Liebherr WPgbi 5283 Vinidor Selection

Introduction

More than just a wine fridge, the Liebherr WPgbi 5283 Vinidor Selection is a three-zone vault for your wine collection, complete with an impressive Sommelier Board for serving up your wine in ideal conditions.

A hugely flexible interior, a useful smart app and space for 85 bottles of wine make this a great place to keep a serious wine collection for those that can afford it.

Design and Features

• Three individual zones
• Flexible shelving, although fiddly to set up
• Sommelier Board is useful, but be careful of the door sensor

About the same size as a 70/30 upright fridge freezer, the Liebherr WPgbi 5283 Vinidor Selection is a wine cooler that means business. It’s a large, heavy appliance, with a single sheet of glass covering the entire front, so you can observe your wine without having to open the door.

That’s particularly true if you decide to engage the interior lights, lighting up the inside so that your wine is always visible. With the standard setting, the lights turn off when the door closes. With the door open, the floor to ceiling LED light strips open up, making it easy to see every bottle, no matter where it’s placed.

A UVProtect Plus system is used on the door, which consists of three protective layers against UB: tinted glass and a double layer of vacuum-deposited metal, known as Low-E coating.

Setting up the Liebherr WPgbi 5283 Vinidor Selection is quite a time-consuming experience, although it is something you only have to do once. There are eight shelves that have to be fitted with the provided wooden slats to prevent bottles rolling.

Each shelf is marked with the ideal position for the slats, but placing each one in the right place takes quite a bit of time. If you need to bunch the slats up more, additional bundles can be bought.

There are three wine zones in this fridge freezer, each with its own temperature control. The top and the bottom zones are larger, with the bottom one containing a large storage zone at the bottom, which can hold up to 17 bottles stacked on top of each other.

There are then three telescopic shelves that slide gently out and have a soft-close feature, much like the drawers in the Liebherr CBNsda 575i. Two of these shelves can each hold seven bottles of wine, while the top one can hold four. The slide-out nature makes it easier to spot and find the wine you want.

At the top is another large zone, which has a fixed shelf that holds 16 bottles of wine. As these have to be stacked on top of each other, it can be a little tricky to find a specific bottle of wine, so it makes more sense to use this space for collections of multiple bottles of the same type.

Above this are three pull out shelves, two that can hold seven bottles and one that can hold four.

In the middle section, there’s limited flexibility, with one single fixed shelf that can hold 16 bottles of wine. Above this sits the Sommelier Board.

A slide-out solid-wood shelf, this area is a flat platform that has a wine glass holder, a storage box for your tools, and a wine bottle holder for keeping an open bottle angled. There’s space here for a decanter, and Liebherr suggests that this slide-out shelf is used to present and serve wine.

That’s a good idea in many ways, and the wide shelf is useful as you can maintain your wine at the right temperature while drinking. Thanks to the activated charcoal filter, which needs replacing every six months, any wine (open or not) will remain odour free.

Just be careful of the door sensor: after 60 seconds the fridge will start beeping, warning you that the door is open, which slightly gets in the way of relaxing while pouring wine.

Each of the three zones has individual temperature control between 5°C and 20°C. And, there’s a humidity control which can be set to standard (50% to 80% humidity), or plus (50% humidity, with higher running costs).

Three zones is great for flexibility, as it gives room to pick a temperature for whites, reds and any more special wine that you might want; or having a slightly warmer middle section to go with the Sommelier Board; typically, wine should be stored a degree or two colder than you’d drink it, to allow for heat rise as the wine hits the glass.

Along with the simple touchscreen control on the front, the Liebherr WPgbi 5283 Vinidor Selection is compatible with the Liebherr app. This gives remote control over temperatures, but also notifications if something should go wrong, such as a dramatic temperature increase or the door being left open.

Performance

• Excellent temperature control
• Good running costs

I loaded the wine fridge up with temperature sensors to see how well it maintained temperatures. I set the top and middle sections to 10°C (for white wine or Champagne). After two weeks of use, I measured the top section at an average temperature of 10.1°C, with temperature fluctuations of +/-0.87°C. Fluctuations of less than 1°C are ideal for stability.

With the middle section, the temperature was 9.2°C on average, with similar +/-9°C fluctuations in temperature. It’s important to note that while minimum recorded temperatures hit 8.1°C, my wine never hit more than a drinkable 11.2°C.

With my red wine section at the bottom, I set the target temperature to 14°C. The average temperature was 13.7°C, and temperatures fluctuated +/-0.79°C. While the minimum temperature I measured was 12.4°C (still fine for red wine), the maximum was only 15.1°C. That’s very good for wine condition.

Running costs are good, too, despite this being an F-rated appliance. As temperatures are typically higher than a normal fridge would be, and there’s no freezer section, I estimated that the Liebherr WPgbi 5283 Vinidor Selection would cost around £23.76 per year to run, with my settings, which works out to a cost of 27p per bottle.

Should you buy it?