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

Just about every box wine maker indicates on their packaging that the wine won’t spoil for weeks after opening. Most claim a month, and some even longer periods. Now, the Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher of the Wall Street Journal have put those claims to the test, and the news is good for box wine fanciers. In Boxed Wines Face The Six-Week Challenge, the WSJ Tastings duo describes how they tested box wines for freshness over aging periods of up to a month ad a half.

Their procedure was fairly straightfoward. Each week for a total of six weeks, they opened boxes of Fisheye Chardonnay and Fisheye Shiraz, and then stored the boxes in their refrigerator. Then, they did a blind taste test of the wine from all twelve boxes to see how the wines had fared during their various lengths of post-opening storage. The results were heartening:

The Chardonnays, on the whole, continued to taste pleasant enough but a bit harsh. Three smelled and tasted notably sulfuric. All tasted of pineapple — sometimes sweet pineapple and sometimes watery pineapple. One was clearly the best. It tasted riper, fresher and cleaner than the rest. This turned out to be the newest box, the one we had just opened. But our second favorite was the wine we’d opened the third week of the experiment, and our third favorite was the very first we’d opened, all those weeks before. Overall, the boxes we opened first and last were the best; the boxes opened in the middle weeks were the ones that tasted and smelled less fresh. But none of the boxes tasted oxidized or obviously off. We’ve tried some wines by the glass at tony wine bars that tasted far more over the hill.

We sampled the Shirazes next. Once again, none of them was obviously oxidized. The difference among them was that a couple tasted vibrant and alive — these were wines we would take to a picnic ourselves — while others had the same basic tastes, but they’d lost life and seemed somewhat dull and flat. In any event, none of them tasted as sweet, alcoholic and heavy as many jug wines on the market and even many under-$20 wines in bottles.

When we checked the bottom of the boxes, it turned out that our favorite Shiraz had been opened in week No. 4 and our second favorite had been the very first cask we opened. Our third favorite was the freshest box. Once again, it appeared that the boxes from the fifth and sixth weeks — those open for one week and two weeks — were the most problematic. Call it a dumb period.

So, the bottom line: It’s true. The wine really does keep for six weeks. It has its ups and downs in your refrigerator, but it will keep fine. Would we keep a box of wine in our refrigerator for six weeks? Well, no. Today, there are so many interesting, affordable wines on the shelves that we’d rather taste several wines than one wine in a big box. That said, the FishEye Shiraz, at the equivalent of $4 a bottle, is a perfectly nice wine for a party this summer — and, yes, if you have any left over, you can keep it around until the dog days of summer without it turning hairy.

We can’t say that we’re surprised, though we’ve never kept a box around for six weeks. Storing even red wines in the refrigerator if the storage time is likely to be many weeks is no doubt a good idea. Another tip is to avoid introducing air into the plastic bag that collapses around the shrinking wine inside the outer cardboard box - see Beware the Burp.

All in all, we give big kudos to Gaiter and Brecher for putting their previous less-than-satisfactory experiences with box wines aside and conducting a fair and realistic test. Coverage like this can only help boxed wine gain credibility, and encourage wineries to put ever-better product in convenient bag-in-box packaging.

I caught a story on NPR yesterday, EU Agrees to Protect Napa Wines’ Good Name, that confirmed that Napa Valley wine makers will finally get satisfaction in the European Union. A text story on the same topic is, Napa Vineyards Gain Special Status:

Just like the protected regions of France’s wine country, at long last, the wineries of Napa now have their own protected region as recognized by the European Union. We joined the celebration at the German Consulate today to learn what this means for Napa’s 400 wineries…
The geographic indication, or G.I. status, has another impact. From this point forward, no company in the European Union can register Napa Valley for wine. The E.U. is an important market for wine exports. Fifty-two percent of all California wine goes to the E.U., about one-fourth of that is from Napa Valley.

What’s good new for the fine wine makers of Napa Valley may prove problematic for U.S. makers of cheap wines. Low end jug wines from Gallo and box wines from Franzia, among many others, feature names like “Burgundy” which is also a geographic indication with restricted use in the E.U. It’s likely that pressure will mount on these terroir poachers to either use wine from the region indicated (unlikely) or change their labeling (unlikely without a fight).

