Emerson Wine Cooler - 8 Weeks of Storage!

When you only consume one bottle of wine per week, a little goes a long way. The picture above shows you what I use to keep my wines from boiling over in the Southern California summer: a compact wine cooler made by the Emerson company, with a big eight (8) bottle capacity. I found it on sale at Target recently for $69.99, not a bad deal at all. So far it has done an admirable job, maintaining a steady 57 degrees in an ambient temperature ranging from the mid-70's to the mid-80's.

Most advice you get from wine fans is to buy the largest storage unit you can afford because it will soon wind up being too small. Being the One Wine Per Week drinker, and inexpensive wine at that, an 8-bottle storage capacity is plenty big for me. That's an 8-week supply of wine! Not much point in trying to age inexpensive wine for very long either, so each slot is going to experience turnover to the tune of once every eight weeks. Limiting myself in this manner also serves the purpose of avoiding temptation to buy more and more wine, which leads to buying more and more wine storage units. It also forces me to be more selective! Yup, it's just the right size and it keeps my wine safe.

This particular unit operates on the thermoelectric effect (aka peltier effect). There's no condenser, and the only moving part is a fan which most of the time is very quiet. Hardly any vibration, hardly any noise, an LCD temperature indicator, buttons to adjust the temperature up or down in 1-degree increments... it's got everything I need to maintain a modest collection.