A Christmas wine gift fails in one of three ways.
It arrives late. It gets quietly re-gifted. Or it is finished by Boxing Day.
We started Coolenator because we kept ruining perfectly good rosé in the garden. Two years of failed prototypes went into fixing it, most of them spent with a thermometer and a notebook, trying to build something that held its temperature for six hours instead of forty minutes.
That taught us a fair amount about which gifts people still use years later. It taught us nothing at all about what looks impressive under a tree. The two are rarely the same thing.
So this list is built around dodging those three failures rather than around price. Fourteen ideas, some ours and some not, with a word at the end about ordering in time.
Jump to
- Won't arrive late
- Won't get re-gifted
- Won't be finished by Boxing Day
- Four we would steer you away from
- Ordering in time
Won't arrive late: things that ship immediately
A double-hinged corkscrew
Around €12. Best for anyone still using the winged one from a hamper.
In stock everywhere, useful forever. A Pulltap's waiter's friend has a second hinge that lifts the cork in two stages instead of hauling it out in one.
That is why it never bends a cork, and why sommeliers carry them. The quiet winner of the whole list.
Extra freezer bullet
€14.95. Best for someone who already owns a Coolenator.
Small, flat, ships fast. Two cores in the freezer means the second bottle is cold immediately instead of nine hours later.
That matters more on 25 December than on any other day of the year. Extra Freezer Bullet.
Beer Coolenator
€22.95. Best for the family member who politely takes a beer.
Same removable core, sized for 330 ml. Beer Coolenator.
A gift card
From €25. Best for when you have never seen their kitchen.
We would normally leave this off a list like this.
One exception, though: colour. There are six finishes and people are particular about what sits on their counter. Don't guess. Coolenator gift card.
Won't get re-gifted: obviously meant for them
A personalised Coolenator
€64.95. Best for the person you actually know well. Order this one first.
This is the one we would argue hardest for. A photo, a name, a date. Nobody re-gifts a cooler with their own dog on it.
It is also where the counter behaviour changes. Generic gifts go back in the cupboard between uses. Personalised ones stay out.
Order it before anything else on the list, because personalisation adds production time on top of shipping. Personalised Coolenator.
Glasses one step better than the ones they own
€60 to €200. Best for someone who would rather have four perfect glasses than twelve safe ones.
Not ours. Zalto Universal glasses are extraordinarily thin and they change how a wine reads. They will also break eventually, which is rather the point.
If there are children or stone floors involved, Schott Zwiesel is the kind answer.
A book that suits them specifically
€25 to €50. Best for showing you know which kind of wine person they are.
Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker follows a journalist's year among sommeliers. Funny, and right for someone who loves wine but finds wine culture absurd.
The World Atlas of Wine if they are already deep in it. The choice is most of the gift.
The Copper Coolenator
€245. Best for a fiftieth or a proper anniversary. Not a stocking.
We made this because we wanted to, which isn't a business case but is the truth.
Solid copper, heavy in the hand, and it develops a patina rather than looking tired. This is the one people photograph. Copper Coolenator.
Won't be finished by Boxing Day
The Coolenator Classic
€59.95. Best for almost anyone. The default answer on this list.
Here is the honest version.
An ice bucket is good for about an hour. After that it is a bowl of water and the label has slid off. A neoprene sleeve doesn't cool at all. It slows the warming, which is a much weaker promise than the box suggests.
We owned both, were disappointed by both, and spent two years and a lot of failed prototypes doing something else.
How it works
A removable aluminium core lives in your freezer. Slide it in, drop the bottle, done.
It adds cold rather than just holding warmth off. That is the whole difference.
The numbers
Measured with calibrated equipment, not estimated. From a 750 ml bottle at 8 °C in a room at 20 to 22 °C:
- Down to about 1 °C within two hours
- Still below its 8 °C starting point at six hours
- No ice, no meltwater, no condensation, so no water ring on a laid table and no wet hands passing it round
For gifting, rose gold and champagne gold are what people pick. Silver, black, sand and sage green suit quieter taste. Hand wash only.
Classic Silver · Rose Gold · Champagne Gold · Black
The Tall
€69. Best for the household where midnight matters more than the wine list.
Champagne and prosecco bottles are taller than wine bottles, and a standard cooler leaves the neck out in the warm.
The Tall Turbo at €79 runs two cores for long lunches. Coolenator Tall.
The Wine Glass Coolenator
€39.95. Best for slow drinkers only. Wrong gift for anyone else.
A white poured at 8 °C is lukewarm within about fifteen minutes in a heated December living room.
So if someone makes one glass last an evening, this fixes a problem they stopped noticing years ago. If they drink at pace, buy the bottle cooler instead. Wine Glass Coolenator.
A Coravin
Around €200 and up. Best for the person who is impossible to buy for.
Not ours, and the cleverest object in wine. It pours through the cork without pulling it, so a bottle keeps for weeks.
Right for someone who drinks slowly, or owns bottles too good to open casually.
A plain glass decanter
€30 to €60. Best for young reds and a good-looking table.
Don't overthink it. A wide-based decanter opens a young red in twenty minutes and looks better on a Christmas table than the bottle does.
Avoid the sculptural ones. Impossible to wash, used twice.
A tasting or a vineyard day
Best for the person who already owns everything.
The only thing here we can't ship you. Nobody re-gifts an experience.
Four we would steer you away from
Aerating pourers. They claim to age a bottle by years in seconds. They don't. Twenty minutes in a plain decanter does more.
Wine-themed novelty gifts. Socks, signs, slogan glasses. Funny on the day, then in a drawer for a decade because nobody can bring themselves to throw away a present.
Wine fridges, usually. Excellent for storing a collection, useless for what most people want, which is a cold bottle on the table tonight. Only if they properly cellar wine.
Another bottle. Lovely, and gone by the 26th. If you are buying wine anyway, buy one bottle and one thing that keeps it cold.
Ordering in time
This is the part everyone leaves too late. Two rules cover almost all of it.
Order anything personalised a full week earlier than you think you need to. Personalisation adds production time on top of shipping, and it is the one product where late December gets tight.
Give yourself a clear working week of margin after mid-December. Every carrier slows down in the last fortnight, whoever is shipping.
Current costs, delivery times and free-shipping thresholds for your country are on the shipping page. We keep that up to date, so trust it over anything you read anywhere else, including here.
And if you are cutting it fine and want a straight answer about whether something will arrive, email us. We would much rather tell you no in November than disappoint you on the 24th.
One last thing
The best Christmas gift for a wine lover usually isn't wine. A bottle is a lovely evening. The things on this list come out every summer for years afterwards.
That is as true of the €12 corkscrew as of anything we make, and we would rather you bought the corkscrew than nothing at all.
The cooling data is on how it works. Everything else is at the full range.
