Wine Chillers

What are Wine Chillers?

There is much confusion to what a wine chiller actually is. Many people I’ve talked to refer to their wine refrigerator as a chiller — not so! Wine refrigerators are storage devices to keep your wines “cellared” at proper temperature. If you keep white wines in the cellar, sometimes you have to put a little more “chill” on them before serving. I’ve also seen people refer to those gel-sleeves that you take out of the refrigerator and slide over a bottle of wine as wine chillers. That’s not true either. Those sleeves don’t usually chill a wine very effectively - they are really designed to KEEP a wine chilled when outside or on a picnic. So, let’s talk about what these things are.

Not Your Fridge/Freezer

Wine chillers aren’t just a normal refrigerator where you store your wines. Normally, if you have a room temperature bottle of white wine, you have to put it in your refrigerator for a few hours and let it chill down before you pull it out and serve it. You could cheat and put it in the freezer to really chill it down, but some wines react negatively to the sudden and drastic temperature changes by clouding up and looking hazy in the glass. Not all of us are lucky enough to have wine refrigerators in our houses or apartments to keep our wine constantly on hand and at the ready at a moment's notice to be served at the perfect temperature.

Types of Chillers

So, if you don’t have time to wait for a refrigerator to chill it down, or you don’t want to take the chance on the extreme temperature of the freezer, you may want to consider a wine chiller. The models range from types that have water that you add ice to so it chills the bottle to those which are simply electrical and can either warm or chill the bottle, depending on what you need. Most models are a one-bottle capacity.

How They Work

These things are pretty amazing, actually. The bottle fits in and seals pretty nicely where all parts of the bottle are surrounded by the chiller — this is what gives the chiller its edge over just sticking something in the freezer or refrigerator. Direct contact with the bottle chills it faster than just putting it into the vast space of a fridge and waiting for the ambient air to chill it down. It’s almost the same context as making martinis in a shaker: shake the thing full of ice and in seconds you can get a nice layer of frost forming on the outside of the shaker because of the direct contact that icy liquid inside has.

Some models (the more expensive ones) have the ability to turn the bottle in the holder—thus ensuring that the bottle is getting constant even exposure. The higher-end models usually have a temperature control gauge where you set the desired temperature and let it go. These devices can usually chill a full bottle of wine from room temperature to serving temperature in about 20 minutes or so.

Finding One - and Using It!

There are many brands of wine chillers to choose from. If you go to your favorite web search engine and type in “wine chiller” you will get many choices and models to choose from. The original, or at least one of the originals, came from Sharper Image. You can also find them at places such as Brookstone in your favorite mall as well or from amazon.com on the Internet.

So next time you have guests over and you that bottle of wine you want to serve, slip it into the wine chiller and in no time you’ll be sipping a perfectly chilled glass of wine. Cheers!