Many wines enjoy aging, but keeping your best bottles in the wrong conditions can cause you harm. It is where the wine fridge comes in, as it is made to keep your wines in good condition for long-term storage, but you must know how to choose the best fridge.
Location
Where you are close to living areas, noise will be an essential consideration. If it will be in your kitchen, you will like to install it away from high-temperature sources like your oven. It should be put in a place with suitable temperature and humidity fluctuations, like your attic or garage. Like your kitchen fridge, your wine fridge must give you lots of room around the sides, top, and rear for good air circulation. You also have to keep the fridge away from direct sunlight when possible.
More capability
When you keep types of wine stored at varying temperatures, like whites and reds, you have to know how to place it. It would be best if you thought about the wine fridge, which can have different temperatures in different areas of the fridge. The fridge has a warmer part at the top, and the more remarkable part is at the bottom.
Doors
Glass doors are handy where you can find what you are looking for before you open the door and let the temperature change. UV light can affect your wine, so you must check the glass door for any UV protection coating. When your fridge is exposed to bright light, you have to buy a fridge that has protection from light. All the wine fridges have glass doors, but there are some with solid doors that give good UV protection and help you with insulation.
Shelving
Metal shelving will make it harder to get your wines as it will cause more vibrations to the bottles, and it can scratch your labels. It would help if you looked for wooden shelving with good sliding that gives you less vibration and is easy to use. You must remember that the extra thickness of shelving can eat the storage space. Checking out the shelves before you buy is essential because some wine fridges have wooden shelves with no sliding mechanism.
Bulk or individual storage
There are wine fridges that offer bulk storage of wine bottles where they can stack on each other. It means you can fit more bottles, but it also means that it is harder to avoid scratching or breaking the bottles. Individual storage means there is less capacity, but your wine is safer.
The best takeaway for you is you must not buy a bigger wine fridge than you need. You may think about how many bottles you need to keep and find a capacity to give you the best energy efficiency. It would help if you planned for future storage by buying a big fridge. But you will be paying for that empty storage until you fill it up, where you can start small when energy costs are essential to you.
