A Huski Wine Cooler was bought for me by my wife as a gift. I have to admit that I was guilty of not looking at it particularly closely when I first received it. We already have several wine coolers, so I assumed it was simply another variation on something I already had. As it turned out, it was very different and an excellent gift.
Huski describes it as an award-winning, high-performance cooler, designed to keep drinks chilled for up to six hours without the need for ice. It certainly isn’t cheap. On the official Huski UK website it sells for around £49.99 to £54.99, depending on the colour. So what exactly is it, and does it actually work?
Designed in New Zealand, the Huski is essentially a triple-insulated stainless-steel container with a screw-on top. You simply place your bottle of wine inside and screw the top down around the neck of the bottle. The thread is deliberately quite wide, so it doesn’t require endless turning. As you tighten it, a rubber seal at the top closes around the bottle and holds it securely in place.
I tried it with a wide range of bottles and everything I had fitted, including several champagne and sparkling-wine bottles. That versatility immediately made it more useful than I had expected.
The important question, though, is whether it actually keeps wine cold. It does. Remarkably well. That is unquestionably the Huski’s main strength. Once a properly chilled bottle is placed inside, it maintains the temperature extremely effectively. Unlike a conventional ice bucket, there is no noticeable change of temperature, there is no ice to deal with, no water collecting around the bottle and no wet bottle afterwards. It also completely eliminates condensation, so hands and tables stay dry.
There is a silicone base underneath the cooler which both protects surfaces and makes the Huski very stable. There is, however, a slight downside to this. The silicone grips the surface so well that you cannot easily rotate the bottle while opening it. If, like me, you sometimes rest a bottle on a worktop or table and rotate it while removing foil or using a corkscrew, you are better off opening the wine before putting it into the Huski. One other small thing. Unlike see-through plastic wine coolers, you obviously can’t see the back and front bottle labels. This is probably more of an issue for me than for the average drinker, as I sometimes need to reference the bottle while I’m reviewing the wine.
Huski also says the cooler is slim enough to allow you to pour comfortably with one hand. Technically it is, but personally I found it easier to use two hands most of the time. The additional size and weight around the bottle make one-handed pouring slightly less natural than pouring from a bottle on its own. Those are relatively minor criticisms, though.
The obvious uses for the Huski are BBQs, picnics, outdoor entertaining and dinner parties. For all of those situations it makes a great deal of sense. There is no ice to prepare or replenish and you can simply put a chilled bottle inside and forget about it.
However, I’ve actually found its best use to be at home, where it has become the perfect partner for my wine fridge. A wine fridge is excellent because it allows you to bring wine to exactly the temperature you want without having to play around with timings in a normal refrigerator. The problem comes once you open the bottle. You pour a glass, put the bottle on the table and immediately it starts warming up. You can keep returning it to the wine fridge between pours, but that rather defeats the convenience of having the bottle on the table. Traditional wine coolers help, but in my experience they simply don’t maintain the temperature well enough.
I can take a bottle from the wine fridge at precisely the temperature I want, put it straight into the Huski and leave it on the table. The wine remains remarkably close to that ideal serving temperature as we drink it.
At around £50, the Huski Wine Cooler initially looks expensive for what appears to be a fairly simple product. I certainly wouldn’t have expected to become quite so enthusiastic about one. But it is beautifully made, easy to use, works with an impressive variety of bottle shapes and, most importantly, does exactly what it claims to do: it keeps wine cold extremely well without ice, water or condensation.
Given that my first one was a gift, perhaps the best recommendation I can give is that I’ve subsequently found myself buying another one. Ebay has several listed ‘new’ in the £20 to £26 price range.
