Health & Fitness Tools

Wine Bottle Refrigerators With Storage Limits

5th May, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

Many sales people and manufacturers try to give the impression that a wine bottle refrigerator is a direct substitute for a good wine cellar, but there are significant differences between the two.

A wine bottle refrigerator can serve very well for keeping wine ready to drink for a few months, but for long-term storage and aging of finer wines, it is an imperfect solution.

For one thing, even though these best wine bottle refrigerators keep the internal temperature more stable than that of a regular kitchen fridge, they don’t eliminate all potential fluctuations.

When it comes to temperature, a wine bottle refrigerator has fluctuation problems no matter what method is used to control them. If the fridge is compressor-based, then it will cool very efficiently, yet as the compressor cycles up and down, so too will the temperature fluctuate, even if it’s just by a degree or two.

Thermoelectric wine refrigerators, on the other hand, don’t cycle in the same way, but are not quite as efficient as those with compressors. So temperature consistency will always be a concern in Thermoelectric wine refrigerators.

Nor does a wine bottle refrigerator usually control humidity as well as its advanced press might claim. The few that really try use methods that aren’t very reliable, so no manufacturer has truly solved the humidity problem yet.

While a glass door on the front of the wine cabinet itself may be decorative, and display the wines nicely, it may also be letting in harmful light. White wines, particularly, can begin to deteriorate in mere hours if they are stored in clear bottles.

So if the wine refrigerator’s glass door is not tinted with special material that can screen UV light, the wine can suffer damage unless it’s consumed relatively quickly.

In fact, because of these potential problems with this method of storing wine, some review sites, like www.modernwinecellar.com, advise firmly against equating any wine refrigerator with an actual wine cellar.

For one thing, wine can be kept in a wine cellar for a long time, whereas a wine bottle refrigerator should be regarded as short-term storage only, with any given bottle stored inside for no longer than a year.

This is sage advice anyway, since these appliances don’t tend to last much longer than five years to begin with. For short-term storage solutions for wine that’s ready to drink, these refrigerators work well. For anything long term, however, a genuine wine cellar is still much better.