I worked on this design when I tried to think of a wedding present for a couple in my very close friends.

I knew both enjoyed wine, yet lived in city apartment, usually a bad place to keep wine bottles (to warm, to much vibration). Besides, the more traditional cubic wine cooler furniture was out of question: quite ugly, and not practical at all. .

First, finding a particular bottle is tiresome, as you have to pull and replace every single bottle to read its label, which is exceptionally annoying.

Furthermore, the fridge look is ugly, and I find the object conceptually very cold and out of touch with what wine is about, that is life, fruit, warmness and nice flavor.

So that’s were come the re-design.

I started from the very form of a barrel, because it is at the very basis of wine fabrication, and because it is a wooden object that has a natural warm feeling.

Then I imagined a system akin to a big/ferris wheel, where each bottle is on its own basket, so that the label of the bottle is always facing upward, and that the wine is not disturbed by the wheel rotation.

In fact, there are two wheels, one for red wine (12 bottles), and one for white wine (6 bottles).

Starting from these ideas, there are many design possibilities opening up, i tried to lay some in my schematics.

Devil is in the details, especially considering the refrigeration part (Pelletier effect with feedback loop). As another reference to wine world, I thought of cork lining for the inside walls, as cork is a perfect material in this case: it dampens vibration, it isolates from outside temperature, and regulates moisture level!

Overall it is a nice design experiment, along a good woodworking challenge, because I designed the pieces so to be able to build it, and so it would (hopefully) be very durable, yet not too bulky.