Aluminium Wine Cooler — Handmade Ice Bucket

A wine cooler in handmade aluminium — a working ice bucket, not a display piece.

Details

• Handmade aluminium construction
• Hand-applied polished finish
• Holds a standard bottle with ice
• Suits a table, bar, kitchen or yacht

Getting it right

Ice alone is inefficient. A bucket of ice cubes touches the bottle at a few dozen points and cools mostly by chilling the air around it. Ice and water together — half and half, plus a good handful of salt — puts liquid in contact with the entire submerged surface and drops the bath below freezing point.

The difference is roughly thirty minutes versus six. It is the single most useful thing to know about serving wine cold, and almost nobody does it.

Aluminium helps too: it conducts heat several times better than the stainless steel most buckets are made from.