That’s the debate that sprung up in the comment thread of a recent post. We’ve all seen the boxed beverage labeled as wine sitting on retailer shelves, but the issue is whether it actually qualifies as wine. CV readers decided that an experiment needed to be performed to settle the issue. This is a science blog, afterall. Being a theorist, I already had my favorite model to describe the outcome of this experiment - namely, wine does not come in boxes. So I was disqualified from participating in the analysis.
Luckily, one brave CV reader, Elliot, stepped up to the challenge. Here are the results, in his own words:
Before I share the results of the wine tasting experiment with boxed wine, I should do a bit of level setting on the experimental apparatus. (me)
I am by no means a wine expert. However I have developed (over many years) a sense for what I like and what I don’t. I exclusively drink red wines mostly Merlot and Cabernet from Calif. I like some reds from France as well. My favorite grocery store selection is Clos DuBois vineyards. I tend to like stuff in that price range and up, where and if the wine is in the $5-$10 range, I really don’t care for it that much.
With that said, I went to Wild Oats and got a “box” of French Rabbit Cabernet.
Bottom Line: It was horrible. I wouldn’t give it to my dog.
Now there was another “wine in a box” choice appropriately named Black Box wine. My gut feel was that it might be better but the smallest container was the 3000 ml or 4xbottles. So I backed away.
Thank you Elliot for settling this question! My theory is confirmed - wine does not come in boxes!
April 9th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Er…but a dozen bottles of Grange Hermitage would come in a BOX….
April 9th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
But did you try Franzia?
April 9th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
I’m about as big a snob when it comes to wine as one could imagine in a poor grad student, but let me humbly submit the Cuvee de Pena: http://www.winemerchant.net/pages/top40.php?rank=03
It comes in bottle and 3L box. I admit I’ve never had it, but the importer is top notch, and it’s gotten solid reviews in the wine rags, so it’s a wine I’d be more than happy to try anytime. if I see it I’ll buy a bottle (best not to spring for a box right away) and report back. But others should do the same.
April 9th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Where’s the double-blind, randomised study? A sample size of one is hardly conclusive evidence
April 9th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
What a fucking elitist post this is. Not everyone has big bucks to spend on all kind of fancy wine. There’s nothing wrong with boxed wine if it’s OK for you and that’s all you can afford. Fucking elitist.
April 9th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
I’ve had Black Box before. I actually have some right now. It’s not my favourite wine in the world, but I drink wine regularly and my stipend doesn’t support anything more expensive! (I also drink Carl Reh riesling from a box–again, not my favourite, but drinkable… they also sell it in bottles and I can’t tell the difference)
April 9th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Kea - I thought of that too! Clearly, we are discussing the situation when wine is poured out of a box. BTW, I have never tasted Grange Hermitage, but I certainly hope to someday! For now, I seem to be stuck with Penfolds Bins 2, 128, or 389.
Collin - The Cuvee de Pena does sounds like it holds some hope. Any wine that advertises that it goes well with hot dogs has got to be tried! Perhaps we need to perform another experiment.
April 9th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Rufus - Careful now, this is a family blog! (Just kidding, actually I don’t know where we stand on that issue, but would think excess use of profanity is discouraged.)
To respond to your point, I was an undergrad and then a graduate student and had absolutely no money during those (many) years. And yet I managed to drink. Plenty, in fact. (Keep in mind that I don’t like beer so that wasn’t an option.) There is plenty of affordable, drinkable wine that comes in bottles. My beef is with the boxed stuff.
April 9th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
I don’t know about the US, but in Australia some wine makers sell the same wine in bottles and casks (boxes). Some really good Margret River wine in western australia comes in casks.
It’s the boxes full of wine from a collection of nameless vineyards spanning some 3000kms, laced with antifreeze that you have to worry about!
April 9th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
It’s AUSTRIA that made wine with antifreeze some years ago..not Australia..
April 9th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
What the….. This is a science blog? Yikes!
-cvj
P.S. JoAnne, it is too late…. no amount of blogging about wine poured from boxes and whether it is good or not will redeem your eating Brussel Sprouts out of boxes. I still can’t get over that. Repent Now!
April 9th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
It’s not wine if you drink it from the box. But it becomes wine again if you pour it into a decanter or if you cut the box away and chug directly from the space-bag.
