Ok, so this post is only tangentially about wine, but last Friday night I finally broke down and bought a wine cooler (and no, not the classic Bartles & Jaymes fuzzy navel)! A friend at work told me that the local Lowe's was having a clearance on a Frigidaire 34-bottle wine cooler for only $171, so I had to do it! I got there after work on Friday and of course saw the last one with my friend's name taped to it, but there was still the display model, so a little negotiation and an additional 15% discount later and I drove home with my new fridge! Here is the standard image, since I haven't had time to take a picture of mine yet:
It's a nice little unit, but there are certainly some quirks to be aware of, particularly if like me, this is your first wine cooler. This particular model did not have the digital temperature settings (I highly recommend them as I think it would make operating a lot easier!) so I had to experiment with the settings which went from "Min" to "Max." So I had to experiement with a bottle of wine I wasn't afraid to ruin, well maybe a few basic bottles of red just to see how they did.
I started with the "recommended" setting, but that ended up chilling the wine way too much, a cabernet served at 50 degrees is just plain wrong! So I adjusted all weekend until I got to the minumum setting, and that turned out to be the right one, cooling to a nice 62-64 degrees. Once the temperature was settled, I stocked the cooler with some of my older wines, where temperature control is much more important, and surprisingly enough, I managed to fill up the fridge! Of course this freed up a lot more space in my usual cellar, the hall closet, so now I have no worries about stroring wine for the moment. But you know how that is, building it and they will come, so I expect in a month or two the closet will again be at capacity!
In the meantime, a small fridge is an inexpensive method to long-term, safe storage of wines with consistent temperature and humidity, if like me, you don't live in a place with a cool, dark basement for wine storage.
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