Welcome to the website. The 12 bottle wine cooler is the latest trend in storing wine as it should be. And with the compact sizes, it is easy to find a place in the house. Even if you don’t do a lot of entertaining, this is a good item to have or to give as a gift because it does a bottle good. It keeps the wine at the proper temperature and allows for the perfect serving temperature. Most wine cellars have adjustable thermostats and shelves to make them versatile. And they come in so many colors they will fit almost anywhere in your home and look wonderful.

Vinotemp Wine Cooler
You know good wine storage is essential for both drinking everyday and for the long-term aging of the vintage. And the people at Vinotemp, I believe, have put great effort into caressing those bottles at the perfect temperature in a 12 bottle wine cooler that is tough to beat. In fact, wine drinkers who know their vintage rave about the Vinotemp, not because of the great price and durability, but because the unit actually does what it supposed to do, with no worrying. Time and again users know they will be serving wine at the temperature that they enjoy, and that it will be keeping their wine the way it should be kept. Perfect.

Cuisinart Wine Cellar
This is a masterpiece in wine storage. Cuisinart studied how you keep your wine and how that affects how it develops in the bottle. So with that in mind their 12 bottle wine cooler has preset temperature settings and something I loved when I saw it because I know how the vibration of the chiller on a lot of these refrigerators can affect the wine; they have a dampening mechanism to keep the vibration to a minimum. Of course you should never freeze wine and this wine cellar has a feature that prevents that from happening, too.

12 Bottle Wine Cellar
You probably already know that if you’re going to store your wine for any length of time that the wine should come in contact with the cork. With a 12 bottle wine cellar, they do. Bottles lay flat keeping the cork moist and preventing oxidation that can make what would be awesome wine taste bitter. I often wondered why wine at Costco is stored upright for the most part, but I suppose that it doesn’t stay on the shelf very long, so it’s not an issue. Most portable wine cellars such as this one have room for a couple of bottles to stand upright so you can chill and use them. All of the racks are removable to clean and adjust to the height you need them.

Wine Refrigeration
Wine stores best in a wine cellar around 55 degrees and so what wine refrigeration does, like the 12 bottle wine cooler, is to imitate that environment as closely as possible. A kitchen refrigerator isn’t good for this because the temperatures fluctuate wildly every time someone opens the door. Wine wants a constant temperature and when things aren’t just right, it can spoil. Ever have that bitter taste with a wine you swore was awesome? So investing in wine refrigeration is not only smart, but protecting your investment.

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.