A Cooler Kind of Wine

It takes a boatload of energy to keep things cool in a wine store the size of Astor Wines and Spirits, which looks onto New York City’s very busy Astor Place.

The store is huge, with thousands upon thousands of bottles of every imaginable shape, size and color displayed on the sales floor. Buyers and clerks buzz about like busy bees.

But it’s downstairs in the basement where the bulk of the store’s inventory lies in a vast wine vault. Neatly stacked racks of wine spread out like the bookshelves in a library. These all are organic wines, with no preservatives to keep them stable at room temperatures. Thus the vault’s chillers keep everything at a cool.

The store uses two of the most efficient gas turbines in the world to make it’s own electricity.

"The activities of Astor Wines & Spirits are heavily oriented to the natural, organic, biodynamic and sustainable," said Andrew Fisher, whose company owns the 100-year old, five-story building that houses the wine store and several business offices in the upper stories.

Not only does the building cover its electricity needs with its turbines, it directs excess heat from the generation process to the hot water systems that heats the building. This is what engineers call a "co-generation system," or co-gen, meaning it is using heat as well as making current.