Got a case of wine sitting in your closet? Why store it in that hideous cardboard box when you can display it for all to see in this nifty modern wine rack from EQ3. This rack can be hung on the wall or it can sit on a table or a bar. It holds the bottles horizontally, ensuring your cork won’t dry up and crumble into the wine when uncorking. Best of all, it holds 14 bottles, so you can display a whole case plus two extra bottles of other favorites. Made of willow wood.

Buy: $64.99

Marcel Wanders designed the Bachus mod wine storage concept especially for those who crave a more showy display of those lovely bottles of red. With removable casters and its stackable design it makes a nice artistic statement, especially in this more traditional setting. We like the mix-n-match colors, but you can easily buy three white versions for a more minimalist vibe. Or just get one if you don’t plan on buying quite that many bottles of wine this year.

Contact for pricing.

Every Tuesday, GearCrave picks a gift for the women in our lives. Today’s gift is fit for both our women and ourselves, and something for us to enjoy together. Wine Enthusiast’s Wine Essence Kit helps you learn the fundamentals of wine and gain the ability to discern the scents, flavors and origins of a bottle of wine. By using scent essences and other identifiers, you can compare and contrast the scent and flavor of your wine until you’ve found a match. Here’s what this gift includes:

• This set includes 9 scent essences in .33 fl. oz. bottle solutions, a detailed taster’s guide, essence labels and a tasting glass
• Learn each of the 9 fundamental essences identified as the primary elements of good wine (sweet, bitter, sour, smooth, acetic, flowery, fruity, oak and tannin)
• Packaged in a nicely designed gift box

Buy: $69.99

The Wine Enthusiast Wine Cellar Cube is a tasteful mahogany brown and holds up to 24 bottles. This design is great because it is made to be stackable. As your wine collection expands, just add another cube to the mix. The display method pictured above is a great addition to an open living room, but these cubes also look great against a wall that could use a bit of livening up, or even in a kitchen area. Just make sure to keep your bottles away from heat sources for maximum enjoyment of all those great wines.

Buy for $50

Your growing wine collection needs a home with perfect preservation temperature and humidity. Aging wine the right way requires on a combination of temperature and humidity control. This wine cellar by Thermador offers both, plus large storage capacity with the Thermador Freedom Collection series. It’s a dual-zone wine cellar, so you get two temperature zones in addition to 14 wine racks and a 98-bottle capacity. These are very quiet units with isolated motors for minimum vibration issues, and there’s even a vanity light so you can show off your collection when you want to give a grand tour.

Buy for $4,729

Some wines deserve their own special place. If you want to display a particularly good bottle, the Ercuis Kalliste Relax bottle holder’s curved shape and silver polish finish will do it justice. We suggest a nice Barolo from Italy, or the ever-increasingly hard to find made-in-USA Steelhead Reserve. Both tasty reds that would look smashing on a nice shiny curved bottle holder like the Kalliste Relax. And how about that handy recessed cork-holding slot?

Buy for $194

The Cooper Cooler is an all-purpose beverage quick-cooler that can give you a cold bottle or can in about six minutes. The first thing many think of for this is a bottle of white wine, but we prefer this for quick enjoyment of specialty beers–those unique brews that don’t come in a six pack. They usually sport funny names like Horny Curmudgeon Stout or Bloated Tomcat Pale Ale. These gems are usually sold unrefrigerated (at least near us), and who doesn’t want to savor a nice pint of Evil Monkey Amber as soon as they can get it home? Put it inside the Cooper Cooler and by the time you get done putting the rest of the groceries away, your bottle will be ready.

Buy for $75.51

What’s the difference between a plain old wine refrigerator and a wine cellar? A wine fridge merely keeps bottles chilled and isn’t designed to preserve, protect, and properly age wine over the years. A standalone wine cellar unit duplicates the temperature and humidity conditions in traditional wine cellars with precision. In the case of this carefully handcrafted, vibration-free EuroCave Performance 283 wine cellar, a built-in alarm lets you know when the humidity falls below the optimum setting (50-80 percent) and a lock and key prevents your fine wines from getting manhandled by cretins.

Buy for $2995.

Want to learn more about how to properly store your wine? Read the GearCrave Wine Storage Survival Guide.

Remember our Wine Storage Survival Guide? In that article we mentioned that different wines (especially whites) have different ideal serving temperatures. It’s easy to put a bottle of Chardonnay on ice for a while or stick it in a wine fridge, but how do you know the exact temperature when you bring it out? Wonder no more. The VinTemp infrared wine thermometer reads the exact temperature of the wine without ever touching it–just press the sensor against the bottle to take the reading. If it’s too cold, just let it warm on the table for a few minutes, and take the reading again. Too warm? You know what to do…

Buy for $40.50

(image courtesy of Mirofoto)

The holidays usually bring a few bottles of wine with them; holiday parties always have a leftover bottle or two, and New Year’s Eve is the same. Storing those collections of wine over a period of weeks or months is much more than keeping them in a cool, dark place. GearCrave’s handy guide to Wine Storage 101 is here to help you keep those bottles preserved just as they ought to be for maximum enjoyment. Continue reading below!