Box o' wine - no really!
I have been advocating screw caps for a few years now. They are not only easy to deal with, but they completely eliminate corked (TCA affected) wines. This nasty taste is all too common to me, but many consumers miss it. Instead, they simply think the wine is not good. Until consumers recognize the need for screw caps, and start accepting them, we will all be subject to the occasional (1 out of 20) tainted bottles.
Screw caps are not the only change we are starting to see in wine packaging. The wine in a box is starting to make an impact on higher quality wines. The concept makes sense - put wine in a collapsable bag that keeps it from being damaged by air. Just as with screw caps, the reputation of wine in a box has been clouded by the cheap wines it has heretofore contained.
New alternatives such as the mini-tank will soon be common. Great for restaurants, this self contained wine bar takes up very little room and it keeps the wine safely preserved under nitrogen. The wine stays fresh and the mini-tank does a great job of marketing the wine just by sitting there. Most importantly the consumer gets a decent glass of wine that is not spoiled.
Spoilage is really what it is all about. For millennia the wine industry has tried to find ways to preserve wine. They were much more successful at hiding the spoilage by adding things like pine tar (which brought us Retsina) or covering up the sour, nasty flavors with a touch of sugar and fruit (today's Sangria).
The clay amphorae served for thousands of years, but it wasn't nearly as effective as wooden barrels. Wine was not placed into barrels for any flavor it might impart, that would happen generations later. Barrels were used because barrels were used for everything. It was simply the shipping container of the day.
Eventually, we would start to see glass bottles. Glass was great, but the perfect closure remained elusive until cork came on the scene only a few hundred years ago. Ironically, it would take just a bit longer to come up with a cork screw.
Finally, an airtight glass container. This allowed wine to actually age for the first time. It was the beginning of modern wine, but it had a few drawbacks. Cork is a natural product, it takes years to grow and it can be of varying quality. Modern techniques helped make cork even more suitable, but it also pointed out the flaw of spoiled corks (contaminated with a substance usually referred to as TCA).
And so now we have wines that are sealed without the danger of being tainted by the cork, but the problem of air remains. A screw top is very convenient to replace, but it does nothing to stop the air in the bottle from ruining the wine.
Nitrogen systems, either huge wine bars or small self contained units like the mini-tanks, are a great answer commercially, but are hardly practical at the home level.
There are various devices that remove some of the air from the bottle, or even spray cans that add nitrogen, but none of these works exceedingly well.
Enter wine in a bag. In theory if you put decent wine in a bag, it will remain decent for some time. In practice the only wines I have ever had from a bag were pretty awful to start with.
Aspen is a great place to visit, and even better to live in, but it is not where one goes looking for quality wines in a box - at least not until they start putting $20+ a bottle wine into bags. And so I will have to wait until I can get to a big city wine store.
Once I do have the opportunity I plan on conducting a blind tasting of the box wines with other bottled wines of the same price range mixed in. I will decant all of the wines into new glass bottles so I can be certain that there is as little prejudice as possible. And then I will report the results here.
I will then try the box wine after it has been open several days vs. the same wine in a bottle with one of those vacuum sealers, and see how much the box helps, if at all. Stay tuned.
Screw caps are not the only change we are starting to see in wine packaging. The wine in a box is starting to make an impact on higher quality wines. The concept makes sense - put wine in a collapsable bag that keeps it from being damaged by air. Just as with screw caps, the reputation of wine in a box has been clouded by the cheap wines it has heretofore contained.
New alternatives such as the mini-tank will soon be common. Great for restaurants, this self contained wine bar takes up very little room and it keeps the wine safely preserved under nitrogen. The wine stays fresh and the mini-tank does a great job of marketing the wine just by sitting there. Most importantly the consumer gets a decent glass of wine that is not spoiled.
Spoilage is really what it is all about. For millennia the wine industry has tried to find ways to preserve wine. They were much more successful at hiding the spoilage by adding things like pine tar (which brought us Retsina) or covering up the sour, nasty flavors with a touch of sugar and fruit (today's Sangria).
The clay amphorae served for thousands of years, but it wasn't nearly as effective as wooden barrels. Wine was not placed into barrels for any flavor it might impart, that would happen generations later. Barrels were used because barrels were used for everything. It was simply the shipping container of the day.
Eventually, we would start to see glass bottles. Glass was great, but the perfect closure remained elusive until cork came on the scene only a few hundred years ago. Ironically, it would take just a bit longer to come up with a cork screw.
Finally, an airtight glass container. This allowed wine to actually age for the first time. It was the beginning of modern wine, but it had a few drawbacks. Cork is a natural product, it takes years to grow and it can be of varying quality. Modern techniques helped make cork even more suitable, but it also pointed out the flaw of spoiled corks (contaminated with a substance usually referred to as TCA).
And so now we have wines that are sealed without the danger of being tainted by the cork, but the problem of air remains. A screw top is very convenient to replace, but it does nothing to stop the air in the bottle from ruining the wine.
Nitrogen systems, either huge wine bars or small self contained units like the mini-tanks, are a great answer commercially, but are hardly practical at the home level.
There are various devices that remove some of the air from the bottle, or even spray cans that add nitrogen, but none of these works exceedingly well.
Enter wine in a bag. In theory if you put decent wine in a bag, it will remain decent for some time. In practice the only wines I have ever had from a bag were pretty awful to start with.
Aspen is a great place to visit, and even better to live in, but it is not where one goes looking for quality wines in a box - at least not until they start putting $20+ a bottle wine into bags. And so I will have to wait until I can get to a big city wine store.
Once I do have the opportunity I plan on conducting a blind tasting of the box wines with other bottled wines of the same price range mixed in. I will decant all of the wines into new glass bottles so I can be certain that there is as little prejudice as possible. And then I will report the results here.
I will then try the box wine after it has been open several days vs. the same wine in a bottle with one of those vacuum sealers, and see how much the box helps, if at all. Stay tuned.
posted by Wineguy at 10:45 AM
4 Comments:
I am in favor of the wine industry adopting wine boxes for quality wines as well. One that we have tried recently that is decent is Black Box.
I have long seen them advertised in the wine mags and tried the Cabernet Sauvignon and was pleased with the quality. We'll be buying it again as our "house wine."
I have tried the Pinot Grigio of Black Box. I found it to be, not too bad. A good one for a summer picnic. Check out
www.boxedwinespot.blogspot.com
English Estate Winery in Vancouver, WA, has been putting premium Pinot Noir in bag in box since 2003. They have developed their own unique BIBB System...Bag In a Beautiful Box, which they are supplying to other small wineries in the USA. Visit their website at www.englishestatewinery.com, where you can buy online or join their BIBB Wine Club.
Can they just make the boxes smaller? The box I have now is like a never ending box and it's driving me crazy. Why does one box have to be equal to several bottles of wine?
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