Cuisinart CWC-3200 32-Bottle Private Reserve Wine Cellar

• 32-Bottle wine cellar
• Thermoelectric cooling system -reduces noise and vibration and offers low energy consumption
• Stainless finish and double-pane viewing window illuminated by soft interior lighting with on/off control
• Electronic touchpad for precise temperature control with blue LED display
• 8-Chrome contoured wine racks designed to hold 750ml or the option to remove a rack to hold 1500ml bottles

According to a yellow sheet of paper that came with the cooler, if there is a power outage, it will not restart automatically. This is not satisfactory. If there is a power outage one day after I leave for a summer vacation, I may come back to find all my wine has been cooked. I am thinking about ameliorating this problem with a backup battery With an extended outage that wouldn't work, but in my neighborhood they don't happen so far as I know.

The thermostat may be defective. I have had the cooler over a week now, and it has only gone off once, even though the temperature is below the thermostat setting and I have the cooler in a room that is at 66 degrees. Right now, for example, a thermometer I put inside the unit reads 52 degrees, the thermostat reads 55, yet the cooler is still running. I'll do some experimenting. Maybe the thermostat works but reads high and the unit needs to run almost continuously. If the problem persists, I guess I'll have to make a warranty claim.

I bought the unit primarily relying on the Cuisinart brand, hoping they would be good about quality control. But evidently not. And why they didn't design for the possibility of power outages is beyond me.

Unusually fat wine bottles will fit, since the shelves are adjustable. But unusually tall bottles won't. I put some in and then discovered they were keeping the door from closing tightly.

I give it three stars because it does in fact work, getting the wine to roughly the right temperature. The motor is quiet and the aesthetics are okay.

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This is a very quiet unit; when it comes on there is only a small murmur.The shelves are adjustable, which is nice.I feel confident buying a Cuisinart product too.The only draw back is that if it is to hold 32 bottles, they have to be pretty skinny.Regular bottles and the wine bottles from my wine club take up more room so it only holds 24.Also, if you store champagne it will take up 3 places.But at least they are adjustable and good quality shelves.

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This thermoelectric cooling technology in this product chills wines by 15 to 20 degrees below ambient temperature. It relies on having an environment with good ventilation, because the product works by creating a temperature potential and drawing warmer air out of the back of the unit through a combination of heat sinks and fans. The reason that this is cost efficient is that it it requires less energy than a big computer to operate the electronics and the fans.

This type of system is actually easy to service too. There are two parts that break: the thermoelectric unit and the fans. Neither is expensive to replace and (while it voids the warranty), any person able to use a soldering iron should be able to do it. Compare that to fixing a freon based system and it's clear that thermoelectric units can cost less over time if you have the skills and time to maintain them.

However, the operating environments where this type of unit will succeed are limited. If you always keep your home at 70 degrees or less, with little variance, then this unit can do well in it. Because of the way that the unit works, you can't place it in a 'warm spot' of your home. I experimented with several different placements and none work particularly well because the unit needs to be in an area with high ventilation and stable temperature (i.e. a basement of an air conditioned home) but the fans make too much noise for them not to be intrusive if you're watching TV or having a conversation. When you combine the ventilation and noise issues, the only environment that makes sense to place this unit is in a room that already houses your water heater, furnace, etc. I can't imagine putting it in a kitchen. A closet won't work (because the hot air rises in the closet and won't be flushed). And most other rooms in the house won't benefit from the addition of a noisy appliance.

Once you get past the limited range of placement options, the unit itself is not very good at temperature regulation. Setting the internal temperature of the unit to its low (39 degrees F) causes it to run continuously (in an air conditioned, high ventilation environment with an ambient operating temperature of 60 degrees or higher). Raising the internal temperature settingof the wine chiller to be 50 degrees placed it inside of it's 15 to 20 degree difference with the ambient air (in my case, 65 degrees) yet the internal temperature of the unit varied from 41 degrees to 61 degrees depending on the location inside of it (the top row is the warmest and the bottom row is the coolest). I measured the temperature variances over time using NIST certified Thermoworks data loggers with 1 bottle per shelf staggered on the diagonal.

