An Introduction To Wine Fridges / Coolers - LANDERS JC70 24 Bottle Review

Why buy a Wine Fridge / Cooler?

Wine fridge / coolers are not just a convenient place to store your wine bottles where they will be lying flat so as not to dry out the cork. If you are fortunate enough to have a place in your home which is kept cool 24 hours a day, such as a cellar or a room which is kept air conditioned the whole time, then a wine-rack placed in the corner or in a glass cabinet, is really all you need. 

However, if like me, you do not have a place in your home which is kept at a constant cool temperature 24 hours a day and you want to keep wine for more than a few weeks before drinking, or are interested in purchasing some wines to store for further maturation, say for a few months or even years, then a wine fridge / cooler is really a must.

A dedicated wine fridge should be able to keep your wine at a constant cool temperature in order to keep the contents stable. This ensures the integrity of the flavour of the wine while it is maturing in the bottle, just as the wine maker originally intended. Wine can easily spoil, not only if it becomes too hot, but if the temperature fluctuates rapidly during the day.

There has never been a better time to buy a Wine Fridge / Cooler here in Israel, as prices seem to have come down considerably in the past few years.

Which Type of Wine Fridge/Cooler should you purchase in Israel?

I purchased a new Wine Fridge/Cooler recently. It is actually my third one.

The first, a very smart looking 12 bottle slim model (designed to slide into a corner or under a kitchen shelf no doubt) which cost me 300 shekels, (a special sale in a supermarket), turned out to have one fatal floor in its design.

Looking exactly like an oversized Desktop computer, it had a power ON button on the front! (No USB sockets though). This meant that every time there was a power cut, when the power came back on, the wine fridge would sit there, switched off, waiting for someone to power it on again. Not a great design feature if you live in a hot country with occasional power cuts! A complete waste of money, but did succeed in proving the need for such an appliance, it was quickly replaced within a year.

The second was a more impressive looking 24 bottle cooler, with digital temperature display and touch screen up/down buttons, that thankfully had no power button. You just switched it on and off it went. It even had an inside light, presumably to display your collection but tachles, you couldn’t see anything with the door closed. It just looked flashy! You could set it to temperatures of between 14 and 18 Degrees Celsius. The lower figure, more appropriate for white wine, the higher figure for red. As I was storing both, I set mine to 16 Degrees Celsius. This unit cost me 800 Shekels (but you could probably get it today for around 500-600 shekels)?

I very soon realised that this unit also had a serious flaw. It wasn’t a genuine fridge as we know it, with a condenser that switches on and off like your kitchen fridge, cooling the air inside. This wine cooler uses a system called “thermo-electric cooling” to keep the wine cool.

The advantage of this system is that it used to be much cheaper to buy than the condenser type wine fridges (which typically used to cost 2,000 shekels and up), is cheaper to run, it is totally silent and does not shake the wine when the condenser switches on and off.

However, the massive disadvantage with these coolers, as I soon discovered, was that it keeps its temperature great in the winter, but come the summer, when room temperatures can reach up to 30 Degrees Celsius during the day, these types of wine coolers just cannot cope and the bottles get warm. The experts tell you that extreme temperature fluctuations are far worse for the preservation of the wine than keeping your wine bottles in a slightly warmer than average environment.

It turns out that these types of coolers are in fact only suitable for countries with milder, less extreme temperature differences, or an environment which is kept air-conditioned all year round (which kind of negates the whole purpose of a wine cooler in the first place). It is certainly not designed for living rooms like ours, where we only have the air-conditioning on when we are home.

I made do with this fridge for a few years until, one Shabbos afternoon, we heard this occasional beeping sound coming from the cooler and noticed that the display had started going meshuga and flashing random numbers like some deranged 1960s computer.

Moreover, the light inside started switching on and off at random times. The kids said that it was probably possessed by some invisible spirit who was pressing all the buttons to get attention, (or perhaps an angel demanding his share), but eventually, it completely gave up the ghost (ahem) and died.

I went “online” (a term only used by those who remember the dial-up MODEMs of the 1990s, “De-Doo-De-De-Dah-Dah_dah_dah_deh-Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOr-Eh-Ooh Eh-Ooh Eh-Ooh Eh-Ooh Eh-Ooh-Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-Ooooooh”, then waiting with amazement and excitement as the home page gradually built up, line by line over a period of a few minutes), to check the prices of some “proper” wine fridges that could keep their temperature even in the summer. Unfortunately, I could not really justify the 2,000 Shekel or so for the Condenser Wine fridges and certainly had no incentive to replace it with another thermo-electric cooling type cooler.

