Brovst, Denmark, 2023
It has been full steam ahead for the two brothers, since they founded their company in 2017. Ground-chilled wine that you can access straight from your living room turned out to be a great idea. Today, they build wine cellars in various sizes to meet different requests. Vinorage currently offers two types of wine storage and both types use LINAK® actuators to access the wine: A wine cellar with a glass door opening to a staircase, and a wine cellar, where the wine is elevated from the cellar.
The bright idea
Rasmus and René Glindvad Kristensen are both trained stainless steel blacksmiths, and for a long time they had wanted to start their own business. They had yet to find the right business idea, but all of a sudden, it just came to them. Rasmus explains:
"When my girlfriend and I were renovating our house, I wanted a wine fridge. But I was outvoted as this would take up too much cabinet space. Still, I could not let go of the idea. So instead, I started to think about whether I could forge a stainless steel box that could be lowered into the ground under the floor. My brother and I set to work, and when the project was finished, we knew we had our business idea.”
The idea was clearly a good one, as orders started coming in quite quickly, and after only a year both brothers went full-time in the company.
Access to the wine
It soon became apparent that Vinorage needed a strong and durable actuator solution for their first model, where a glass door in the floor opens down to the cellar. The choice quickly fell on LINAK:
"We started out with an alternative solution, but it was not good enough at all. Both my brother and I are familiar with LINAK from our previous jobs, so it felt natural for us to contact them. And LINAK turned out to have the best solution for us all around," Rasmus says.
However, the brothers realized that the actuator they used to open the glass door was not enough, as they also needed to lift the wine from the cellar. Instead, they needed two actuators with extra power. Rasmus explains:
"Our second model required something entirely different, as the wine is brought up to you instead of you going down in the cellar to get the wine. We needed a parallel system that could lift up to 200 bottles of wine at a time. Again, we received some great advice from LINAK, and together we found a fantastic solution. LINAK was great at understanding what we needed."
Why store wine underground?
According to Rasmus, there are several good reasons to store your wine underground:
"First, it is a greener alternative to a classic wine fridge, which uses electricity to constantly keep the wine chilled. The wine cellar uses the soil temperature for cooling, which also means that no cooling elements can break. The only power used is for the actuators and the light. The stainless steel that we use is also very good at drawing the cold into the wine cellar.”
And according to Rasmus, there are several features that give a Vinorage wine cellar a real wow factor:
"Being able to push a button, which either opens a glass door or elevates a wine rack from the cellar in one uniform movement, is a feature that our customers really love. We sell to both wine enthusiasts and people working with interior design."
The future
Vinorage is now well established in the Danish market with their two models of wine cellars. But their ambitions go much further:
"The next step is to establish sales abroad. We are already in touch with a number of distributors who can help us. We also have several new projects in mind and on the drawing board – and LINAK has, of course, already been included in our future solutions," Rasmus concludes.
Read more about Vinorage on their website
