Skip to main content

Perlick’s new refrigerator treats your food like wine to better preserve it

Even if your refrigerator has ditched the cold-to-coldest dial and lets you choose a temperature, it’s still treating your meats, cheeses, and veggies all the same. In recent years, we’ve seen temperature-controlled drawers pop up in more places, which can let you be a little choosy about making everything as cold as you want your sodas. But that still leaves most of your fridge at a uniform chill, so it’s not surprising that it took a wine cooler maker to break the compartment into zones. Perlick added its first tall refrigerator to its lineup, and it brought it to KBIS 2018 to show off.

While Perlick is known for its wine and undercounter fridges, it wanted to expand into something more full-size. Its new 24-inch column refrigerator has four temperature zones you can set independently, and they’ll maintain those temperatures within one degree Fahrenheit. In addition to the main compartment (32 to 42 degrees Fahrenheit) its pre-set categories, are deli, meat/fish, and produce, all of which can be set to between 32 and 37 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to the main part of the cavity, there’s a two-tier deli tray, a special compartment that slides under a shelf for marinating meat, and a meat and fish drawer. The produce drawer doesn’t pull out but instead tips forward; the design is supposed to let you stand your greens up instead of laying them flat.

“Moisture is a huge part of preservation,” Stephanie Muraro Gust, a marketing manager for Perlick told Digital Trends. The company worked with somaliers for the hydration system in its wine fridges, and brought the tech over for the produce drawer. The refrigerator electronically monitors the humidity in the drawer and draws sterilized water from the evaporator and introduces it into the compartment. While the wine fridges do this automatically (so people don’t mess it up, essentially), for the column version, users can set their preferred humidity level between 55 and 95 percent (by units of 10).

If you want, you can pair the column fridge with Perlick’s new 24-inch column freezer. It also has a stainless steel interior, as well as open bins and a touchscreen panel on the inside for temperature control. Both are available now, though you’ll have to contact a Perlick dealer for pricing.

Editors' Recommendations

Jenny McGrath
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jenny McGrath is a senior writer at Digital Trends covering the intersection of tech and the arts and the environment. Before…
The Plum wine dispenser preserves opened bottles for up to 90 days
plum wine news dsc 0634

Any oenophile will happily espouse the benefits of wine, that natural nectar Galileo called "sunlight ... held together by water." But short of attending a tasting, function, or restaurant dinner, enjoying it by the glass has not historically been realistic -- once wine is unsealed, rapid oxidization causes it to turn. Now, though, a promising new startup called Plum promises to extend the lifespan of wine with an automatic appliance two years in the making.

The eponymous Plum dispenser is not your average wine accessory. The brainchild of David Koretz, a former security analyst turned entrepreneur, it is a system that not only pours wine precisely by the glass, but one that fits aesthetically alongside high-end kitchen appliances, services wine at its optimal temperature, and ensures the integrity of that wine for weeks on end.

Read more
Can’t be bothered to keep your water pitcher full? GE’s new fridge does it for you
ge fridge that fills your water pitcher for you auto fill 0002

Ever pull out your water pitcher to find it’s only got a few droplets left of chilly water? GE wants to make that a thing of the past with a fridge that automatically fills up your water pitcher.

The Autofill Pitcher uses magnets to sense when the jug is in place and a floating switch to tell when it’s full. Whenever you snap the pitcher back into its spot, it will fill up with 74 ounces of filtered water. The docking station is right at the front on the top shelf, so you’ll have to fit items around it if you plan on letting it do its autofill thing.

Read more
A new refrigerator laser can detect food poisoning-related bacteria
Food Poisoning Laser

Your refrigerator may be where you store your favorite items in the house (seriously, cheese over jewelry any day), but some of our iceboxes may also be doubling as breeding grounds for dangerous bacteria and food-borne illnesses. Thankfully, there's now a solution for that. To bring your refrigerator into the 21st century, simply affix to it a laser that will annihilate microbes residing on your food. Well, it will detect the microbes, though annihiliation would be a great next step.

While a laser-packing fridge may seem like a rather extreme approach, the problem at hand is no small issue -- in fact, it's estimated that around 50 million Americans get food poisoning each year, with around 3,000 of these cases result in fatalities. So don't laugh at this seemingly militaristic notion of a fridge-mounted laser.

Read more