Top Wine Cooler Brands: The Cheapest to the Most Reliable

What are the top wine cooler brands out there? Who can be relied upon for years of usage and technical support?

You’ve got more than a few fine wine bottles and you already know a little something about their proper storage. For example, you know that all wine is perishable, since, unlike whiskey and the like, there isn’t enough alcohol in it for preservation purposes. You also know that you should be keeping even ready-to-drink wine cool for the best taste possible, and that ideal conditions include keeping the bottle out of direct sunlight, at relative humidity levels greater than 50%, in a space where temperature doesn’t fluctuate more than 5°, and that’s somewhere in the range of 40°F and 65°F. You might already know that achieving that perfect temperature is quite simple with a good wine cooler.

What you probably don’t know is what brands make wine coolers, let alone good wine coolers. What are the top wine cooler brands out there? Who can be relied upon for years of usage and technical support? Which wine storage brand is the most affordable? Utilizing customer review data from people like you and sales information from major online retailers, we’ve compiled a list of the top wine cooler brands based on different selling points.

By affordable, we mean cheapest. As in, you want a wine cooler ASAP, you don’t have much pocket change to spare, and you’re not trying to find the best storage for your vintages. In this arena, Igloo wins. Igloo is perhaps better known for their ice chests, those ubiquitous cold cube receptacles that dot beaches across America every summer.

However, they’ve also delved into the wine cooler business and have a few models on the market, all of which are at the lower end of the spectrum. While individual price points depend on your personal internet shopping savvy, you can find some of the Igloo models, such as the 4-bottle, 6-bottle, and 12-bottle models all for less than $100 dollars each online. As of this writing, their 4-bottle model, the Igloo FRW041 4-Bottle Wine Cooler, is the cheapest around at just under $70.

Not only does Igloo have low capacity wine coolers for dirt cheap prices, they also don’t offer any high-capacity wine coolers — they stop at the 30-bottle mark. That particular Igloo unit goes for around $150 dollars, which is more of an 18-bottle price point for the rest of market. If you compare the prices of most other 30-ish bottle coolers, you’ll see that they start closer to $300 and go WAY up.

Igloo is the cheapest wine cooler brand because they literally have the lowest-priced wine cooler available, almost all of their models are on the low-capacity-low-price end of the spectrum, and they don’t offer a high-quality or big capacity wine cooler. As such, Igloo might be a good brand to start out with if you’re looking for toss-around, no frills wine storage, but you might want to look elsewhere for more options and reliability.

Most people will use the “Sort Price Low to High” drop-down option every time they shop online. However, there are those out there who immediately go for the “Sort Price High to Low” choice. This category is for those people: the people who want the most expensive simply because it’s the most expensive. But this info may also be helpful for everyone else for gauging whether the most expensive is actually 40% or 50% or whatever % better than the rest of the competition.

This one’s neck-and-neck. On one hand, Perlick might just be the most expensive brand, considering that their entire line of wine coolers, which are called “Indoor Undercounter Wine Reserves” (a name worth its own weight in gold) are fairly small-capacity units that each cost at least $3000. Their most inexpensive unit, the 15″ Signature Series Wine Reserve (20-bottle capacity, undercounter, stainless steel), can be found for around $3500 online. On the opposite end, their most expensive wine cooler, the 48″ Signature Series Wine Reserve (88-bottle, undercounter, dual zone, stainless steel) runs a cool $6000 — minimum. Perlick truly offers luxury residential undercounter refrigeration, which, unfortunately, most people can’t afford.

However, Perlick doesn’t win the award for the brand with the most expensive wine cooler. That goes to Vinotemp, for their Macau 1450-Model Wine Cabinet. This product can hold 960 bottles and the manufacturer’s website lists it for $14,089. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more expensive wine cooler, though that price-point is appropriate for this behemoth of a wine storage option. Vinotemp also offers a number of expensive models above the $5000 price point, but these are also ultra-high capacity wine coolers with room for hundreds of bottles.

In short, Vinotemp offers the most expensive wine cooler and a number of expensive models. But when it comes down to it, Perlick edges them out as the most expensive wine cooler brand, because their prices are relatively higher than competitors for the small size units they offer.