An additional problem with the unit is capacity. The 32-bottle system has 8 shelves with nooks to store 4 bottles per shelf. I had to remove 1 shelf because most of the wine that I buy has bottles that are simply too wide to fit on a standard shelf layout. Then I adjusted all of the shelves to achieve the proper spacing. Additionally, wide bottles don't fit particularly well in a row, which can reduce the total number of bottles per row to 3. I alleviated this problem for some rows by alternative bottles stored with the bottoms toward the rear of the unit with bottles stored with their bottoms facing the front of the unit. This is awkward on the shelves but increases the storage capacity. The top shelf loses two bottle bays to the temperature adjustment electronics, so the total capacity is between 26 and 22 of the bottles that I actually own.

I mentioned earlier in the review that this unit is going to have service needs. The heat sinks and fans are going to get dirty (especially if you have pet hair in the air), which will cause chilling performance to degrade, and the fans and the thermoelectric coupler are going to fail every few years. The parts may even last 3 years, which is the warranty period for this device. However, the shipping costs to have this item fixed are more money that it would cost a knowledgable handy person to service themselves. If you are one of these people, I wouldn't bother with the warranty. If you are not one of these people, you should expect that this thing is going to break every few years and you will need to buy another one or be without it for a month or two while it is fixed. In this sense, I think standard freon cooling systems units can significantly outlast this device, but handy people can more easily fix this device than a freon cooling unit. It's a trade-off.

Given the 32 bottle wine chiller's cost and the cost of energy in the Seattle area, this kind of unit can be attractive (compared to the $200 low end wine chiller at Costco) if you have the right placement position in your home and you can handle the maintenance or replacement issues. Is it better than other thermoelectric wine refrigerators? I doubt it. The internal temperature variance is so large that it is difficult to imagine that it could be worse. The fans are probably better than the fans in the cheapest unit you can find, but the thermoelectric coupling components and heat sinks are standard parts used in every unit of this type.

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In short, the cooler's temperature regulation seems to be pretty shoddy, and the customer service is useless at helping us determine if we just have a defective unit, or if it's within the design specifications.

Now, the long version. :) Our cooler is currently set to 56F, since we discovered the thermostat shuts off the cooling system when the internal temperature of the unit reaches 57.5F. Which is fine -I understand that there can be disagreement between consumer products that measure temperature. The issue here is that while the thermostat shuts off at 57.5 or so, it kicks in at 61F or so. This means that several times a day, the temperature in the cooler fluctuates by about 3.5 degrees. This stands in contrast to the alternative Whynter WC321-DD that we're trying out, which has dramatically smaller fluctuations (.5-1 degree), with more frequent but shorter activation of the cooling system.

We tried contacting Cuisinart's customer service to determine if this temperature fluctuation is within the design specification, but all we got was advice to move the unit away from walls as per the instructions (done already) and to keep the unit away from sources of heat (also already done). Not surprising since the number was for the general Cuisinart customer service line that undoubtedly handles most or all of their products' inquiries, but still less than helpful.

Additional notes:

The complaint that the unit has to be reset when the power goes out is correct. However, it is my understanding that many wine coolers do this. The Whynter unit we've compared it to does it. If you *really* care, buy a UPS (un-interruptible power supply).

The fans aren't terribly loud as far as fans and refrigeration units go. Our refrigerator in the kitchen is a decent bit louder than the wine cellar. However, the unit can definitely be heard if the room is quiet, and can be heard from adjoining rooms with the doors open. As a comparison, from about 20-30 feet away, the Cuisinart unit is still a bit louder than the mentioned Whynter unit with my head very close to the back, listening for fan noise. I'd call the Cuisinart's fan noise to be pretty middle of the road -nothing terribly loud, but nothing especially quiet. (of course, I think the Whynter unit is impressively quiet) Additionally, there are two fans on the Cuisinart unit that, on our unit, operate at slightly different speeds, resulting in what some people could find to be an obnoxious tone mismatch.

This cooler has the standard issue with larger pinot noir-style bottles. The top rack has additional space in which they fit, but the temperature controls rob you of the two in the middle, leaving you all of two slots. Skinnier pinot noir bottles will fit, although they'll rub against the rack above. If you care about the labels, you'll want to make sure that they go in with a glass surface to the top.

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I received this model as a wedding gift about three years ago. It worked well for the first two years, then in amove, one of the "feet" broke.Contact with Cuisinart was futile.The never responded, nor was I able to find a replacement.This forced me to craft a replacement leg.Shortly after, the unit stopped cooling. Again, contact with Cuisinart was futile.No response at all. I am now looking for a replacement, as there are no service centers willing to even look at the unit.

I loved the size and the look, but the quality and support is non-existant.One of the other reviewers was spot on ih his assessment that this is a short lived device that is a throw away when it breaks.