What’s the Difference between a Wine Fridge and a Regular Fridge?

The question I had was, why are wine fridges with condensers much more expensive than your average small kitchen fridges that you find in a hotel room or office? Surely it’s the same technology? The answer is that these wine fridges have a higher quality condenser which is quieter than your regular fridge and, more importantly, has better damping so that it does not shake the wine bottles when it switches on and off. (This constant shaking can also apparently ruin the wine).

Apparently, the wine fridge somehow works in a slightly different way, whereby it maintains high humidity levels so that corks don’t dry out, as opposed to regular fridges which are designed to reduce humidity.

Can you use a Wine Fridge as a Regular Fridge?

The other question which I was wondering is, is it possible to use a wine fridge, even for a day, to store food and drink items like dairy? Apparently it is. However, bear in mind that it is a good idea to keep your wine fridge Kasher LePesach all year round so that you don’t have to clean it out before Pesach. Obviously, this means that you should only store wines in your fridge throughout the year and not beer and lager!

I had no alternative but to keep my wines in this broken wine cooler (switched off) all through the winter and spring. Come summer however, I had to find a solution. As luck would have it, I was given a gift token for the wine store “Derech HaYayin” (known in English as “The Wine Route”), for my birthday. So, I went to the store, intending to purchase some wine or whisky but suddenly remembered my wine cooling problem. I asked the salesman there whether he could recommend any model and he replied that, as it happens, they did sell a proper (almost) silent condenser Wine Fridge and it was on special offer to Club members, reduced from 1,600 to only 1,000 shekels!

After inspecting the model which they had in the store, I ordered one straight away and they called me two days later to come pick it up. The guy very kindly helped me shlepp it into the car and I brought it home.

The salesman warned me more than once, not to switch the fridge on for 24 hours after I had removed it from the packaging, to allow the gases in the condenser to settle down. I removed all the travel tape inside, placed it in the corner and obeyed his instructions, waiting until the next evening to switch it on.

Of course, you can always get the fancy ones with the wooden shelves, rather than the metal racks which mine came with. However, it will cost you a good 500 shekels more. The advantage of the wood racks (besides them looking really cool) is that the metal ones use up more room in the fridge and will not always allow you to insert non-standard shape bottles.

I actually ended up hammering down the metal racks in my old cooler until they were almost flat, in order to allow wider than normal bottles from Ramat HaGolan Yarden series and Gvaot Gofna series, to slide in. These bottles are fatter than the average wine bottle. If you tried to force them in, you’d end up tearing the label!

One last thing. I would highly recommend spending another 80 Shekels or so, purchasing a Fridge Surge Protector with a 3-minute Wait-Timer. The timer switches the power back on after 3 minutes which protects the condenser from those quick succession split-second On-Off-On-Off power cuts which can burn out the components and destroy your expensive fridge.

So, in summary:

1. Wine Coolers/Fridge – Two Types

Thermo-Electric Coolers and Condenser Fridges

2 Make sure that the fridge switches itself on after power cut.

3. Unless the wine fridge is going to be sitting in an air-conditioned environment 24 hours a day, in my opinion, you should spend the extra money on a compressor Wine Fridge.

4. Be aware that fridges which come with metal racks, (rather than the more expensive wood racks), are designed for bog standard wine bottles and may not allow bottles of unusual shapes unless you modify them yourself.

So, which model did I buy?

The LANDERS JC70 24 Bottle Condenser Wine Fridge

Specifications: As far as I know, there is no Caramel colour added but there is, as I understand a Chill Filter built in. The abv (alcohol contents) varies depending upon what you put in it!

There is not much to say about this Wine Fridge. I switched it on and set the temperature to 12 Degrees Celsius. It has kept that temperature ever since, unless I open the door for more than a minute, (as I did whilst taking these photos).

There is an automatic lock on the touch screen buttons which is good against little kids fingers as well as acting as a Shabbat lock. To unlock the button panel, you press the left hand side “Up” button for 5 seconds.

The fridge has a built in light but as I mentioned before, I don’t think it has any practical use.

Conclusion

It sits in the corner of my living room, is totally silent except when you actually go really close to it, you hear a faint hum when the condenser is on. It keeps its temperature even when the room is 30 Degrees Celsius. White wine is great to drink straight out of the fridge whereas red wine needs to be removed around 3-4 hours before drinking, in order to reach standard room temperature (around 22 Degrees Celsius) before drinking.

Would I have liked a fridge with wooded shelves? Sure but I couldn’t justify the extra expense for something which is 90% cosmetic.

There is nothing more to say. It just works. Highly recommended.