It seemed only a matter of time before the elegant, expensive glass bottle—receptacle of wine for hundreds of years—should come under assault from the twenty-first century. Just as corks have begun to be replaced by mass-produced plastic stoppers, so now the time-honored wine bottle is facing competition from a thing alarmingly called box wine. Box wine is exactly as it sounds: wine contained inside a portable cardboard box covered with brand imagery. It's really a vacuum-packed plastic sack with a spigot housed inside a glossy shell that can be punctured by means of a prepared opening. You can take it anywhere (it comes with handles), and perhaps even pass it off as something inoffensively nonalcoholic. Forget the elegant formality—and manual effort—of inserting a corkscrew; just plunk the box on your table, pull out the tap, tear off the foil seal, and press the little button: You now have a whole vat of vino at your disposal—and no bottles to dispose of afterward. It may be crude, but it delivers the juice.
Box wine is not quite poised to replace bottles, but it is certainly beginning to redefine how people drink wine—casually, almost in the way that they drink beer. It's beach and stadium wine, fun-house plonk for frat parties, picnics, and pizza takeouts. As with beer, the social pretensions have been neatly leeched out, rendering the nectar of connoisseurs as bluntly democratic as Budweiser. Thus, in the age of Trader Joe's and Two-Buck Chuck, when it has become a frenzied consumer idée fixe that we are all paying too much for our wine, box wine is actually converting "bottle drinkers" by the thousands. Producers, for their part, claim that by cutting out the high costs of glass bottles—including their packaging, storage, and shipping—they can halve the price of the wine itself. Otherwise put, they can cram twice the amount of liquid asset into the box format for the same price, while claiming that substance and style are two different things—that box wine tastes just as good as the more attractively packaged kind. Snobbery, they say, is not taste.
Surprisingly, box wines have been familiar in European and Australian supermarkets and roadside convenience stores for years as an on-the-go gimmick—they account for 50 percent of all wine sales in Australia, and 40 percent in Sweden and Norway. The United Kingdom and even France are not far behind.
On his jubilantly self-celebratory Web site, Ryan Sproule, the canny vintner who produces Black Box Wines in California, says, "While traveling in Europe, I discovered boxed wine and grew to love the many conveniences it offered. In Europe, where wine is very much a part of everyday life, a fancy bottle does not sway wine enthusiasts. I learned that European winemakers have been selling fine wine in boxes for years; the savings from not buying costly bottles are passed on to the wine drinker who gets a better wine at a better price." He adds: "Black Box Wines are wines of distinction and character, crafted from grapes grown in the world's premier wine-growing regions."