April 9th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Boxed wine?? What are we talking about here?
I’ve had Cuvée de Pena in the bottle, and it’s suprisingly good for the price, especially the 2003 vintage which is a bit better than 2004. It has an artificial cork, but it’s very full bodied, stick-to-your-teeth red wine. And it comes from the French Pyrénées, the ancestral homeland of my dog.
The 2003 vintage had an extremely tight cork and was a bit better than the 2004. The 2004 needs a bit of airing when first poured.
April 9th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
What JoAnne said. I find plenty of affordable wines that don’t come in boxes (mostly b/c the box wine scares me and I’m a teensy bit too old for a ’space bag’-good lord I hang out with young ‘uns). And I don’t like California wines so it’s all import for cheap.
April 9th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
I will second the claim that the Cuvée de Pena is pretty good (I had it from the bottle, 2004 IIRC). A good buy for the poor students among us.
April 9th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
I’ve had several varieties of the Wine Cube sold at Target, and they’re excellent quality for the price (works out to about $4 or $5 per 750 ml). No, it ain’t fine Burgundy, but if you want a glass of a little something on a night when you’re just warming up some leftovers, Wine Cube fits the bill.
April 9th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Postscript: The wine gods must have been smiling on me because the very next night I got to drink some Niebaum Coppola Cask Cabernet. It was very good.
And not from a box. Possibly the most expensive wine I’ve ever had, or maybe ever will have. Fortunately I did not have to pay for it.
I will be the first to admit that this was not a true scientific experiment. Only one boxed wine was tested. But it was enough for me. As the old country song goes…
“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
Elliot (generally a Guinness drinker by choice)
and Rufus please let us know exactly what activities you are involved with to improve economic and social justice and perhaps we will have some common ground to discuss that topic.
April 9th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
As another financially challenged grad student, I can also say that I do manage to scrape together enough pennies to buy non-boxed wine. I’m not saying I drink Silver Oak or Meursault on a regular basis, but I do manage to find some decent wines in the $10-15 range. It can be done!
I’ve never had Three Thieves, which normally comes in a jug, but I’ve heard it’s good. They now have something out in a box, and I’m tempted to try it. In general I try to stay away from boxed wine (and, for that matter, any wine that advertises on tv or in magazines), but I’ll try anything at least once.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:19 am
A friend of mine drank a whole bottle of two buck Chuck once (Charles Shaw). Man, was he wasted. I was wasted that night too, and even I could tell how wasted he was. I woke up kind of sick the next day, but then I had a burrito, and I swear to god I’ve never felt better in my life.
The moral of the story is that boxed wine sucks, but just because things suck doesn’t mean we have to rename them.
April 10th, 2006 at 2:32 am
A.J., that sounds dangerously like that transmogrificationary doctrine those Papists have…
Also, (and I say this as an annual competitive chugger), chugging wine! Good FSM, the barbarity.
April 10th, 2006 at 4:27 am
Hmm… I’ve met a decent white in a box before now, but it was some special wine club thing my father got so maybe that’s an outlier.
The stuff that really marks you down as a barrel-scraper though is carton wine: in my local supermarket it starts at about 24Kc (about a buck?) for a litre. Suffice to say it is overpriced…
April 10th, 2006 at 5:16 am
As Elliot I don’t have a special interest in this, and apparently some taste buds - I have beaten wine amateurs in blind tests. (With name and type of wine provided.)
Some boxed wines when properly cooled are better than the worst bottled wines, and quite acceptable. But I have yet to taste a great boxed wine, so I don’t expect boxes to be capable of housing such.
April 10th, 2006 at 9:29 am
agm,
Doesn’t the Sacrament of Transmogrification refer to the miracle by which the FSM becomes a box full of delicious cookies?
April 10th, 2006 at 10:13 am
The good thing about boxed wine, as compared with the bottled stuff, is that, once you have necked the contents and are no longer in full control, the empty receptacle doesn’t function that well as an impromptu weapon - or sex toy, as we have established that this is not a family blog.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
in Japan, you can buy sake in those little cardboard juice boxes - bundled in packs of five, each with a little straw.
April 10th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
I can actually drink pretty well for as little as, say, $5 a bottle by buying closeouts. There’s a lot of good wine that distributors can’t get rid of and they’ll discount it tremendously rather than keep it around. If you find the right retailers, they’ll pass the savings on to you.
