It’s official, I now have too much wine in my 750-square-foot apartment. But more importantly, I don’t have proper storage, so I’m in the market for a wine fridge, where at the very least, I can keep my better bottles and a few that I want to age a bit. The only room in my kitchen would be for a small counter top one, but I have room in the corner of my dining room for something free standing.
Should I continue researching and look for something better? cheaper? Any advice for particular features I want to make sure I have? I already realize as soon as I buy one, I’ll probably want something bigger (my original search was for a 12 or 18 bottle, so when I saw a 24-bottle that wasn’t too much more, I honed in on it).
I was in the market for a wine fridge not that long ago. For whatever reason, wine fridges seem to have more problems than a full sized fridge that lasts for a decade or more. I wouldn’t worry much about the brand name. I would just get the Costco fridge, knowing you can return it if it goes bad.
I had to do this with a Costco wine fridge that started blowing hot after 30 days. They took it back without a problem (offered to fix it, but I chose not to risk it). Of course I ended up getting another (smaller, sadly) model because I wanted to fit it under a counter.
The advice I got when I was shopping for a wine fridge years ago was: Get one much bigger than you think you need. I did heed this advice and was very glad I did. So I pass it on to you.
Alicia - offsite sounds like something you should consider. Typically the smaller ones dont last long, and that sometimes works out, as you will outgrow it anyway. I would say Eurocave 144-220 bottle ones are good, but might be too big for your sized apartment.
I’m going to cut and paste my rant from another similar thread recently. Substitute 24 for 18, and your home town for NYC, and I think the same points still hold.
A few thoughts:
(1) Are you sure you only want an 18 bottle fridge? That holds so little as to seem not to have much purpose. Statistics show that 99.99% of people who buy wine cabinets very shortly regret that they bought one so small (okay, I made that up, but if anything that number is probably on the low side).
(2) My guess is that they all have lousy reviews because home wine fridges generally suck, and I say that after many years of ultra-annoying experience with multiple ones. Obviously, the best and most expensive brands tend to do better, but as a whole, wine cabinets are somehow 1% as reliable and 10X as expensive to repair as some cheap refrigerator you buy at Sears (again, I made that up, but that’s my best estimate). Not only are they generally poor as far as long-term repair and maintenance, but they all have assorted other annoying flaws, like racks that are too small for half your bottles, humidity that is too high and deteriorates all your labels, make too much noise, etc.
If I were you, I would:
(A) Buy a substantially larger cabinet than you think you would ever need. Rule of thumb: if you think you’re buying a big enough one, you aren’t, get a bigger one than that.
(B) Look on Craigslist and equivalent places, especially since you’re in NYC and there should be large numbers of people nearby looking to get rid of theirs (probably because it turned out to be way too small), and you’ll probably be able to pay well under half the price of a new one.
Best of luck.
Seriously, if you’re storing wines for long enough that ideal storage conditions matter, you’re going to be storing many, many times what will fit in a 24 bottle cooler.
Use your refrigerator. Seriously. If all you want is a little bit of space to store a few bottles to “age a bit”, then use the warmer regions of your refrigerator. Worst case scenario: your wine ages a bit more slowly.
Let me be really blunt: the 24-bottle storage fridge you’re looking at is an utter waste of money. All you get is temperature control. That is to say, there is no humidity control (to the extent such is necessary - I remain uncertain, but I did purchase a Eurocave just in case). And dual temperature control? If you’re paying even a 1 penny premium for that, it’s too much.
If you decide that you really want to start cellaring wine, you’ll want much more storage capacity and the ability to control humidity.
And if/when that time comes, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T PURCHASE A VINOTEMP!!! Stay away from this rotten company and it’s anti-consumer practices. They’ve screwed over members of this community and I’m shocked that no one has yet warned you away. Do a search if you’re unaware.
+1. Think 5x-10x. Sounds astronomical, but if you’re going to start collecting, getting to 100-150 bottles over the next couple years is likely going to happen. Cheaper, over the long haul, to buy more than what you need today then to have to replace what you buy today multiple times in the future. I love Transtherm and they make a “loft” which is ~100 bottles (this was my first unit and I’m glad I bought this over the 24 bottle unit I was looking at at the time). Of course, how things have evolved (but I’m still very happy with the decision to buy the 100 bottle unit when I did).