Here at Box Wines, we don’t think seeing some of the “Hearty Burgundy” and similar labels disappear would be any great loss. In fact, if the plonk disappeared completely it wouldn’t be missed (except, perhaps, by penniless college students and the occasional bargain-seeking party animal. (The main risk we would see is to the reputations of the varietals used in those wines if the labels are changed to a varietal designation.) Virtuall all of the better boxed wine seems to be compliant with accepted geographic designations. A quick scan of the boxes we’ve encountered in the last year shows that almost all use varietal labeling. The Free Range Red Bordeax and Free Range White Bordeaux are exceptions, but they really do originate in the Bordeaux region of France.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I think there will ultimately be restrictions on U.S. winemakers that prevent using geographic labels inappropriately, but there may be either “grandfathering” for existing labels or at least a phaseout period of some years.

Why do restaurants mark up wine so much, and why doesn’t the percentage markup taper off as the wine gets more expensive? This is the question raised in the Freakonomics blog in Question of the Day: What’s Up With Restaurant Wine Prices?:

…the markup on wine is extremely high, and progressive.

Depending on the place, wine by the bottle has at least a 200% markup, and that markup seems to be constant as the base-cost of the wine rises. This means that I will typically choose the $50 bottle over the $70 bottle, and definitely over the $120 bottle, even though the difference in base cost to the restaurant is maybe only $7 and $25. Had they offered me the bottles at $50, $60 and $75, I might have bought one of the more expensive ones, and (a) made the restaurant a larger profit at almost the exact same cost (not counting the added cost of having the more expensive inventory); and (b) been much happier, drinking the better wine, and more likely to come back.

We’ve wondered about this strategy as well. Rather than automatically tripling or even quadrupling the price of every bottle of wine in inventory, why not use a graduated approach? I.e., we can see the need for a hefty markup on a bottle that the restaurant gets for, say, $5 in case lots - after all, if you triple the price, the dollar margin is a mere $10 - and that bottle needs to be stored, opened, etc. just like a more costly bottle. But does it make sense to triple the cost of a $50 bottle? Might there be a point at which margin is maximized by a lower price to the customer resulting in more sales? For example, that $150 bottle might linger on the menu and get little traffic - at $90, it might sell many more bottles and still produce $40 in dollar margin each time.

The Freakonomics blog doesn’t have all the answers on this one, although the author points out that buying an expensive wine is often a status move (as in impressing your date) rather than an economic decision. There’s quite a bit of commentary on the post expressing alternate points of view.

One of the commenters at Freakonomics, jfwells, has a simple explanation for a flat markup policy: “My father is a restauranteur and I would venture to guess that the reason for a flat 200% mark-up on the wine is probably tradition more than anything else. Sure, they could calculate out how much more they could sell if they had a different scale of markups for different price ranges, but they are in the food business for a reason. They aren’t economists. Heck, most restauranteurs aren’t even very good business people. Half of all restaurants (non chain) go out of business in the first year.” That’s probably not too far from the truth (though I’d hope the national casual dining and fine dining chains actually WOULD employ an economist or two, at least on a consulting basis).

Because of high wine markups, we like the idea behind Philadelphia’s BYOB restaurants. We’d also like to see restaurants experiment with lower wine pricing to encourage more diners to drink wine. Often, even by-the-glass prices seem out of touch with reality. A restaurant may charge as much for a glass of low-end Aussie Shiraz, for example, as for a Bombay Sapphire martini. And quite a few casual dining chains seem to push all kinds of beer specials, but almost never run a wine promotion. Restaurants might be surprised at how much they could boost wine sales with a little effort to make wine affordable.

Ex-Ghostbuster actor Dan Aykroyd is entering the wine market by partnering in a new venture based in Lincoln, Ontario to for the Dan Aykroyd Winery. The winery will showcase memorabilia from Akyroyd’s acting career. The venture is backed by Diamond Estates Wines and Spirits Ltd. of Toronto. This is no bottom-of-the-barrel effort. According to the Associated Press, the winery will produce everything from $14 mid-range wines to limited releases that will sell for more than $93 a bottle.

