It’s very convenient that they let you schedule weekly orders of this.
Exactly, you don’t want to use the same old $10k industrial chiller week after week. Gotta keep a fresh supply on hand.
Seriously though, why would you need scheduled orders of these things? Who is going through a chiller a week?
Mostly. Skip the salt, it does nothing. Move the bottle around every now and then to circulate the ice water, that will help cool it faster.
I’m fond of my eurocave sowine.
Why do you say salt does nothing? I thought the salt lowers the freezing point of the water, so the temperature around the bottle is lower.
BTW, I use the cooling sleeve.
mythbusters says add the salt for faster cooling
freezer sleeves for the odd 1-2 bottles, though in winter it’s often easier to just put the bottles outside for an hour or two.
Only when having a tasting at home where 3-4 wines need to be chilled or kept cool, do we resort to bucket plus ice & water. Adding salt does work, but rarely do we need to resort to that. I think I’ve only done it once.
I use the freezer, but also think that an ice/water bucket is fastest. Why skip the salt? Yes, adding salt depresses the freezing point, but the water in an ice bucket isn’t going to freeze anyway. Salt makes sense on the roads, where you want to lower the freezing point when temps drop below 32. But in an ice bucket, the ice itself is going to warm up pretty quickly to 32, then slowly melt as the surrounding water absorbs the heat of fusion during melting. In theory, salt might get the water bath down a few degrees, but in practice my hunch is that a) a lot of the salt will just sit at the bottom undissolved in the cold water, and b) the water surrounding the bottle will quickly rise in temperature, so unless you’re routinely mixing the bath and moving the bottle around, it won’t make much difference. From a practical standpoint, you now have a bucket of salty water you can’t use for anything else (like watering your plants), and it’s a step I think doesn’t help enough to matter. Plus you have salty water on your hands every time you take the bottle out of the ice bath. But I’ll watch the mythbusters, maybe they’ll prove me wrong.
That’s a lot of words to say “the salt doesn’t do anything” when you seem to agree that it does. I would have expected something more precise from a scientist 
Apparently I hid my backtracking pretty well 
I’m going to try it myself, but I think it’s probably not worth the trouble of dealing with the salt, salty water, etc., unless you’re really concerned about saving a couple minutes.
I think the reason salt doesn’t really matter is that you’re dealing with something that you want cooled “sufficiently” and “quickly” and neither of those are particularly scientific. You’re talking about say, 10 minutes? Even if the salt mattered enough that you could shave off a few seconds, it wouldn’t really be important in such a casual environment.
Plus, if you put a bottle into the water and put that in the fridge, and you keep moving the bottle every few minutes as the ice freezes, you can freeze a mold for later use with another bottle. Let’s see you do that with salty water!
Why wouldn’t it work? Your freezer is much colder than the melting point of salt water. Anyway, this method assumes that bottles are the same diameter. I guess you must have a large freezer to keep all your molds.
I was gifted a Cooper Cooler ice bath chiller. It works quite well actually. That said I almost never use it because you have to get the thing out, plug it in, fill it with ice and water. It does save some time vs an ice bath (with or without salt). If I had whites sitting at room temp I would use it more but I have them in a 55 degree cellar. I usually enjoy most at cellar temp anyway.
This thing:
https://www.amazon.com/Cooper-Cooler-Beverage-Chiller-Silver/dp/B0000U3CIW
The sleeves have additional uses…most often, to keep the bottle cool WHILE it remains on the table, and also to keep it cool during transport. I find that putting a sleeve over a bottle of Champagne or wine and then inserting it into an insulated wine bag (with individual compartments for each bottle) will cool the wine during your drive AND maintain the cool temperature for many hours in the bag. (I have even put a sleeve on a bottle, and a couple of additional ice packs in the bag, and left it in my car all day long while at work, then taken the bottle to a restaurant where it is perfectly chilled…)
I have a random version of the bucket of ice/cold water method mentioned here. I usually have the ice cream maker bowl sitting in the freezer, so it’s always ready to go. If I’m not making any ice cream, just use that as my bucket and fill with water. The water gets cold very quickly (even freezes a bit on the edges). Single-use appliance used for two purposes now instead of one!
There’s this.
All these methods work fine. The fastest/best is to get a tank of liquid nitrogen.
I got one as a gift. The electronic chiller took more time to get the bottle cold than had I just put it in a large bucket of ice water.
There is no better way to chill a wine than to put it in a large bucket of ice, add water, spin that bitch.
Revisiting this with a more specific scenario. Looking for something that will keep whites cool at the dinner table while drinking through the bottle. Don’t want an ice/water bucket - over chills the wine IMO. Thinking of a marble sleeve which might keep the bottle cool, say a bit below cellar temp. Do these work in your experience?
I saw one used in a restaurant last year, it was a chunk of marble they kept in the freezer, seemed to work ok but the problem is bottle sizing.