Thinking outside of the box

Wine bottles

For thousands of years we have consumed wine in bottles. Why, because they work well. We want our wine to store for months and in some case years. The benefit of bottles is that they will not allow any ingress of air. Air is the enemy of wine as it will entirely change the taste and colour of wine depending on the amount of time it has been exposed. However, once it has been exposed to air it starts to oxidise and then there's no way back.

Enter the wine box. Frowned on for many years, boxed wine became synonymous with cheap poor quality entry level wine. However, times have changed.

For your every day consumption it actually has some surprising advantages over bottled wine. So let's put the snobbery and tradition to one side and look at the facts.

If you are a responsible drinker and have a glass or two a day then you put the cork back on. The problem you've got now is a lot of air is present in the bottle and the clock is ticking on its shelf life. Boxed wine has an inner bag that the wine is actually in. When you take a glass or two out of a wine box the bag scrunches up against the wine limiting the amount of air almost as much as before you opened it. Thus boxed wine can last three to four weeks.

What about the environmental impact? Whilst glass is recyclable so too is cardboard so that is a draw. However, and it's a pretty big however, wine bottles don't pack well, so there is a lot of wasted space between 3,000 bottles of wine in a container. Wine boxes can be packed much more efficiently and they weigh a lot less than glass bottles. Some estimates say the CO2 impact is fifty percent less with boxes due to the weight saving and better ergonomic design.

So why don't we move over to boxes? Tradition and poor image. There simply isn't enough quality wine being packaged in boxes.

Even Jamie Oliver has embraced the box by putting an Italian organic red wine on his wine list in his Italian restaurants.

So whilst we are throwing the snobbery out of the window, here's a non traditional summer wine drink brought to my attention by a friend of mine from Castleton, now residing in sunny Altea, Spain: Get a wine box, preferably Shiraz, and pour it into your soda syphon bottle. Add the fizz and store in fridge. Voila, chilled sparkling red wine.

Purists make your own mind up.

Food & Wine by Paul Sheerin
Pshearse@gmail.com