Wine thermometers?

Hey gang

Moving along steadily with my wine cellar, a couple of people recommended I rely for temperature consistency not on an air thermometer, but a wine one inside the bottle. I don't see one in the Wine Enthusiast catalog that routinely lands on my doorstep. Where can I get one of these? I do see in that catalogue an "infra-red" thermometer that you press against the outside of the bottle for three seconds and which somehow gets a reading from inside. Okay, I'm not a technophobe but still, anyone actually used one of these and kno that they work?

Tony

Can't help you with your request. However, I don't see the need to monitor more than the ambient temperature swings of the cellar unless you have extreme variation. In theory the liquid inside the glass bottle would be show less temperature change than the cellar air so if you are only seeing a few degrees change from peak to valley why go through the extra effort to monitor the inside the bottle enviornment.

Hey gang

Moving along steadily with my wine cellar, a couple of people recommended I rely for temperature consistency not on an air thermometer, but a wine one inside the bottle. I don't see one in the Wine Enthusiast catalog that routinely lands on my doorstep. Where can I get one of these? I do see in that catalogue an "infra-red" thermometer that you press against the outside of the bottle for three seconds and which somehow gets a reading from inside. Okay, I'm not a technophobe but still, anyone actually used one of these and kno that they work?

Tony

Tony, most technologically oriented people reject the idea of monitoring the interior temperature of bottles. The air temperature will fluctuate far more rapidly, so any change in air temperature is what you should be monitoring. It's essentially an early warning system for what's going on in the bottles. One caveat, though: since air temp is more variable, one doesn't need rigid air temperature controls: ± 2-3°F should hurt nothing and most cooling units will do far better than that anyway.

Mark Lipton

Okay, I'm not a technophobe but still, anyone actually used one of these and kno that they work?

I'm not sure what you mean by "work".

Do they give you an indication of what the temperature (and its variations) of the wine itself is, as opposed to the surrounding air? Yes.

Should you use the in-bottle temperature for controlling the thermostat of your cellar (if it's active cooling) as opposed to the air temperature? ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY NO! The reason: All cooling system thermostats allow temperature variation over a range (called the hysteresis). For example, when I set my cellar thermostat to 57F, it turns on the cooling unit when the temperature reaches 58 and turns it off when it goes below 56. There is a two-degree hysteresis. Wine is mostly water, which has a very high specific heat compared to air. This means air warms up and cools down much more quickly than wine. Two-degree swings in the surrounding air temperature are barely going to budge the temperature of the wine itself. On the other hand, if you are controlling the system using the in-bottle temperature, you're not going to turn the system on/off until the wine itself has warmed up by 1 degree above the target or cooled down one degree below it. Use of in-bottle thermometers for temperature control subjects all your wine to the hysteresis. For this to be acceptable, you'd want only a fraction of a degree's hysteresis in the thermostat, and typical cooling systems don't have that.

Personally I think the in-bottle thermometers are mainly a marketing gimmick.

-Paul W.

OK, so I won't say which person on this board recommended I use such a device!

I was interested in whether that infra-red device actually worked, just purely from a technological point of view.

And Paul, I'm hoping to keep the room passive. I know that gentle temp swings aren't damaging,I was just following some advice on monitoring wine temp rather than merely room temp.

Thanks!

Tony

I was interested in whether that infra-red device actually worked, just purely from a technological point of view.

I received one of the infra-red devices as a gift and they seem to work quite well. -- Clark