It will be interesting to see if this winery tries to play it straight, like efforts named for celebrities Greg Norman or Francis Ford Coppola, or whether they try to capitalize on Aykroyd’s quirkier acting roles. One limitation is that at least some of the iconic images related to Ghostbusters, for example, are the property of others.

We’re looking forward to tasting Akyroyd’s wines.

It’s the fifth birthday of Two Buck Chuck, aka Charles Shaw Wines, and the brand has hit the 300 million bottle mark. That’s a remarkable achievement for a wine sold only through a single retail chain, Trader Joe’s. The wine is either the scourge or the savior of the U.S. wine industry, and is the brainchild of black-sheep winemaker Fred Franzia.

“We’re not out to gouge people,” says Franzia. “What I would like to see is every consumer be able to afford to have wine on the table every day and not feel insecure about it.”

Last year, Two Buck Chuck - available only in the Trader Joe’s grocery chain and priced at $1.99 in California, hence its nickname - accounted for at least 8 percent of California wine sold in-state, said Jon Fredrikson, who tracks wine shipments through his Woodland-based company, Fredrikson, Gomberg & Associates. National market share figures are not available. A bottle can range as high as $3.49 elsewhere. [From Vallejo Times Herald]

Though disdained by wine aficionados, there’s little doubt that Two Buck Chuck has expanded the wine drinking market. It now accounts for 8% of the wine sold in California. And while many winemakers fear that selling wine for two or three dollars a bottle is bad for the entire industry, vintner Michael Mondavi puts an optimistic spin on the Franzia offerings, suggesting that “the vast majority of the people who originally start buying Two Buck Chuck, within a period of a year, trade up to better wines.”

Our opinion is that very affordable wines DO expand the market and that many of these low-end wine consumers will eventually move upscale, at least graduating to some better but still inexpensive California and Australian brands. We tried Two Buck Chuck Chardonnay and thought it was not bad for the price, though we cared somewhat less for Two Buck Chuck Cabernet Sauvignon. With the massive volume they produce, there are bound to be variations between batches (these are non-vintage wines) - without a convenient Trader Joe’s, though, our access to the brand is limited to occasional forays to bigger urban areas.

The latest issue of TIME highlights a new study by geriatrics researchers at the University of Bari in Italy that seems to link moderate alcohol consumption with lower rates of dementia in older individuals. First, the good news:

A survey of elderly Italians — 1,445 of whom had no cognitive impairment and 121 who suffered mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — found that, over 3.5 years, those with MCI who drank less than one drink a day progressed to dementia at a rate 85% slower than those who drank nothing.

The article is quick to point out, however, that the scientists who did the study aren’t ready to declare a cause-and-effect linkage. Other factors, such as the idea that healthy, active people might be more inclined to have a glass of wine vs. their less able, more heavily medicated peers, could be at work. Nevertheless, they don’t dismiss the possible benefits of that glass of wine:

Alcohol could offer some protection against cognitive decline, after all. Moderate alcohol consumption has been linked with reduced risk of vascular disease, and good vascular health could slow the progression of dementia. The study authors note that some experiments show that ethanol encourages the release of a brain chemical that could be responsible for improved memory; that alcohol is associated with high levels of HDL cholesterol, linked to better coronary health; and that anti-oxidants in wine, the main source of the elderly Italians’ alcohol intake, might also boost cognitive performance.

If nothing else, studies like this show that having a glass of wine each day doesn’t hurt, and may help in several key aspects of staying healthy. In addition, enjoying a glass of wine has its own merits. Cheers!

We’re testing a new blog rating widget from RateItAll - it’s an innovative approach, as you can interact with the rating site right inside the widget. Even if you aren’t a RateItAll member, you can do a three-line registration right inside the widget. We’re impressed by this technology. Right now this widget is in “closed beta”, but for our blogger readers we expect availability to begin soon.

If you enjoy reading our blog, please take a minute to rate us and add a one-line “review”. Feel free to comment on how well this works for you in this post, or if you have any problems. We’ll pass the info along to the developers. And thanks!

You don’t actually DRINK wine, you TASTE it, right? After inhaling the wine’s nose for a while, you carefully slosh some of the liquid around in your mouth, seeing how it affects different parts of your tongue. You let a few wine molecules drift down your throat to be sure the back of your tongue gets a chance to contribute to evaluating the wine, and spit the rest out. Right? Well, for those of you who occasionally let more than those few molecules down your gullet, and may occasionally even appreciate the mood-altering effects wine or spirits, CalWineries has a guide to optimizing your buzz.

