Located in Southern California, Vinotemp is a 30-year-old, family owned business, with administration offices, manufacturing, distribution and warehouse facilities throughout Los Angeles and Orange County.
Founder, Francis Ravel, was born 1917, Casablanca, French Morocco. In his early 20’s, Francis moved to Paris where he joined and fought with the French Foreign Legion. The young freedom fighter was captured by German occupation troops, where he escaped and joined and fought with the US Army to push German troops out of France and assist with the Allied invasion and conquest of Nazi Germany.
After the war, Francis came to the United States and eventually landed in Hollywood, California in the early 1950’s. He became an actor and was cast with Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Elvis Presley in a verity of hit musicals. After a lengthy film career, Francis turned his talents to the early days of Television and played a recurring role on the I Love Lucy show.
After a lengthy and successful film and TV career, Francis, at 68, found his true passion of making and bottling his own wine. This simple turn of fate led to the need to store his collection. A man ahead of his time, he was the first to introduce the idea of placing a cooling unit into a sealed wine cabinet, soon he was making his wine cabinets for friends and family and “voila!” Vinotemp was born.
From these humble beginnings, Vinotemp has grown to be recognized worldwide as design and innovators of bespoke wine solutions, including cooling systems, wine cellars and wine furniture. Today, Francis Ravel’s daughter, India Hynes, who grew up playing and working on the floors of the Vinotemp factory, is now President of Vinotemp International.
Inspiration lies at the very core of Vinotemp’s culture and India, like her father, has traveled the world in search of new ideas and trends, both in and outside the wine industry, to learn about the latest technology and storage solutions to keep Vinotemp on the leading edge of design and technology, now and in the future
At Vinotemp, the term “bespoke” is taken very seriously. Much like a fitted suit, they design and build a personal space that will define and reflect the collection and the collector. Vinotemp challenges the very way we look at space, so they may better understand the problem, a well as the solution. Vinotemp believes that modern wine design must move away from a one-dimensional approach and think of the wine-room as a multi-dimensional canvas. The static, cluttered, restricted, and unchanging wine-room of the past must now evolve into a living stage, a place where it is possible to create an environment that alters old beliefs about space and structure and to infuse new concepts that reflect the needs of today’s modern wine collector.
Even though Vinotemp is considered an international company, with offices and partners around the world, it is a California company with a California “soul”. As much as Vinotemp has grown and expanded over the years, we still call Southern California home. Vinotemp’s loyal workforce of woodworkers, cabinetmakers, artisans, and designers are all bound together by a single thought…to create a product that will last for generations.
