My background is not in wine; I’m just into about my third year of seriously stocking the stuff, and I mostly like to imbibe 4-5 times a week. I needed a way to effectively store wine a couple of years ago, so I tried to figure out what 'frig to purchase, and the options seemed daunting: everybody sells a wine 'frig, and the prices are $150 to over $12k for standalone units. What differentiates these units? I spent more time than I’d like reading, then I bought something, and it didn’t make it to 2.5 years, so I’ve read some more.
My background is in service. Not refrigeration (though I’ve taken some classes) but service principles remain the same.
First, I’d say that if you’re buying new, stay far, far away from Vinotemp. Read Lou Ferreira’s and Susan Williams’ Tales of Woe dealing with Vinotemp (it’s a fairly long read, with lots of details) and you’ll understand why you don’t want to go that way.
Broadly, there are two distinct types of wine (and general-purpose) refrigerators: those that can be serviced when they break, and all the rest. The serviceable ones are expensive. But, the expensive ones can’t all be serviced, so price alone will not guide you here. For example, Eurocave gets high marks from reviewers and longtime owners, but nobody claims that they can be serviced in the US, nor does there seem to be a reliable source of spare parts, if you can convince a service facility to diagnose yours.
The class of wine refrigerators that can definitely be serviced are the ones that use what Quasar in the '60s (remember Quasar?) used to call, “Works in a Drawer” technology. The refrigerator’s cooling unit is all in one box that (usually) hangs from the cabinet’s ceiling. When it craps, it unscrews with (often) two screws, and drops out. You can have it serviced, or if the economics don’t work out, replace the whole cooling unit. It’s so easy to swap the cooling unit out, that Le Cache has a video showing how owners can do it themselves on theirs.
So, if you buy a Le Cache or a (used) Vinotemp, or one of the other wine refrigerator mfgrs who use this technology, you are pretty much guaranteed to be able to repair it five, ten, or twenty years down the road, because there are (or have been in the past) several different mfgrs of the cooling units (WineMate (Vinotemp’s house brand), CellarPro (Le Cache’s house brand these days), WhisperKOOL, Breezaire, etc.), and while the coarse dimensions of the units do vary a bit, it’s nothing that can’t be accommodated by your cabinet.
On the other side, you have Eurocave & Transtherm (on the high end), and on the budget side: Summit (the one that I just dealt with), Magic Chef, and literally dozens of import 'frigs sold under various brand names from everywhere including Home Depot. While you can often get a 5-year warranty on the compressor (only), compressor failures happen but the labor to replace will be 1/2 or more the cost of replacing the entire 'frig, and the all-too-common evaporator leaks cannot be repaired at all, esp. when the evap is built into the back wall of the cabinet. This is the “affordable” class of wine refrigerators.
Le Cache has notably good customer service. In their standalone products, their lineup skews to the wood-finish cabinets, with only a few metal cabinets, but AFAICT all their products have the “Works in a Drawer” technology. They are not cheap. However, they do come up on the used market fairly regularly so if you’re not averse to buying used, they are a good buy – this is the way I’m going, once I push my Summits out my door this week. The older Le Cache units used the somewhat problematic Breezaire cooling units, not noted for quiet nor longevity, but they can be replaced with a modern CellarPro for ~$1600 (there are options from $1,400 to $2,100), so plan accordingly.
HTH