.

People fight each other to get their hands on vintage made-in-America fabrications which can last a century or more.

Have you ever priced “steam punk”?

Or vintage cast iron fencing?

I honestly think that circa 1950s American engineering was so solid and the products so durable that they ran out of customers because nothing ever broke down.

At which point the snakes in the business schools & the economics departments were motivated to invent the concept of planned obsolescence.

And the chinese were more than happy to implement that reptilian agenda.

Thank you Greg