• La Sommelière, leader in the wine cellar market, claims to have invented the first "true intelligent wine cellar in the world".

  • Mobile app, connected shelves... The device helps consumers store and organize their collection of bottles.

Do you have several good bottles of wine at home?

It is still necessary to know how and where to store them... While more and more French people are falling for a wine cellar to be installed in their kitchen or living room, some manufacturers compete in inventiveness in the features offered.

A year ago, the market leader, La Sommelière located in Arnage (Sarthe) launched the "first connected and intelligent cellar in the world", called Ecellar185.

The device, manufactured in the Pays-de-la-Loire and available in household appliance stores at a price of 3,990 euros, has just been awarded the grand prize for innovation at the Foire de Paris.

In addition to the 168 slots, a whole host of technologies can be found inside.

One way to address a common problem among wine lovers, says Dider Grychta, CEO of the Frio group, which owns the brand.

“After innovating on conservation, we now had to improve the organization.

When you have 50 bottles or more, it becomes difficult to find your way around!

No more notebook or Excel spreadsheet records: the cellar, connected to an application called Vinotag, takes care of everything.

Equipped with sensors, it records each bottle entry and exit in real time.

But the other innovation, after three years of research and development, are these connected shelves (the boards on each floor), which know and indicate thanks to a light diode where a particular bottle is located in the cellar,

Alerts so as not to forget the grands crus

To know where to store your precious beverages, again, your smartphone can help you.

“Once the consumer has scanned their label, the bottle is recognized with a pre-filled form.

The app advises you on the best place to place it: at the bottom, at the bottom if it is to age for a long time, at eye level if it is more recent.

You can also set the cellar to have a uniform temperature, around 12 degrees, or staggered, with slightly cooler spaces at the bottom for white wines, for example.

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Food and wine pairings, alerts at the approach of peak dates, isn't this new generation cellar a gadget, when other connected wine cellars, certainly less advanced, but less expensive also exist on the market ?

This is not the opinion of Didier Grychta, who believes that "people consume less but better, with a desire to learn about wine, to age their bottles properly", and in particular certain great wines which can fall oblivion, ten years later...

The Frio company, which achieved 75 million euros in turnover in 2021, half from export, does not communicate on the number of units sold.

However, it indicates that Ecellar185 is the market leader for cabinets over 3,000 euros and that a second “little sister” version is already in preparation.

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