Wine Cabinet Purchase Update

Well, the VinoView wine cabinet has been installed in our living room/study for about 3 weeks now, so I just wanted to post a quick update on our satisfaction so far.

Size
It is advertised as a 35 bottle wine cabinet, and it does in fact hold 35 bottles!

Temperature Control
So far, we've found the contents are kept at a consistant temp within a +/-1.5 degree F variation from top to bottom. The technology is capable of both cooling and heating but the unit's documentation doesn't specify whether such a configuration is in place. Only way to find out would be to open all the doors and windows and, uh...not gonna happen.

Noise Factor
The unit is quiet. I can hear it run if I listen for it but, normally, I don't hear it. The fan on our furnace in the basement drowns out any noise that the wine cabinet might make. In other words, the ambient noise in our apartment is higher on the decibel scale than the wine cabinet.

For the sake of objective review, I will outline the slight drawbacks of this unit. For us, these are hardly worth mentioning but, they might be important considerations for some:

Drawbacks

1. Wire shelfing is a bit tight: Have to be careful not to scratch labels.
2. Interior accent LED lights cannot be turned on/off: Thank you Monkuwino for pointing out what was in our owner's manual all along!
3. No dual-zone temperature control: Again, not an issue for us. This is first and foremost a wine storage unit and if we need to bring down the temperature of a bottle before serving it, we've got a device for that.
4. No self-leveling feet: Being that we are in a 150+ year old building, the lack of adjustable feet is kind of a bummer but, we just used some shims.

So far we are happy with our purchase. We will post future updates should any issues arise.

Buying a Refrigerated Wine Cabinet

When we decided to buy a wine cabinet recently, I was surprised to find very little in the way of a Wine Cabinet Buying Guide online. I started at Amazon.com where I did manage to find one or two models with a decent number of good customer ratings. Unfortunately, all of the bad reviews seemed to revolve around shipping problems and damage and horrible manufacturer customer support. With that bit of data, we decided we better shop for one locally. I began scouring websites like epinions, and bizrate but found very few models have been rated at all. I also did a search of the Consumer Reports archives—nothing; Wine Spectator--same thing.

It seemed that any consumer information available was reserved for the upper-end models: I was not going to get any help selecting my McChiller (did I hear somebody say ‘free gun rack with purchase’?). Finally, we decided to hit our local Home Appliance stores where we soon discovered wine refrigerators were not even in stock. Home Depot had a “Magic Chef” unit (yeah, I never heard of it either). My searches yielded a few discussion boards from around 2005 where the majority of Magic Chef owners had picked the unit up on sale for between $149-$177. My HD was selling it for $449. Moving right along…

What have we learned so far?

1. Shipping a wine cabinet can be risky
2. wine cabinets damaged during shipping may take months to get repaired
3. Buying a wine cabinet locally in ‘North East New England’ is not an option

What are we left with? Find a reputable retailer online. That’s exactly what I did. I went to the Wine Enthusiast website where, happily, they have a January free shipping special on a few models. I found a model with 14 good customer reviews. I also opted to purchase the 3 year warranty since most of the rants I read out in cyberspace indicated the trouble started in the 2nd year.

What have your wine storage/cabinet shopping experiences been? Does anyone reading have any recommendations to add or expand on? One tip I found more than once was: Whatever you think your storage needs will be, plan on exceeding it. I know this unit is small but, we are limited by space, and we are in a temporary situation so, it's only gotta get us through the next year or two.

We still have yet to receive the unit. I will definitely post an update here on how it works out for us.

VinoView Silent 35 Bottle Wine Display Refrigerator (Graphite Trim Door) Available at