April 10th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
“I’ve met a decent white in a box before now, but it was some special wine club thing my father got so maybe that’s an outlier.”
According to my wine snob humanist friends it’s not that uncommon. Of course that’s not the boxed wine you’d find in supermarkets.
April 10th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
The thought of wine in a box gives me bad ’80s flashbacks (Matilda Bay, specifically… blech). Although, perhaps that wasn’t wine to begin with.
April 10th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Black Box merlot is not undrinkable, but certainly doesn’t afford the pleasure of a good wine. Generally the Australian box wines are significantly better than from anywhere else - I’ve had some that made perfectly good house wine, the Hardys line in particular, and the Banrock Station chardonnay.
I’d expect cheap French wine in a box to be horrible, frankly.
April 10th, 2006 at 6:37 pm
If this is a science blog….shouldn’t that have been a double-blind study?
April 11th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
I agree with serial catowner. There seems to be a little superstition involving the magic properties of bottling at work here.
It seems akin to the qualities ascribed to corks vs. screw on caps.
April 12th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
In boxes? You mean http://www.tavernello.com/ ?
Well not so baaad, I mean the ratio price/quality
is ok, at least here in Italy.
-s.
April 13th, 2006 at 6:26 am
Being more of a beer and single malt person myself (I can distinguish red from white wine at least) I don’t have much to say about the quality of wines. However, I can read, and acording to test in the papers here in Sweden there seem to be a number of decent wines in boxes.
Wine in box has become a big sales hit is Sweden, mostly due to the generally high price on alcohol here. In the state monopoly store a simple search counts 84 different red wines in boxes and 56 whites. Some of them have gotten quite ok revews.
May 19th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
You guys know that you can unscrew the spigot on boxed wine and refill it with whatever you want? It’s true. Try that on one of your wine snobiest of friends. You’ll turn their world upside down. And of course it will be pretty funny when they stop by the store to pick up a few boxes of their own.
But really, I’m leaving work right now to pick up a box of wine. In kayaking circles, they’re quite popular as water bags; durable, airtight, double as a pillow. And cheap. And really, it might be crappy wine, but I can’t just pour it out. It’s going to be a long night.
May 19th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
I guess that last post is kinda late and no one is going to read this. So it’s appropriate that I’ll be drinking the box of wine alone too. I’m not sure if I’ll get the Franzia or the Peter Vella. Maybe one’ll be on sale.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:11 pm
Hey…. never too late to post a comment on an old thread. I think the idea of playing a trick on one’s “wine-snob” friends is a brilliant idea!
Also, use as water bags is good. I usually get those from camping stores, but a smaller one can be useful - good idea! Only problem there is the danger of being seen by friends or acquaintances actually buying the boxed wine. The horror!
-cvj
May 24th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
I’ve been working in fine dining for the last few years, and here’s what I’ve picked up from some of the win connoisseurs and wine reps that come around:
Boxed wine isn’t all bad. In fact, in Europe, it’s quite popular amongst most people. It’s wayy more popular than it is over here. Boxed wine won’t turn, or go bad, as fast as bottled wine will. This is because the spigot and bag are much more airtight than a cork (real or synthetic) and bottle. It’s also more airtight that the vacu-vin corks.
Screw top wines are also nothing to be ashamed of. There’s a saying amongst some that there are really only eleven bottles in a case of wine, because on average, on bottle in 12 will have a bad cork. Even synthetic corks will tend to leak wine out once you have drilled a corkscrew down into them if you lay them horizontally. Try it out by holding an opened, but recorked bottle horizontally, then tilting it left and right over and over. It’s a sure sign there is not a very good seal.
The other thing about screw tops is that they open up the world of wine to more people by making it more easily accessible. Boxed wine does the same thing. A cork and corkscrew is intimidating to alot of people. Alot of people have a corkscrew in their kitchen, but have no idea how to use it.
Don’t be put off by inexpensive wine or boxed wine. It’s really all a matter of personal taste, and you will never know until you have tried it. To say that you have tried box wine once and hated it, and will never try it again is a somewhat ignorant statement. It’s just the same as saying that you have had a bottle of bad wine and won’t drink from a bottle any more.
Whatever you do, don’t sniff the cork. You will only smell cork!