If you love wine, you leave no part of the imbibing experience to chance. You always store your bottles properly, and you always make sure your wine is served at its optimal temperature. And if you're not one of those people, after tasting a wine that's been pampered its whole life and served at the perfect temperature, there's a good chance you could become one. What Temp Is Right? For long-term storage, our friends at The Wine Club in San Francisco recommend aiming for 55°F. When serving the wines, bring them to these temperatures: Champagne: 50-52°F

Most whites: 55-60°F

Lighter reds: 62-65°F

Medium & heavy reds: 65-68°F Getting it right is easy, thanks to the array of wine chillers, wine fridges, and storage devices on the market. The best machine for you really depends on how much wine you have, and how much temperature control you want. If you have a collection of bottles that you plan to store for months and drink over time, you'll get more use out of a dedicated wine fridge that can keep your bottles at cellar temperature (55 to 57 degrees). All you have to do is chill or warm them slightly when you're ready to drink them. Or if you're the type who buys bottles and drinks them right away -- like within a day or two -- you should look into single-bottle machines that can bring a bottle to the perfect temperature in minutes. And you may be thinking, "Why not just stick it in the freezer?" Well, you could, and you'd save yourself a few bucks, but your wine will come out too cold if you don't check on it every couple of minutes. And even your fridge is probably too cold (by 10 degrees or more) to bring the wine to its optimal drinking temperature. An ice bath is another option, but again, you have to monitor the temperature to make sure you're not dunking it too long. A set-it-and-forget-it wine chiller is both more consistent and more convenient. HOW WE TESTED We selected seven of the most popular chiller models, both single-bottle chillers and stand-alone fridges with medium capacities (8 to 21 bottles). Our tests involved chilling and storing bottles of Moscato and Merlot over two weeks in a typical home setting, measuring temperatures with a Fluke 561 Infrared Thermometer. We looked for stability and control in the fridges, and speed and size in the single-bottle models. We also judged all the machines based on how easy they were to install and use, how much control they gave us over the temperature of the wine, and how loud they were.

Brookstone Iceless Wine Chiller Let's start with the best single-bottle machine. Brookstone's Iceless Wine Chiller (between $80 and $100 online) uses thermoelectric cooling to chill bottles via the Peltier effect. The machine works for nearly every kind of wine, and you can set the best temperatures for each type by picking from the pre-programmed library of 40 different wines (It includes settings for sake, too). An LED screen shows the bottle's current temperature, the temperature it's working towards, and a countdown timer to when it will be ready. It's certainly not fast -- a bottle of Moscato took an hour and a half to chill from 68°F to 43°F (cold, but what the machine recommended). It does come with an insulation sleeve to wrap around the exposed top and keep the cold in, but its effect is minimal. A Merlot took less time to chill, as you would assume, going from 72°F to 65°F in just under an hour. There's also a Quick Chill option that cuts down chilling time by about half, which will come in handy if you're in a hurry or forgot you had friends coming over. One feature I really wanted when testing all the single-bottle machines was the ability to set the temperature manually, rather than be left to rely on preset options. Brookstone's chiller comes closest to this, however, since it already has optimal temperatures set for nearly every kind of wine. So you can just pick whatever preset option results in the temperature you're aiming for, regardless of what kind of wine you're chilling. In all, I liked Brookstone's chiller the best of the single-bottle units I used, and I liked it more than our own Mike Lasky did when he tested it independently a few years ago. WIRED Preset temperatures for 40 different wines. Nice LED screen. Small footprint on the counter or bar. Less than $100, pretty reasonable. TIRED Not that fast, and "Quick Chill" option is noisy. Insulated sleeve doesn't help much with chilling. Rating: 8 out of 10

Vinotemp Champagne Chiller Vinotemp's chiller ($130) is the wine chiller equivalent of an ice bucket. You just throw a bottle in it, press a button, and walk away. It only has three setting: Champagne, white wine and red wine. This makes is super-easy to use right out of the box, but what you gain in immediacy barely makes up for what's lacking everywhere else. After you drop in a bottle and select the type, you have to busy yourself until the indicator light blinks. In my testing, the Vinotemp kept me waiting as long as four and a half hours for a bottle of white wine. The temperature was inconsistent around the bottle, with the area above the label still at 68°F, the middle at 55°F, and the bottom of the bottle at 40°F. Just opening it and pouring the wine off the top left me with a glass that was too warm -- in the mid-60s. After gently rocking the bottle back and forth to mix the colder liquid at the bottom with the warmer liquid at the top, the next pour was right around 53°F. I repeated this test with a bottle of red, and after gently mixing the contents, the pour measured 61°F -- just about right. Even though it doesn't let you dial in an exact target temperature, it's more accurate than an ice bath or the freezer method. But it's much slower, much more expensive, and requires rocking the bottle to get a consistent pour. Skip it. WIRED Simple, with almost zero work involved. Dead quiet. TIRED No temperature customization options, just three settings. Too slow. Too expensive for how little it does. Rating: 4 out of 10

