I’m not a drinker but as I understand it boxed wine has many advantages to bottled yet it’s always treated as if it is something cheap that no true wine drinker would touch. Is it just snobbery or is there a real reason to avoid boxed wines?
They put cheap wine in many of them I would say is a reason. Not all are in this category but lots of low end stuff.
It is also a bulk thing. Even in a box, wine goes bad after a couple few weeks, and you are buying 5 liters at a time. That’s a bunch of wine to drink in that amount of time.
Most of the people that I know who drink box wine are at the very least low level alcoholics.
I think there’s a certain amount of snobbery involved. It used to be the same with screw tops, but their acceptance has certainly grown.
The boxed wines I’ve had were fine, but then again I’m on record for saying I can’t tell much difference between moderately priced wines and expensive wines.
Thread relocated from IMHO to Cafe Society.
but isn’t the reason that there is mostly cheap wine in boxes because expensive wine makers know that boxed wine is considered low quality and therefore don’t want to sell their product in a way that may diminish their brand?
Well, that, or they’re buying it for a party.
Or they’re anticipating rough treatment of the container. When I went white water rafting on the Green River, if you wanted wine you brought it in the form of box wine. After two camping stops the cardboard box had come completely apart from rough handling, but that mylar bag with the wine in it held right up.
Ideally, the wine you have should compliment the foods you have with it. Different kinds of wine go best with different kinds of foods, and even within a certain kind of wine, some will pair better than others with the same kind of food. It’s unlikely that the wine in the box, even if it’s good wine, will be the right wine for whatever you’re eating over the whole time you have the box.
If you’re into wine, you might have one wine with cheese before the meal, another kind with the meal, and then another with dessert. If you’re not into wine then it doesn’t matter, but then you’re likely fine with a generic wine anyway.
They didn’t specifically mention one of the biggest benefits of boxed wine: as you drink it, the bag shrinks, so you don’t have significant oxygen in contact with the wine. An open bottle of wine is decent for a day tops (I don’t agree with their 5 days) once you drink half of it. Even if you seal it well and use one of those vacuum pumps, you’ll still have enough oxygen in the headspace to cause changes in flavor. But I’ve had wine boxes where I was unable to detect a change after a week.
As already noted, the main problem is that wine makers don’t put good wine in boxes. Boxes are for everyday wine that you aren’t too worried about pairing perfectly with your meal.
Boxes are less expensive than bottles, ergo boxed wine must be inferior.
<holds nose haughtily in the air>
Box wines have come a long way in the last few years. It isn’t all Franzia these days. There are some really drinkable options out there, and you don’t have to worry about bad corks, leftovers, glass recycling and all that garp.
One place that fine wine in a box would work well is in restaurants that sell wine by the glass. There’s all kinds of systems that restaurants can buy to preserve the wine in the bottle, but it would likely work better/cheaper if they just had wine in those bags.
You’ve all missed the most important aspect in addition to it lasting longer in the container. When you’re done, you take the bag out of the box, inflate it and you have a Party Pig!
We drink wine with dinner most nights. Once we open a bottle, we finish it. So for us box wine is great. We always have a red and a white open in the cabinet. Right now there is a Black Box Pinot Noir and a Fish Eye Sauvignon Blanc open.
For a restaurant meal we bring a bottle if it’s a byob place, or buy a bottle or a few glasses otherwise. Maybe my palate is crap, but I love box wines.
If Rolls Royce chooses not to sell engines to Dodge, it’s not because it would diminish their brand. They only make as many as they need for their own cars.
Similarly, the practices that cause high-end wine makers to make the good stuff mean they don’t end up with enough wine to sell to bulk marketers. They bottle it themselves and make more profit via high prices rather than bulk sales.
OTOH wine boxes tend to be larger than bottles so you’re more or less forced to keep partial amounts longer. And not all boxes have bibs or bags inside. As well, there are various effective preservation systems for those really concerned about keeping partial bottles of wine which will likely work much better than collapsed bags. For instance, you can buy cylinders of argon that you simply squirt into the bottle – argon is both inert and heavier than air and does a pretty good job of shielding the wine from oxidation.
I wouldn’t be snobbish about buying everyday wine in a box if there was anything around I particularly liked at a decent price, but there isn’t. To me, as for many, the advantages of bottled wine are many. The bottle size is just right for a typical dinner for two, it’s small enough that one can have a fair variety in a wine cellar to suit any meal or occasion, the bottles store nicely in traditional wine racks, and it’s a fine inert container for wines that improve with age or at least are expected to have significant longevity.
Some of the stuff in that article about how great boxes are is bullshit – like the claim that 10% of conventional wine bottles suffer from cork taint. In my experience it’s very rare. BTW, while I like the aesthetics of a traditional cork, I have no particular problem with fake corks nor with screwtops. Today’s screwtops are used for many quality wines (especially from Australia, not so much for California wines which still seem to feel there’s an image problem, nor for the tradition-conscious French) and they are far superior to the back-alley grade screwtops that one used to associate with super cheap wines.
You have never played Wheel of Goon?:D:D:D:D
When I was a banquet server in the early 1990s, we used box wine to fill carafes, if that’s what the customer ordered. Very convenient, and no corks to worry about, either.
Sort of a chicken and egg thing going on I agree. They don’t want to have the image of their product diminished. This really limits the amount of good wine that gets boxes, which further contributes to that image.
Personally I like the box, well the cartons (smaller ones then the box, and with a conventional carton screw top lid. The bottle always seems like such a waste of material.