Thank you everyone for your thoughts so far! Keith – I’ve been waiting for someone to make a “wine cooler” joke, so thanks for that recommendation as well.
My collection is not quite big enough for off site storage or the expense of it (and I’m trying to reign in the buying a bit) – unless Joe, I can carve out a corner of space in your locker.
I probably have about 60 bottles total. I’ve been trying to focus on wines I can drink now, but I probably have at least a dozen that would be be better if I let them age a bit.
Chris, I appreciate your rant… I’ll check out Craigslist – but I fear lack of space won’t let me go too much beyond a 24.
Alicia, it’s not simply the storage capacity; the units you’re considering are less reliable and more expensive per unit of storage space than the refrigerator you already have. We can’t stop you from wasting your money, but we will be happy to remind you that “we told you so!” when you inevitably reach that conclusion.
Richard, I completely understand … and I’m guessing that’s why when I looked up Eurocave and some of the others, I’m seeing price tags in the thousands, rather than just a couple hundred dollars.
So am I better off not buying a wine fridge, and just letting the wines sit in shaded areas of my 72-degree apartment? (with putting a few in the regular refrigerator)?
Yes, for certain. Find the coolest indoor closet, put them in a styrofoam shipper box at the bottom of it.
The only good thing the 24 bottle cooler would do for you is better serving temperatures. If you think that is worth the money, great, but don’t do it for storage reasons.
In addition to white daily drinkers stored anywhere in the fridge I can fit them, I have 26 bottles of Austrian Riesling stacked and, um, “cellared” on the bottom shelf (these are all screwcaps), and three magnums of Burgundy and 1 magnum Champagne in the vegetable crisper (Eurocave does not play well with magnums). I’ve stored them like this for several years now, and have never had any problems with the bottles I’ve opened (several Rieslings and 1 Pavelot Gravains magnum). They’re likely aging more slowly than those in my Eurocave as the temperature is cooler in the fridge.
I put the screwcaps in the fridge because I don’t think the lack of humidity control will have any negative effect, unlike with corked wines. Supposedly lack of humidity (60-70% or so?) can dry out corks and allow oxygen egress. Very significantly, the units you’re looking at DO NOT have humidity control. They’re not really intended for cellaring wines. To the extent you really care about cellaring on a long-term basis (say for BDX, Barolo, and any other long aging wine), I suspect you’ll want to be able to control the humidity, but all these units provide is temperature control. Just like a refrigerator.
Eurocave = bad idea. They are extremely expensive on a per-bottle basis and not an efficient use of space until you start getting rid of shelves and stacking bottles in a way that makes it impossible to get anything out. Also if the cooling system fails it is kaput. You want a cabinet where you can replace the cooler and keep the cabinet if you have to.
Sadly, there are very few wines worth cellaring that are worth cellaring only to “age a bit”… most ageworthy wines will get worse and worse for a long time before they start getting better, so if you’re only aging a bit you were better off not aging at all. That means you basically need to operate from the assumption that the cellar isn’t a temporary resting zone with bottles going in and bottles going out. It’s bottles going in and more bottles going in. They don’t get to come out for a looong time. 15 years is minimum for most types IMO, 25 years more realistic. Multiply that by how many bottles you intend to add each year and you get a scary number.
Do you typically keep your AC on most of the time during summer, or do you let your apt get pretty hot during some days? If the former, almost any wine will be just fine for many months in that kind of storage, particularly if you intend to drink it within a year or two.
Do consider the idea of an off-site locker, if something is available to you and not too far away. I don’t know what costs are out there, but assuming they are not much different than here, you can probably get storage for around 10 cases for maybe $20/month? That’s less than the cost of one modestly priced bottle per month, and you would pay for the first year by passing on buying a cheap wine fridge.
I didn’t read everyone’s suggestions, but when I first got into wine a about 5 years ago, I bought 2 40ish bottle coolers from Craig’s List. I paid under $100 for each. When I upgraded, I sold em on CL really easily. I now have a Eurocave that holds around 125. Works for the size collection I can afford to have right now.
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