Cooper Cooler The Cooper Cooler ($75) is definitely the most effective chiller in the single-bottle category. It chills bottles consistently and quickly, it just has a weird way of getting there. It's the only non-thermoelectric chiller in the bunch, and you can hear it. This machine is loud, thanks to the water and ice that are constantly moving around and splashing your wine bottle to cool it. But the Cooper Cooler does bring wine bottles down to drinking temperature fast. A bottle of Moscato chilled from room temperature to 43°F in 10 minutes. The Cooper can bring a bottle of room-temperature red down a few degrees in just a couple of minutes. It has preset options to choose from, depending on the drink (it chills beer and soda in bottles and cans, too), and you can choose whether you want to bottle to rotate or not while chilling. The only reason not to rotate the bottle is if you're chilling a particularly delicate wine. Chilling with the rotation on leaves lines on the sides of the bottle, and you'll always come away with a soaked label because of the water and ice -- be wary if you're someone who saves the label. Also, the Cooper Cooler's lid works well to keep the water (most of it) inside the chamber, but it does limit what you can chill. Large or odd-shaped bottles won't fit. WIRED The fastest chiller out of the single-bottle machines. Relatively inexpensive at around $75. Can bring red wine to drinking temperature in just a minute or two. Chills beer, too. TIRED Sorry, I couldn't hear you, my wine chiller's too loud. Larger bottles can't fit inside. You need to add water and/or ice, which is a hassle. Rating: 7 out of 10

NewAir Thermoelectric Wine Chiller That's it for single-bottle machines. Now, let's move on to fridge-style devices made for long-term storage. NewAir's thermoelectric wine chiller (around $300) is a dual-zone fridge -- it has a large bottom storage area that can hold 15 bottles, and a smaller top storage area for 6 bottles. You can control the temperature of each area separately, so you can store your reds at cellar temperature and keep your whites a little cooler. Or you can store everything at 55 degrees in the lower section and move bottles up top to prep them for drinking in the next day or two. The temperature range of each zone is 44°F to 66°F, and once you have the temperatures set and the bottles in the rack, it takes a few hours to stabilize. I did notice the temperatures of the wines and the interior temperature of the fridge were one or two degrees cooler than what was displayed on the LED, but if you're using your own thermometer to double-check, this shouldn't be a problem. Also, it wasn't off by much, so you shouldn't ever find yourself with a frozen bottle of wine. WIRED Dual-zone design lets you choose the best temperature for two different types of wine, or separate your storage area from your prep area. Attractive design. 21 bottles is a lot of wine. TIRED Only shows temperature you set, and the display doesn't change as the internal temperature changes. Louder than the rest of the fridge-style chillers. Rating: 6 out of 10

Whynter SNO 16-Bottle Wine Cooler If there's one chiller I'm most torn about, it's the Whynter (around $180 online). On one hand, the digital display shows the temperature as it changes internally, and it's the most accurate of all the fridge-style chillers in terms of display temperature reading and wine temperature reading. On the other hand, the temperature range is limited -- you can only set it between 52°F and 65°F, which hits the cellar-temp sweet spot, but is inconvenient if you want to prep sparkling wines, or if you prefer your tart white wines at colder temperatures (the other fridges go down to the mid-40s). And while it holds 16 bottles, it's a little bulky because it's shaped like a cube. Even though I love the cube, it just takes up too much space with that shape. It's close, but no cigar. You'll probably get the most use out of this if you strictly want a machine to store all your wine at a stable cellar temperature, and if you have the extra space. WIRED Most accurate temperature readings. 16 bottle capacity is big enough for most small collections. Nifty lock and key to make sure no unwanted hands get to your Château Latour. TIRED Temperature range is more limited. Too bulky. Rating: 7 out of 10

Cuisinart 8-Bottle Private Reserve Wine Cellar The Cuisinart Wine Cellar ($160) is the opposite of the Whynter in many ways, and it was my favorite of the small-capacity fridges we looked it. There are a couple of minor drawbacks. The digital display shows only the temperature you set, and it's slightly inaccurate when compared to wine temperature (after stabilizing, the wines were 2 or 3 degrees warmer than the display indicated). But the Cuisinart is a lovely looking wine fridge. And though it only hold 8 bottles, it does have the advantage of being very small. At 17 x 10 x 17.25 inches and weighing only 26.5 pounds, it's the lightest and most compact fridge I tested. It's also insanely quiet -- I had to put my ear up to the back of it to make sure it was working. Considering it's the cheapest fridge-style chiller on our list, you don't have too much to lose if you want a decent machine that will be an attractive addition to the rest of your kitchen appliances. Just check the thermostat for any inaccuracies when you first get it, and adjust the setting accordingly. WIRED Well-designed. Wide temp range -- between 39°F and 68°F. Small and light, so it's easy to move or to stash in a tight kitchen. Very quiet, great for a small apartment. TIRED Only holds 8 bottles. Wine temperature is slightly off from set temperature. Only shows the set temperature, not the actual recorded temperature. Rating: 8 out of 10