Vin Chilla works but chill times a bit exaggerated
Written: Mar 24 '03
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Pros: small, light weight and easy to use and understand, faster than a fridge
Cons: Chill times were exaggerated. A little noisy w/the way it churns the ice water
The Bottom Line: Exaggerated chill times, difficult to drain excess water, and a cheap quality of the plastic used, but it does chill faster than a fridge and is great for unexpected situations.
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| carryino's Full Review: VinChilla Rechargeable Single Bottle Wine Chiller |
I bought the black rechargeable Vin Chilla(VC) for about $90 plus shipping from a wine gift website since I thought this would be a great way for me to chill my wines since I don't have room for a wine fridge and I have too much stuff in my regular fridge. The VC works by the user plugging it in to recharge the battery(stated life on a full charge in the booklet is approx 1hr)and putting in ice and water and then your bottle of wine. It has a spring wound dial timer which then activates the VC by churning the ice water bath around the stationary wine bottle(some of my bottles started to wobble around though--don't know if this is good or bad). It was a little noisy the motor or whatever that churns the water. The dial timer will stop automatically based on how many minutes you set it at. In their booklet, they have a helpful approx. temp. chart which tells you how many minutes to set the dial for. They exaggerate a bit where the website copy I've seen on the site I bought it from and from other websites/retailers, it says "chills in minutes". In reality to chill my wine to fridge temp. which I like my wine at(I know some of you wine snobs will say this is too cold, but that's the way I like it)really takes about 15-20minutes. When they said "in minutes" I'm thinking 3-4 maybe 8minutes, not 15-20. In 3-4 minutes it will chill wine down around 8-10degrees F, too warm for me and not even close to fridge temp. Overall, it does chill but the times are a bit exaggerated in their advertising. I don't know if you truly get 1hrs worth of chilling since at most I chilled 2 bottles so this took about 35-40mins worth of total battery life--but it seemed to work fine on 2 bottles. Recharge time wasn't an issue for me since I just let it recharge overnight and if I did run out of juice, you can always plug it into an outlet and run it--just won't be portable though. Two cons other than the exaggerated chill times, were how to drain the excess water once the ice started melting to chill another bottle. I had to bring it to the sink and dump some of the excess water out and then add more ice. If they had a valve or something so that I could drain the water at the table instead of bringing the whole thing to my sink would be nice. Clean up is easy though, just dump the whole ice/water into your sink, the only other thing it says you have to clean/replace is a filter every so often. The other con was that the plastic used looked kind of cheap especially for the price. NOTE I saw on a wine website/catalog (that shall remain nameless) another device called the Cooper Cooler that also purports to chill wine quickly, has anyone tested this out-I'd be curious to see how they compare.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 90
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Epinions.com ID:
carryino
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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