Lately I’ve been noticing these boxes in the wine department of one of the grocery stores I go to. They work on the same principle as those big, cheap boxes of Almaden and similar brands, but are more expensive and only give you four standard bottles’ worth. Like most wine drinkers, I’ve always been prejudiced against boxes, screw tops, plastic, synthetic corks, and so on.
But according to the labels, these boxes were different. They contained true varietels from single geographic appellations, that are regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. (There’s a strange thought. Did you know that the government agency that rushes nests of militants with all their guns blazing is the same outfit that cites a winemaker for putting Paso Robles on his labels when he has no right to? I wonder how they all get along with each other at the office.)
But back to the box. The box is actually not a bad idea. The wine is in a bag within the box, if you follow me, and said bag collapses as the wine is drawn out through the tap. The advantage of this is that the air never comes in contact with the wine, so the last glass is as good as the first. I always wondered why better wine wasn’t being packaged this way, but then, as I noted, we wine drinkers are a hidebound lot, suspicious of newfangled things. But on a perverse whim I caved and bought a Black Box of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Cutting to the chase (finally), the wine is quite good! Which is to say it isn’t like a good year of Caves-des-Papes or Far Niente, but it is very decent and drinkable, with the rich overtones you expect from even an ordinary California Cabernet. I’d say it’s very much like Gallo of Sonoma, but costs about half as much.
We’ve been drinking a lot of Allan Scott sauvingon blanc (from New Zealand), which just went to a screw cap. (It was funny when CrazyCatLady didn’t realize this and took the foil cutter to the aluminum cap. “They didn’t put a cork in this!”) According to my wine merchant, a lot of mid-priced wines are going this way.
That’s a double-edged sword; it also never lets the wine open up any. I find that letting even the cheapo reds I drink ($8-15, usually) sit open for a couple of hours improves them dramatically. (In a class I took last year, we had a blind tasting that included two bottles of the same $9 California cabernet, one freshly opened and one opened for about 3 hours before the class. It didn’t even taste like the same wine.)
Then again, if you’re not going to drink the whole bottle at once (and this is often an issue for me), the box might just be the way to go.
I have been buying most of my wine in box form, recently. There are more and more decent kinds coming out all the time, it seems. Black Box is one of my favorites. Banrock Station Shiraz is also quite tasty.
Also, Target carries a store-brand box of…Merlot, I think? I was quite surprised at how good it tasted.
*Disclaimer: I am not a conissour (sp?) by any means, but I knows what I likes, and I can tell the difference between a bottle of decent wine, and a glass of Canai (not that I wouldn’t drink either, mind you)
The screwtop is another frontier for the winesellers. Traditionally, nothing screams “cheap alcoholized grape juice” more stridently than a screwcap, but, on the other hand, how can one argue that a screwtop with a genuine cork liner isn’t more appropriate than the synthetic corks that are becoming ubiquitous in the under-10-USD range?
Could not the wine breathe at least a little bit in the glass?
Opening a bottle doesn’t allow the wine to breathe a bit. The amount of air that the wine is exposed to though the open neck of the bottle is minimal. To aerate a wine, you need to decant it or pour it into a glass and let it breathe for a bit. If you want to get the most flavor from a boxwine, do the latter…pour the wine into your glass 15 minutes before dinner.
You can buy wine at Target? Fascinating! Here in Minnesota you can’t even buy booze at night.
I’ve had Black Box and I liked it fine. I like that it’s the equivalent of 4 bottles for about $20, and I like that I can help myself to a glass any ol’ time I feel like it. My SO hated it, though. Snob.
BTW, my local liquor store was selling canned wine for a while. They put a sign on it that said “Poison! Drink to punish yourself for being evil!”
Yeah, going to Target in Atlanta was a whole different experience than going to Target in Minnesota/South Dakota. One one hand, it was nice to go somewhere that felt like…home, a little, anyway. On the other hand, I could buy beer and wine (only at the Super Targets, with the grocery stores), which was odd.
How I miss the odd alcohol laws of Minnesota (as opposed to the odd alcohol laws of Georgia). Only a few more months of missing, hopefully.
