Wine Chillers – For Your Home

There are so many options for wine storage in your home. Most people make their decisions based on the number of bottles in their collection. If we are talking about less than two dozen or over 500, it’s the number that makes the main difference in chillers. After that it’s a matter of personal style, budget and how much space you have. Let’s dive in a little deeper now.
For those with a small collection, you still should have a wine chiller as your investment – no matter how small or great – needs to be protected from heat and light. Most people opt to keep their small chiller in their kitchen, some in the dining room. Just remember not to place the unit too close to a heat source or window. Your bottles should be stored on their sides so that the corks do not dry out. Often, when I run out of space in my chillers, it will be a screw capped white or Rose wine that I will move from the chiller into the refrigerator (and consume fairly quickly) as a screw-capped bottle can stand up.
A Note on Screw Capped Wine and Sake: When I took my sake certification class, I learned that a screw cap can rust, and also, that Sake is best consumed fresh and should only be stored in a chiller. Don’t buy Sake from a source that just kept it on a shelf instead of a chiller.
Now, for your larger collectors, with a hundred or more bottles to store. We’ve been very lucky with the Vinotemp chillers. When we didn’t have the space in our home, we got a commercial looking one with no glass or pretty lights. We kept over 400 bottles in a chiller in our garage successfully, insulated with Styrofoam (the ones that your bottles come in when shipped) on the outside, for many years. But it wasn’t ideal. Not only did our collection hide in the garage, but it also took a few minutes to get out there to select a wine on a sometimes-nightly basis. We listed every bottle in a computer program, numbered the rows to find them, and then would scratch off a bottle from the list every time we took one out.
Fast forward to today. We still have over 400 bottles but finally have the perfect space in our home to show it off. Our previous home was over three thousand square feet and though our new home is smaller, we just planned better this time. We had seen some friends with some amazing homes in Santa Clarita with a wide range of storage options we learned from and are all worth looking into:
A wine cellar, with an attached seating area for sampling, adjoining a garage.
A den with straps on every shelf of wine to protect from earthquakes.
A dark and cool closet jammed with both full and half bottles.
A dining room with more than one chiller decorating the space.
And the one we had to have: The Wine Room – as we like to call it – with a circular table and comfy club chairs, surrounded by wine chillers, wine decor and glassware. (See photos of the Chegwins’ Wine Room – our inspiration.)
We went back to our home, changed our “den” into a Wine Room with a circular table, swivel club chairs and added a display case and shelving for a portion of our liquor collection. Either before or after dinner we have wine or cocktails in that room. The pièce de résistance: three wine chillers side by side with different options for interior lighting (don’t leave on for long due to the heat) and glass doors so that people can see a sample of our collection.
I also use the three chillers for three distinctive storage ideas for our collection: the first chiller holds our New World wines (wines not from Europe: Napa, Central Coast, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand), the middle one holds our Old World wines (which are from Europe: France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal) and our third is my favorite as it holds everything I deem as “drink now” wines which mostly includes our New World wines over 10 years old, Old World over 20, whites, Rose and sparkling. I don’t have a wine list anymore, and once a year, usually at the start of a new year, I rotate wines from one chiller to the drink now chiller depending on their age.
Eve Bushman has a Level Two Intermediate Certification from the Wine and Spirits Education Trust (WSET), a “certification in the first globally-recognized course” as an American Wine Specialist ® from the North American Sommelier Association (NASA), Level 1 Sake Award from WSET, was the subject of a 60-minute Wine Immersion video (over 16k views), authored “Wine Etiquette for Everyone” and has served as a judge for the Proof Awards, Cellarmasters, LA Wine Competition, Long Beach Grand Cru and the Global Wine Awards. You can email Eve@EveWine101.com to ask a question about wine or spirits. 

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