When it comes to making the most out of your glass of vino, the one thing that may matter more than the vintage is the temperature. After all, there’s a reason that those wine coolers are set to such exacting standards, and as any sommelier or wine expert will tell you, the temperature can dramatically affect the taste of your favorite red or white. But even if you’re aware of the effects that a too warm or too cold environment can have, it may be difficult to adjust the temperature as needed. Enter the QelviQ, a smart wine cooler that claims to know the ideal serving temperature for a bottle of wine, and subsequently adjusts temperatures as needed so that you’re ready to serve an enjoy an optimal beverage.
Capable of cooling a bottle at a speed of up to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in 10 minutes, the QelviQ hopes to quickly adjust the temperature of your wine so that you’re always making the most of it. The wine cooler comes with a companion QelviQ Temperature app, which purports to leverage optical character recognition and image recognition technology to identify wine labels. From there, it’s able to match your bottle to a database of more than 350,000 ideal serving temperatures from more than 80,000 winemakers. Your only responsibility should be to scan your wine with the app and the cooler will determine the current temperature of the bottle, and begin the adjusting process.
The 120-watt motor purports to cool at a rate that is nearly four times faster than a high-performance refrigerator and maintains permanent airflow into the cooler via two ultra low-noise fans. Don’t worry — this isn’t a large wine cooler that you’ll have to install. Rather, the portable device looks just like a wine chiller, albeit a 21st-century version that you don’t have to fill with ice.
Keeping the QelviQ charged should be relatively straightforward, as the basic configuration comes standard with a 120-watt power station, as well as a lithium ion battery that promises up to 1.5 hours of cord-free cooling. The smart wine cooler is currently seeking funding on Indiegogo, where it has already raised over $30,000 with a month left in its campaign. Of course, you should always exercise caution when backing crowdfunding campaigns, but if the QelviQ has piqued your interest, the team is offering early bird pricing of $299, with delivery anticipated for March 2019.
