Box Wines
A wine blog with news and reviews of affordable wines

The New York Times quotes Bloomberg News in Italy Joins the Boxed Wine Rebellion by Mike Nizza:

Italy’s Agriculture Ministry said that some fine Italian wines that receive government quality guarantees will be allowed to be sold in boxes.

I find this encouraging, if a bit odd. When I was last in Italy, there seemed to be no regulation against some wine shops dispensing directly from a large stainless steel tank into a recycled 1.5 liter water bottle (or, presumably, any other container provided by the customer). That’s hardly ideal storage and preservation technology. Why the Italian government would worry about the well-proven performance of today’s boxed wine packaging isn’t clear.

In any case, this is one more indicator that box wines are moving upscale and becoming better accepted.

Post at Neuromarketing: Please Your Guests by Fooling Them. A study shows that in blind taste tests, average wine drinkers rate the cheap stuff higher than more expensive wine. Here’s a chart from the post that suggests you can maximize the enjoyment of your guests by serving them cheap wine they think is expensive:

We tasted Killer Juice Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 and liked the wine. We were also impressed by Killer Juice’s use of the packaging to enhance the shelf appeal of the wine.

In a typical supermarket or wine shop, the customer is presented with a staggering array of wines. Boxed wines in particular may be a challenge, since many consumers associate the concept with ultra-cheap product from brands like Franzia. Killer Juice does several things to stand out beyond the wine’s attractive black packaging.

Their first step is far from unique - they put a big gold emblem on the box to promote the Cab’s winning a gold medal at the 2007 Critics Challenge International Wine Competition. Other wineries do that, but most don’t. Particularly for a boxed wine, a prestigious-looking award is a vote of confidence that could turn an uncertain wine shopper into a buyer.

The second thing Killer Juice does is even more clever. Many wine shoppers may have difficulty assessing the value of a box of wine. For one, boxes are deceptively compact - a three-liter box doesn’t look like it holds the same amount of wine as four 750ml bottles, even though it does. Many box wine makers print the equivalent number of bottles, or even use little bottle pictures to illustrate the capacity of the box. Killer Juice goes a step farther, and prints “Contains 4 Bottles of Killer $10 Wine” on three sides of the box.

This message communicates more than quantity. It says something about quality to the consumer - a $10 bottle value suggests wine that is better than plonk, and might actually be pretty good. In one fell swoop, Killer Juice establishes an equivalent bottle value, and highlights the big savings their package offers.

Will these small enhancements make Killer Juice boxed red wines fly off the shelves? Probably not. But they will help, and as the glassy-eyed wine buyers stares at the shelf laden with boxwines, they could tip the balance.

NBC’s Today Show did a frothy piece on the increasing quality and acceptance of boxed wines today. Much of the segment involved a couple of the hosts trying to guess whether they were drinking box or bottle wine. They actually guessed correctly most of the time, but it was hardly scientific. Here’s the video:

Wine has largely defied quantitative analysis because of the many compounds that make up its aroma and flavor. Now, it appears that scientists have found a way to accurately predict the response of expert tasters to coffee aromas - can wine be far behind?

Scientists at the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, are reporting success in developing a system to judge the sensory qualities of a cup of espresso. Using a proton-transfer reaction mass spectrometer, which ionizes and analyzes the hot gases wafting above the coffee surface, the system can quickly predict what trained human tasters will say about it.

The aroma of roasted coffee contains as many as 1,000 volatile compounds, although a particular aroma can be defined and reproduced fairly accurately with about 50 or fewer. The system devised by Christian Lindinger and colleagues and described in the journal Analytical Chemistry does not rely on precisely identifying compounds but looks at how the mass spectrometry data differ from brew to brew. [From the New York Times - Scientists Finding Ways to Perfect a Cup of Joe, Without the Attitude by Henry Fountain]

The most interesting conclusion is that a relatively small number of compounds - sixteen, in this case - were sufficient to predict how human experts would describe the coffee’s aroma. One would expect wine to be even more complex than coffee, but the prospect for validating human impressions is intriguing. Applications in blending, quality control, and so on seem more likely than bypassing expert tasters to describe a particular wine. (Via Neuromarketing - Simulating the Coffee Drinker’s Nose.)

A key hurdle that box wine must overcome is that it is cheap plonk - many consumers will assume this until proven otherwise. Boxed wine makers who think, “Wait until they taste it - THAT will convince them!” are, unfortunately, hoping for too much. We’ve written about experiments which have shown that people subconsciously prefer wine that is more expensive, or that comes from a better region (see Neuromarketing for Why Expensive Wine Tastes Better and Wine: The Spillover Effect. In each case, wine that was actually identical produced different reactions in the wine drinker’s brain and/or unconscious behavior. It’s not a big stretch to assume that boxed wine, long a beverage of choice for hard-up college students and thrifty party-givers, would carry the same mental stigma as cheap bottled wine or wine from a region of uncertain quality.

The New York Times has picked up on this theme with My Cortex Made Me Buy It by M. P. Dunleavey. In that article, the author wrestles with the question of how much the perception of the wine was influenced by the fact that it was poured from a box:

When [the subjects] sampled the wines with lower prices, however, the subjects not only liked them less, their brains registered less pleasure from the experience. It seems that what these subjects really liked was the price tag, not the product.

