Lots of wine lovers have recognized that not all good wine comes in corked bottles, but the New York Post has jumped onto the bandwagon with No Glass: Wine in a Box is No Longer a Joke by writer Andrea Strong. The article comments,
While you gain the cachet of being on the cutting edge of a new trend, you won’t be sacrificing quality. These premium bag-in-a-box wines are made in the same way as bottled wines, but have the advantage of being kept in an air-free zone without the risk of being ruined by a faulty cork.
Sure, some of the romance is lost. But for easy-to-drink wines that you might sip at home, use for cooking or take to a party, you’ll save money (because the packaging is so inexpensive) and help the environment (glass bottles take much more energy to recycle than paper), and the wine will last longer (four to six weeks after opening, thanks to the vacuum-sealed bags.
The article spends some time talking about Three Thieves wines, and their introduction of 250-ml TetraPaks (think soy milk packaging). We’re not seeing those in our shops yet, but surely they can’t be far from arriving.
The article quotes various wine experts as saying box wines aren’t quite ready for delivery to the table in fine restaurants. For by the glass service, boxes are fine. Part of the fun of ordering a good wine in a restaurant, though, is the uncorking and presentation. One restaurant, though, DB Bistro, is decanting box wine into a carafe for table consumption.
The Toronto Star recently wrote about Three Thieves as well. They weren’t too impressed:
“Three Thieves is uneven stuff and looks like playground plonk. If the LCBO is so hell bent on reducing glass intake by 10 per cent, why don’t they try to do it with wines you’d want to buy?”