Wine Cooler 4 U Blog

As you search for a wine cooler, you encounter multiple words that can all mean the same thing.

These words alone are not going to lead you to your perfect wine cooling appliance. The selection process involves looking for style, capacity, cooling system, lighting, controls, and on and on.

To help you investigate, lets clarify the wine cooler words.  First, in addition to being called a” wine cooler”, it can also be called a:

• wine refrigerator
• wine cabinet
• wine cellar
• wine chiller
• wine storage
• wine & beverage cooler

“Wine cooler” is the most commonly used term.  However, wine cooler is the most problematic, especially for older folks.  If you are in your sixties, most likely you drank Bartles and James wine coolers as a young adult.  So, the mind has to be able to jump over that reality when investigating the subject of storing wine in a refrigerated appliance.

In many of my writings, I use the term “wine refrigerator” to make sure there is no mistake about meaning.  So, a wine refrigerator is the same as a wine cooler.  From here things get a little messy as the manufacturers seek to make their units stand out in a crowded market.  The terms “wine cabinet” and “wine cellar” can be used to label any kind of wine cooler.  However, these terms usually refer to wooden cabinets.   Often, the term wine cellar is used in association with large capacity coolers (several 100 bottles), but, here again, “cellar” and “wood” tend to go together. In addition, “wine cellar” is also used to describe large custom cooled rooms used only to store wine or an underground room.

Vinotemp Single Bottle Wine Chiller (VT-CHILLER-SLVR)

A wine chiller is almost always a small device intended to cool one or two bottles of wine for immediate consumption.  The cooling mechanism can be ice or an electrical cooling unit that also can warm the wine.  This appliance sets on a counter or cabinet and is generally used to maintain the proper drinking temperature of a bottle of wine taken directly from a wine cooler.

When you search on the term “wine storage”, you will get results that include wine coolers.  However, the term usually refers to “wine racks”.

Finally to confuse things a bit more, you will find cooling units that are identified as  “wine & beverage coolers”.  These units typically have two cooling zones, one of which can be set down to a  kitchen refrigerator temperature (37 degrees), way too cold for wines.  You will also find one occasionally that has an ice maker built-in.  We’re not sure what that’s all about.