APPARENTLY my brain had a similar reaction at the thought of drinking Blue Nun from a box, which costs about $20 for a container that packs the equivalent of four 750-milliliter bottles of wine. But why? Does the brain fire up at the sight of a higher price tag in any context?

A good question indeed, and one that box wine producers will have to address as they strive for greater acceptance of their products.

While writing about the proposed wine nutrition labels, I once again wondered about the existing alcohol content labeling. The current “standard” is based on an international agreement that allows wine bottlers more or less complete flexibility in where and how to list the wine’s alcohol content. Considering the creativity that goes into many wine labels, flexibility is a good thing - there’s no need to put a fixed-size message like tobacco health warnings just to let someone know that their Merlot is 13% alcohol.

What I do wonder, though, is why some winemakers go to such great lengths to conceal this information. Not long after I started doing my little wine reviews, I began posting the alchohol content for each wine tasted. This forced me to find that information on the bottle. I was amazed that on some bottles I was nearly unable to locate the alcohol statement, even after scanning the label several times. In some cases, I had to examine the label under bright light to find that the maker had included the alcohol content in miniscule, light gray type, running vertically along the edge of the label. Lest one think that the vintner was concerned about destroying an attractive bottle design, I should make it clear that all of these bottles had other, far easier to read text content - the name and location of the winery and/or importer, a description of the wine, tasting notes. etc. The only text that got the special invisibility treatment was the alcohol data.

The part that strikes me as odd is that the alcohol content of most wines differs by a percent or two at most - it’s certainly not a differentiating factor from a purchaser standpoint, i.e., nobody is going to pick a 13.5% Cabernet Sauvignon vs. a 13% because they expect more of a buzz. Likewise, nobody trying to avoid alcohol would select the 13% Cab based on its miniscule difference in potency.

Buyers may find the alcohol content a bit useful, but mostly in evaluating what a wine is likely to taste like. If I see a Zinfandel labeled at 14.9%, I expect a bigger, bolder wine than a Pinot Noir labeled at a couple of percent less… but neither value, in and of itself, means much. Still, it’s irritating when wineries obfuscate this information to the degree that some do.

Are winemakers just being ornery in resisting the requirement to publish alcohol content on the label? “We’ll do it if we have to, but by golly we’ll do it in a way that nobody can find it!” Is there another reason? Post a comment with your opinion…

Everyone acknowledges that there is a lot of subjectivity in wine tasting, but it turns out that more expensive wine really DOES taste better, even when it’s the same stuff in the cheaper bottle. Neuromarketing notes in Why Expensive Wine Tastes Better that neuroscientists at Stanford and Caltech found that wine that the drinker thought cost more activated the brain’s pleasure center to a higher degree than the exact same wine with a cheaper price. In short, the identical wine tasted better with a higher price tag. I suppose that’s one reason why Charles Shaw wines (aka Two Buck Chuck) can win a blind tasting competition, but rarely scores rave reviews in wine publications.

The important aspect of these findings is that people aren’t rationalizing on a survey, i.e., reporting that a wine tastes better because they know it’s a lot more expensive. Rather, they are actually experiencing a tastier wine.

This is indeed the key point. It’s easy to imagine a wine novice being given a glass of wine and told it was one of California’s finest wines, costing $100 a bottle, and being too intimidated to say, “Gee, this tastes about like the $5 Cab I bought at the supermarket…” - even if that’s what he’s thinking. To the contrary, the researchers found that, according to the brain scans, the expensive wine really DID taste better to the subjects.

In an earlier post, Wine Label Makes Food Taste Better, we talked about how a wine’s apparent origin (California vs. North Dakota) shaped diners feelings not just about the wine itself, but about the entire dining experience.

I’m sure we’ll see more research in the future that demonstrates the subjectivity of wine tasting and how the wine drinker’s actual experience is shaped by preconceived notions about the wine. While very experienced wine tasters may well be more objective, the vast majority of wine drinkers do not have the experience and skill to dispassionately analyze the wines they sample.

Obviously, price isn’t the only factor that influences the perceived taste. The perceived origin of the wine is clearly important, as shown by the California vs. North Dakota study. Presumably, other label characteristics will prove to be important too - the perceived prestige of the winery, past experience with a brand or varietal, third party ratings, etc.

This is fascinating research that shows why wine is such an interesting, and occasionally controversial, topic.

A Neuromarketing post, Wine Tasting Trickery, explains why wine tasters (even the Box Wines blog) don’t just follow their taste buds.

This illustrates the challenges that box wines have to overcome - even if they taste exactly the same as a wine in a bottle with a natural cork, they are likely to be downgraded if the tasting isn’t blind.

Health Magazine ran an article in their October issue, “The best vino to go.” The subtitle was, “New boxed wines are honestly worth drinking.” The article doesn’t say much other than giving an explanation of how the bag-in-box concept works and extolling the longevity of box wines. They mention Black Box Wines and FreeRange Wines as a couple of good alternatives.

There’s nothing too spectacular about this article, but it’s nice to see mainstream media making the point that today’s boxed wines aren’t the plonk of a decade or two ago. In particular, Health should reach a large group of consumers who want to take the “glass a day” approach to red wine for heart health.