To figure out the bestselling wine cooler brand, we visited 5 major online shopping sources: Amazon, Home Depot, Wayfair, Overstock.com, and Google Shopping. We then searched for “wine coolers” or “wine cooler” and sorted these products by Top Sellers/Best Sellers/Most Popular. Within most of the results on each individual retailer and especially when reviewed all together, the bestselling wine cooler brand appears loud and clear as NewAir.

•On Amazon, NewAir had 4 units within the top 15 bestselling wine coolers, including the AW-281E 28 Bottle Thermoelectric Wine Cooler. This unit was #2 within the bestselling freestanding wine cellars (as Amazon likes to call wine coolers). Haier also had 4 units listed in this category.

•At Home Depot, NewAir similarly had 4 wine coolers within the first 15 wine cooler bestsellers. The NewAir Premier Gold Series 116-Bottle Dual Zone Wine Cooler was the #2 product on the list, and GE was the next closest brand with 3 bestsellers total.

•On Wayfair, under the Wine Coolers & Refrigerators category, NewAir had the top 4 bestselling wine coolers, all in a row, with the AWR-460DB 46 Bottle Dual Zone Built-In Wine Refrigerator listed as the #1 bestseller in the whole category. The next closest brands only had 2 bestsellers each.

•Overstock.com only lists the top 10 results for the “Best Selling Wine Coolers.” However, within those results, NewAir had 5 models listed. The next closest wine cooler brand, SPT, had 2.

•Finally, on Google Shopping results for wine cooler (which Google classifies as a wine fridge) the most popular unit is the NewAir AW-281E, which is ranked #1 in wine fridges. NewAir also had 3 total units within the top 10 results, while Wine Enthusiast and Danby were next with 2 units each.

These results, while informally obtained, reveal a consistent message: people like buying NewAir products.

Although it’s a bit of a Debbie Downer after the categories above, potential customers need to know which wine cooler brand customers have found to be the most unreliable. Not necessarily just a brand whose products are most prone to failure, but also, if they do fail, a brand that may be unresponsive to their customers’ concerns.

We selected the top names that kept appearing over and over in our wine cooler brands research, such as Haier, Avanti, NewAir, Igloo, Danby, Vinotemp, Fridgedaire, etc. We then inputted them into retailer websites and consumer complaints databases, and we also scoured a number of wine cooler review comparison guides, along with forums discussing the “worst wine cooler brand.” The results were interesting, to say the least: Vinotemp kept popping up.

Vinotemp may be the answer to the issue we raised previously — super expensive doesn’t necessarily mean 10x better. Within the online retailers mentioned above, many of the Vinotemp products being sold received 3 stars or below. A recurring complaint from customers was that the units worked well for about a year, but then some component on the product failed — the compressor gave out, etc. When consumers tried to contact Vinotemp customer service for replacement parts, their e-mails and phone calls went unanswered, or there were long delays in correspondence from the company.

A search online also reveals that Vinotemp has a clause within their Terms of Service that grants them the potential to sue customers who provide bad feedback. This type of thinking isn’t necessarily the most reassuring to potential buyers. The bottom line seems to be that while many customers will have no problems with their Vintotemp wine cooler, if they do, they might not be able to rely on the brand to help them answer their questions.

Dealing with a wine cooler company doesn’t begin and end with the purchase — there are going to be hiccups and questions long after the initial buy. That’s why it’s important to buy a wine cooler from a brand that you can rely on.

Founded in 2002, NewAir prides itself, above all, on being “A Name You Can Trust” — that’s the brand slogan after all. NewAir has a dedicated customer support team for answering appliance questions both before you buy and after your purchase. Unlike many wine cooler brands, NewAir offers a 1 year warranty that includes in-home service and repair on products such as the NewAir AWR-1600DB.

Above all, NewAir’s goal is to help customers make informed decisions about their wine and beverage related purchases. So if you have any questions about wine coolers, wine cooler brands — pretty much anything at all wine storage related, now is your chance to ask AND get an answer via the form below: