Ravi Instant Wine Chiller
$16.99 + $5 shipping
Condition: Cold
Product: 1 Ravi Instant Wine Chiller
From the product website-
Caution: Do not use the ravi to refresh non alcoholic or carbonated beverages, such as beer and champagne.
$39.95 on wineenthusiast.
Anyone actually used one of these?
Hm, worst wine.woot description ever, next to, of course, {description}.
This is why I have a wine refrigerator I think?
Cheers!
Any idea how many glasses of wine this will chill before it needs to be returned to the freezer?
Also from the product website-
“Should you be caught off guard with a warm bottle of white wine that you wish to drink, thanks to the ravi you will be able to chill 2 to 3 glasses to the perfect serving temperature.”
What it really needs is an electronic bypass system so you can dial in the serving temperature and not require the wine to ALWAYS come out from-the-fridge cold.
this is something that i might buy 3 of if it was like 5.99, but would not pay for one at this price, i can wait 20 min for wine to chill in the freezer if needed
EDIT: Never mind, I see how the product works. Not really sure why this is the case now. I assumed it rapidly chilled the entire bottle because of how it clipped on, maybe using a CO2 charger. However if you just place it in the freezer and pour the contents over it I really have no clue as to why you can’t use it for those items. I don’t think they’d explode from being poured over something that was frozen. I pour soda on ice all the time and I’ve never had a glass of soda explode on me.
Also I have significant doubts to how this thing works, if it is just steel that is poured over. If there was a spiral running through it the increase surface area the liquid was exposed to, and increase the amount of liquid exposed to the cold surface, then perhaps it works. Better yet a glycerin chamber inside would be great, with a tight spiral running through, as glycerin will remain cold for hours after taking it out of the freezer (so you wouldn’t have to worry about it warming up from having the liquid pass over it).
Same price on bed bath and beyond, and a few other sites that sell them online according to the product’s website. Factoring in shipping this is probably about 50% off. Yet another great discount from Woot.
A couple things.
The concept behind this thing seems to be pretty simple (certainly not “revolutionary” like the website claims) - run wine through a frozen steel tube and it’ll get cold. The only problem I can see is that the specific heat of steel is significantly lower than that of wine (or any liquid, for that matter), so to chill a certain mass of wine would take a many-times-greater mass of steel. Even if the steel is substantially colder than the desired temperature of the wine, it would still take a substantial amount (I guess I could do that math if I wanted to figure it out for sure, but who has the time or energy for that). Point being, even without doubting this object’s actual capacity to perform as advertised, if it does perform as advertised, then it still makes pouring incredibly awkward and any bottle it’s placed on very top-heavy.
Second, how hard is it to clean? I imagine it would get pretty gunky rather quickly if there’s some kind of elaborate radiator system in there.
Here it is on Amazon at $34.99, with mixed but sparse reviews. Apparently it has to be disassembled to be cleaned.
Here’s another one on Amazon for the same company from $24.23, with slightly better reviews, but I can’t really tell the difference between the two.
EDIT: Apparently they are the same thing, the first is simply sold by The Wine Enthusiast, while the second is straight through Amazon. So this deal is ten bucks or so cheaper than Amazon, depending on what your shipping there would be.
If I’m opening a really good bottle of wine, having this “water filter” looking thing on the bottle makes me laugh. If you can afford a good wine, you also probably know how to store and chill it.
That’s where the beauty of a phase change material (water or the like) comes in. The steel tube could be surrounded by the frozen water and absorb lots of heat while remaining at it’s freezing point.
Kris
I found a blogger’s review that gives it a B+. They like it, aside from some drawbacks: “It’s bulky and makes handling your wine bottle awkward at best; I kept worrying I would drop it and break my glass, spilling the wine everywhere. It’s a little messy, and cleanup takes quite some time, requiring you use a special device to shoot air through the Ravi to dry it out before you put it back in the freezer.” Also, there’s a video showing how it works for those curious.
And here’s another review.
And another.
Based on the last review it seems like it does, in fact, have a spiral inside. This would greatly increase the surface area of wine being exposed to cold steel, so I can see this definitely being effective. If it was just a straight tube I would have failed to see how it could have done anything.
D’oh. That’s what I get for trying to reverse-engineer it from the write-up. Of course there would be some kind of glycerol compound in there or something. So there’s how it works.
I still think (and the review posted above seems to back this up) that it would make pouring awkward and the bottle top-heavy.
Even if it’s no match for a well-calibrated, heinously-expensive wine refrigerator, though, if it works, it still beats the single-bottle wine chiller I have (a gift from SWMBO’s mother) which takes over an hour just to drop a bottle of red ten degrees.
Anyone know what the overall heat transfer coefficient (U) is on this puppy?
damn, I waited too long for the chardonnay.