Wine Fridge or Interior Closet - Help Please

Hi Everyone,

I’m facing a wine storage decision that I’d love some help with. Right now I have about 5 cases or so of wine I’ve accumulated over the past couple of years from retail and the Viticole wine club which I am a member of. I have about a case of early 2000s vintage port and 4 cases of wine in the $30-50 range let’s say. I never envision buying wine much pricier than that.

A lot of this wine is recommended for some short term aging (5-10 years or so? - stuff like nice Chianti Classicos, some Bordeaux, etc). Right now it is stored in an interior closet which is never opened, in boxes in the dark. I would expect the temperature to always be close to room temperature (~65-72F) with little variation.

I am thinking about getting the Costco Artevino 200 bottle unit, but it’s around 2K which is probably something like half my wine budget for the year.

My question is - do I spring for the wine fridge, or just buy some inexpensive wood shelving for the closet? I don’t ever anticipate aging wines for 10+ years, but of course I want to enjoy the wine as much as possible.

Cheers,
Erik Alexanian

Erik - depending on where you live, you may be able to rent a wine storage locker which will help lower the cash commitment and even out the cash flow. I live in the SF Bay Area and have a locker I pay $62 per month rent that fits 250 bottles. After 32 months of course you begin to pay more for the storage than you would have paid for the fridge, but you saved some of your wine budget. If the up front payment investment makes more sense, then the Artevine is made by Eurocave, which I believe to be the gold standard in wine cellars, and from what I understand last forever. That said, I do not have any direct experience, so perhaps others can chime in as well.

As to your basic question of a dedicated Wine Cellar cooled unit I would definitely vote for the Aretvino unit, but at the end of the day, I think only you can answer this. Is the value of your collection greater than the value of a storage locker or the Artevino? What percentage of the collection would you be comfortable losing due to heat damage or pre-mature aging? There is a good high level article here (7 Wine-Storage Basics You Need to Know | Wine Spectator) which calls out that anything over 70 begins to degrade your wine.

Food for thought.

Thanks for the input John. I’m in RTP NC and would probably just by the unit instead of looking for a locker.

I agree that I should probably store in a cooler environment, but I’m just not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze in terms of cost. Especially since I don’t plan on drinking anything too crazy expensive as I know a lot of you on here do.

Anyone else have thoughts on mid-term storage for wines in the $30-50 range? Does the 55F ideal conditions really make a difference?

If you are going to drink them in 5 years I would just store them in the closet. Ideally get a small, like 40 bottle, fridge for the agers and put that in the closet or elsewhere. Small inexpensive coolers are about $400 for a 40 bottle fridge at Costco or Home Depot.

Yeah agree with last poster - I think a smaller, less expensive fridge seems to be your best option given you have ~60 bottles (and perhaps don’t even need them all to go in the fridge). Keep in mind that these fridges run best when close to full, i.e. you probably don’t want a 200 bottle fridge with <100 bottles in it.

Thanks everyone - I think I’m coming around to the idea of a small (~40-80 bottle) fridge. It’s just that the Costco Artevino III 200 bottle is back on sale for $2K and is such a good deal at that price that it’s hard to pass up. I try to talk myself into thinking about how much wine I’ll want to store in the FUTURE rather than right now. But a 200 bottle fridge does seem like overkill for someone like me.

Cheers,
Erik Alexanian

I’m going in for the Costco Artevino III. We’ve bought a lot of wine over the last 18 months as Covid unexpectedly has driven our habit to unexpected heights. I guess that is a positive of the season. Great thing about wine discussion is it most often involves some version of “yes”

We are in the midst of moving to South Carolina from New York where i have stored our two hundred plus bottles of wine in a dark basement closet where the temp and humidity was kept pretty much consistent year round. The problem i face now is our new house is built on a slab so while I plan on giving some of our wines away before we move i do plan on taking several wood cases of wine with us and storing them on the floor of our various closets of which we have several mercifully but I’m a tad anxious to see how this turns out. After reading this posts I am going to look into a wine storage facility but I doubt I will find anything nearby.

If you lurk craigslist you can find a deal. I got a eurocave pure m for 2400 that was like 2 years old mint which I thought was a good deal. On here, I have heard of crazy deals for older fridges like 1k and below… Given their expected lifecycle, way better economics than off site storage.