15 Aug 2017 Chateau Cardboard makes big UK comeback
Box wine, that 1980s fridge staple beloved of secret, non-fussy drinkers, is back in vogue. According to the wine bible, Decanter, sales are rocketing.
Waitrose box wine sales are up 15 per cent, while Amazon — it sells groceries now — reports a 212 per cent year-on-year increase in sales.
In the past, the perception of boxed wine was that it was the cheap, nasty stuff no discerning drinker would touch. These days, experts believe the boom in boxed booze is in part due to the impressive quality of the wine.
Waitrose has a new line of premium bag-in-a-box wines, and bagged wine is available from upmarket venues such as Vinoteca in King’s Cross, London, and Fergus Henderson’s high-end restaurant, St John.
Meanwhile the hipster wine distributor, Vinnaturo, is boldly selling wine in a bag without bothering with the extraneous packaging.
As a benefit, the bags are cheaper to manufacture and more efficient to transport than bottles, thus cutting costs and carbon footprints.
Environmental considerations apart, can a bag really do justice to fine wine?
Wine expert Michael Sager, the owner of Sager + Wilde in east London, believes it certainly can, but that most box wines are targeted at the affordable end of the market, and they thus reflect the harsh economic reality of modern wine-making.
“In this country we are happy to spend £2.90 on grapes,” he says, “which is not enough to make a bottle of wine — it takes two punnets. Many people don’t want to spend over £5 on wine which takes months to make — then you have to bottle it, pay duty on it [half the price] and transport it. That’s the problem.”
Sample by sample, Sager can easily pick out the tricks used by clever wine-makers to deliver the appearance of quality on a budget. However, when I complain about the vanilla oak flavour present in Tesco’s Parra Alta Malbec, he almost makes me feel guilty. What more do I want for my money?
“At that price point you are not really using oak pieces, you are adding chips which are tiny so as to offer the highest possible surface area to get the highest possible flavour extraction for the minimum amount of money.
“This is a bit like loose-leaf tea versus the powder you get in tea bags. That’s not the wine-maker’s fault, that’s people not wanting to spend more.”
However, because the profit margins in modern wine-making are so perilously thin box wines give more freedom to smaller distributors to compete for fridge space with the larger brands.
I also speak to Tom Craven, who runs Vinnaturo and is presently in Slovenia looking for new wines. Craven makes it clear that the bags allow consumers access to better wine for their buck.
“You cut so many costs putting wine in that sort of packaging,” he says. “it is more efficient for transport, which you save about 50 per cent on, so you can spend more on the wine.
“Also, compared with a bottle, a bag creates 80 per cent less CO2. It’s about saving money, but it’s also about being greener and more sustainable as well. So it is a bit of a no-brainer.”
Finally there’s the claim that the bag keeps the wine for longer. Can this be true?
“Absolutely,” Craven says. “This is the other benefit to bags. If you just want a glass, you open the whole bottle and the bottle oxidises and you face either drinking too much, or drinking more than you want to drink, or not, and then you end up chucking it away because it has oxidised and turned to vinegar.
So why don’t all wine manufacturers opt for box wine?
“No one would buy it,” Sager says. “They have too much to lose. A lot of these [wine manufacturers] are family businesses so there is a tradition element. They aren’t even doing screw-caps instead of corks simply because it is not traditional.
“This is an issue which is more about perception. I would bet you that if you had a cheap wine with a screw cap versus a cheap wine with a normal cork, the cork one would sell better at the same price.
“If you buy a wine you are never just buying it for yourself; you are bringing it to a party, or serving it up to friends. I think nine times out of ten you are buying the wine that makes you look better.”
Source: The Times