Cuisinart Wine Cellar
Here’s the deal – you want to keep your wine at the optimum temperature and have it perfect for when you want to drink it. Because not everyone is blessed with a wine cellar with perfect conditions, i.e. not only temperature but humidity as well, in comes a handful of manufacturers of the portable, cute, 12 bottle or more, wine cellars. And Cuisinart normally does a decent job on creating the right equipment for the right job in the kitchen, with everything from mixers to portable dicer’s. However, not everyone is happy with their entry into the 12 bottle Cuisinart Wine Cellar.
The unit comes with eight presets that are calculated, and well documented for proper wine serving and well, storage of the drink for your red wines and your white wines. I am happy to write that you can also make this adjustment manually, should you not like the presets. One advantage of the Cuisinart Wine Cellar is that you can have bottles of wine chilling, and available where you set up the wine cellar, instead of having to trot off to the larger wine cellar, should you have one of those. This cellar measures 16 inches high and deep, so it should do well with all sizes of bottles.
There are four sliding shelves in the unit which are changeable. I think Cuisinart did this simply so you could get the unit clean if you wanted to. A trusty electronic thermostat displays the temperature in centigrade or Fahrenheit and I easily saw if the cellar actually did get down to the setting I selected. It was within a few degrees. There is a three year warranty on the unit I saw and felt this was much better than most of the cellars out there because most quit just after a year in service.
Problems with the Cuisinart Wine Cellar include condensation problems with the plastic tray that sits in the bottom of the unit filling up with water every few days. This happens when the chilling unit on the cellar malfunctions. Unfortunately, this can ruin good wine by overheating it as well. It seems whatever plagues most of the 12 bottle wine coolers is what plagues this one, as well. The chiller works for a few months and then simply dies. It then acts like it is working but instead doesn’t do anything, and sometimes heats the interior of the cellar.
It all boils down to the thermoelectric cooling device that some of these units employ. I really feel they come from the same manufacturer because they all fail the same way and at the same time – 8 to 12 months out. Problems with the Cuisinart CWC 1200 12 bottle wine cooler are well documented and it’s my advice to stay away from this unit.
Tags:Condensation Problems, Correct temperature for red wine, Cuisinart CWC 1200 problem, Cuisinart Wine Cellar, Electronic Thermostat, Fahrenheit, Humidity, Optimum Temperature, Red Wines, Sliding Shelves, Warranty, White Wines, Wine Cellars