The Serious Case Of Boxed Wines

A short while ago, I celebrated a birthday (time, unfortunately, has no emergency brake). I coincidentally received not one, but two cards that poked fun at the inadequacies of boxed wines.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the well wishes. The stereotype that cheap, awful wine flows out of boxes, however, is losing its joke status. Time marches on and boxed wines are being taken more seriously these days.

Boxed wines sales grew by 31 percent in 2008, according to The Nielsen Co., the consumer tracking firm. Compare this to overall table wine sales, which grew at a 4.4 percent. Interestingly, the people who are most interested in premium boxed wine are those with annual incomes above $70,000, not your redneck, Bowery bum types.

The most striking part of the Nielsen survey showed that 38 percent of all U.S. households bought wine last year, but less than one percent dared to stick their toes in the boxed wine pool. According to Nielsen, this suggests some powerful growth potential.

It’s no wonder that every year when I turn my attention to boxed wines, there are more to taste. This year I went through 18 wines from eight producers. The result was this: Almost without exception, these wines are fine and decent. Nothing you’d write home about, but nothing you would ever push away. One wine that I couldn’t get my hands on was the Yellow+Blue Torontes, which was one of my fave wines, box or no box, in 2008.

One interesting development this year was the introduction of a New Zealand sauvignon blanc by Black Box. New Zealand sauvignon blancs were made for boxed wines. These fresh, crisp, unfussy wines taste great when they are ice box cold. Since boxed wines don’t oxidize or turn to vinegar for weeks, they can sit in your fridge ready when you need a splash of sunshine. How does it taste? There are better New Zealand sauvignon blancs out there, but this one does the trick.

From Red Truck Winery of Manteca, Calif., comes another new entry to the boxed wine market…sort of. It is not exactly a box, but it is definitely not a bottle. Red Truck put a blend of syrah, petite sirah, cabernet franc, malbec and mourvedre in a three-liter plastic keg. They actually put the wine in a spigoted bag and put the bag in a “Mini-Barrel,” instead of the typical cardboard box.

While that hip, trend-setting one percent of wine drinkers mentioned above know what I mean when I say “premium boxed wine,” it behooves me to warn the other 99 percent of wine drinkers just what that term means. Cheap, awful, nearly undrinkable wines still come in boxes. These are throwbacks to the boxed wines of my youth, which rightly served as the butt of cheap-wine jokes. Generally speaking, these are wines that come in five-liter formats and go for about $12. Premium boxed wines come in 1.5 and 3-liter versions and go for about $5 to $10 per liter.

Premium wines are also being packaged in half-liter and liter-sized Tetra Packs, otherwise known as milk cartons. These are great values and can contain decent or even great wine (the Yellow+Green Toronetes comes in Tetra Pack). Their drawback, unlike their bag-in-a-box cousins, is that they spoil just like a bottled wine once opened.

Every year I get older, another group of innocent, open-minded wine drinkers turn 21. Their perceptions of boxed wines are considerably different than mine were 24 years ago on my 21st birthday (do the math), when no such thing as a three-liter premium box wine existed. All they know is that decent wine can be found in lightweight, eco-friendly boxes and cartons. Kids today…they don’t know how lucky they are.

2008 Black Box Wines Sauvignon Bland, East Coast, New Zealand


• $25/3 liters

• One Thumb Up

• Decent aromas of lemon, lime and grapefruit. Lots of acidity and flavors of grapefruit, lime zest and lemon. A pleasant quaffing wine.

2008 Black Box Wines Chardonnay, Monterey County, Calif.


• $25/3 liters

• Two Thumbs Up

• Pleasant aromas of peach, fresh apricot and nutmeg. Vibrant flavors of green apple, pear, lime and tangerine. Full-bodied but still quite refreshing with a tart, citrus-like acidity.

Non-Vintage Red Truck, Mini-Barrel, Red Wine, California


• $30

• Two Thumbs Up

• Interesting grapey aromas of red cherry, smoke and flowers. Medium-bodied, it offered quite pleasant flavors of plum, blackberry, anise, chocolate and tar (in a good way).