An industry favorite that’s easy to customize and excellent for long-term storage.
What we love: This is a serious fridge for people who aren’t joking about their wine collections. The single-zone La Premiere L can fit 146 to 200-plus variously shaped bottles; the final count depends on whether you remove some or all of its 11 adjustable beechwood shelves and arrange your wines in horizontal, vertical, or stacked configurations. “EuroCave La Première has always been the most reliable and useful for bottles of different shapes and sizes,” Raftery says, and notes that you often spot these fridges in restaurants with enviable wine programs. Devotees love how the aluminum walls and constant but surprisingly not-too-loud ventilation keep the air inside fresh, as does a charcoal filter designed to absorb airborne impurities that can creep into bottles through their corks or caps. You can monitor the internal temperature and humidity level on a digital display screen, and the LED white light is softer than what’s on other fridges we tested. Plus, you can choose between a solid or UV-protected glass door and pick which way it swings. It has a one-year warranty for the entire fridge and five years’ on internal parts. It’s also sold through Wine Enthusiast, so you can take advantage of their customer service. In an age of A.I. chatbots, it features one of the shortest paths from dialing a phone number to speaking to a human that I’ve found.
In the “splurge for collectors” category, BA writer has tried out and loved the Goguette (a new brand from the reliably excellent makers of Eurocave fridges). You can check out the Goguette review here, but I thought the La Premiere L represented a better value than the smaller, pricier (though quite elegant) Goguette.
What we’d leave: This tall drink of water stands almost six feet high and weighs nearly 300 pounds, making it unrealistic for some homes. The price is nothing to sneeze at, either. Nearly $4,000 is a lot of money to spend on an appliance that only some of us consider imperative to lifelong happiness.
How I tested wine fridges
To find the top wine fridges, I considered an array of factors: how quiet or noisy each fridge is, its size-to-capacity ratio, the ease of assembly, whether it has customizable, adjustable shelves and can fit variously sized and shaped bottles, if it monitors temperature as well as humidity, and the general intuitiveness and effectiveness of its digital display and design. I also loaded the fridges with wine to see if they could hold what they claim.
Since I used each fridge over weeks rather than years, I also prowled user forums and retailers’ comments sections, and the deeper recesses of wine Reddit for insights on the fridges’ long-term performances. We also called brands’ customer service lines when available to see how helpful representatives would be to people with questions about fridges they had already bought or were eyeing.
What is a wine fridge—and how is it different from what’s already in your kitchen?
Wine fridges provide optimal environments for your bottles, protecting the juice inside from heat, light damage, and other potentially harmful factors. As fate would have it, those particular storage conditions are different than the ones food refrigerators offer.
One of the most important differences between a wine fridge and a regular old food fridge is their temperature control. “Wine fridges provide a stable, Goldilocks temperature for all types of wines, as opposed to a usually way too cold fridge, which is being opened and closed much more frequently,” says Chris Raftery, a regional manager for the luxury wine importer Wilson Daniels.