The site notes that “people drink alcohol because it makes them feel good. But that’s true only up to a certain point, after which alcohol makes you feel worse, then bad, then sick, then…well…dead.” They provide a somewhat unscientific but probably qualitatively accurate graph that shows how initially, increased blood alcohol produces a positive mood swing, while consuming more alcohol eventually sends you on a downward slope of feeling worse, and eventually, feeling nothing. “After you pass your optimum buzz, increases in your blood alcohol content (BAC) are not only going to make you feel worse, but are another nail in the hangover coffin. Depending on the person, the ‘best’ feelings from alcohol come when your BAC is between 0.03 and 0.12.” That’s quite a range, but no doubt the value for most people is in that range somewhere.

They also provide a chart for weight and alcohol consumption to let the user calculate how much alcohol it takes to achive a more or less optimum BAC level and then how much to maintain that level. Wine and beer drinkers have an easier time of it than spirits drinkers, no doubt, since the alcohol content is lower and it’s easier to stretch a glass of wine or a bottle of beer than, say, a neat single-malt scotch. It also means that wine drinkers can consume at a comfortable pace for a bit longer before approaching the point of declining returns compared to, say, someone knocking back vodka martinis, and that there’s somewhat lower probability of overshooting. The latter might occur when the individual reaches his personal optimum, but already has consumed a drink or two which haven’t been absorbed yet.

You can do the math using the data on the CalWineries site to calculate the effects of what you are drinking on a person of your weight. As a really rough rule of thumb for wine drinkers, though, it looks to us like once you are in your optimal zone, limiting your consumption to about a glass of wine per hour will keep your BAC more or less constant. Drink more, and you risk continuing to increase your BAC and the negative factors associated with that. Remember, real-world results vary greatly depending on the individual’s weight and how they metabolize the alcohol.

I should point out that some of the “optimal” range described in the article is at a level which would make it illegal to drive a motor vehicle in most states, not to mention making it downright dumb to operate a chain saw or nail gun. So, if you decide to try optimizing your buzz, please do so in a safe, responsible, and legal manner!

Move over, Joe Camel… a new vice-loving cartoon character is in town. The Pink Panther will now have his own wine label. Appropriately enough, the wine that will be promoted by the cartoon character is a rosé made from Merlot and Cabernet grapes. MGM has licensed the character to a winery in Bordeax.

The article notes that a British trade magazine thinks the wine label could run afoul of laws prohibiting advertising geared to the under-18 crowd. Ya think? I don’t know how tightly the EU and/or the UK regulate this sort of thing, but I can imagine the furor in the U.S. if there was any kind of a mass marketing campaign using the dapper pink feline.

The health benefits of a daily glass of red wine are well established, and scientists generally agree that it’s a compound called resveratrol found in red wines that is responsible for the positive effects. Red wine has been shown to protect against a number of diseases, including Parkinson’s, cancer and heart disease; it has even been shown to play a role in extending lifespan. Now, a UK scientist is trying to quantify the differences between individual wines:

But Dr Richard Hoffman, of the University of Hertfordshire, says that while the health-giving properties of resveratrol have been well studied, no-one has systematically measured its levels in different brands. “As a result, they assume that all red wines are the same, but this is certainly not the case as the levels of resveratrol vary,” he says. Dr Hoffman’s team is comparing the levels of resveratrol in a random selection of red wines using liquid chromatography techniques to separate and collect the compounds in them. [From How Saintly is Your Shiraz?]

The objective of the research is to help persuade wine makers to include health benefit information on their labels. Hoffman would like supermarket shoppers to see how much resveratrol they are getting in each wine at a glance, allowing them to make more informed decisions on which wines offer the maximum health benefits.

It’s an interesting idea, but mandating labeling changes for wines is bound to be an arduous political process. Also, one wonders if we know enough to advise consumers on what a particular level of resveratrol means. Is more always better? Or is there a threshold that, if met, provides a maximum level of protection? Labeling issues aside, it should be interesting to see the results of the research and find out what differences exist between varietals and/or brands.