Box Wine Rules!

[ March 6, 2018 update: Also read Why I gave up on Box Wine ]

For once I’ll post on something that has nothing to do with my work. It’s also not that new news but I think I feel like adding my piece on this.

When my wife and I were on vacation last year we were given a box of wine – and I don’t mean a box of bottles of wine, but literally a box of wine, as in “box wine”. 🙂

It’s fair to say that we were pretty skeptical at first but we ended up agreeing that it was actually quite nice. Based on that experience we decided to try a few box wines back in California. We tried the Bota Box first and stuck with it for a while but we eventually grew tired of it and switched to Black Box which seemed significantly better. This has become our table wine. We’ve compared the Cabernet against the Shiraz and the Merlot and the Shiraz won everyone’s vote, although I like to change every now and then.

Last weekend I had some friends over for lunch and ended up with a bottle that was barely started. On my own for the week it took me several days to get to the bottom of it. All along I kept the bottle on the kitchen counter with just the cork on.

At the rate of about a glass a day I noticed the quality was clearly declining from one day to the next. Tonight, as I finally reached the bottom of the bottle I drank the last of it without much enjoyment. This is when I decided to get a bit more from the Black Box wine that had now been sitting on the counter for about two weeks.

Well, box wine is known to be good in that it stays better longer because the bag it’s stored in, within the box, deflates as you poor out wine without letting any air in. As a result the wine doesn’t deteriorate as fast.

If there was any doubt, tonight’s experience cleared it out for me. Although the wine from the bottle was initially of better quality than any box wine I’ve tried to date, after a week, it was not anywhere near as good.

I’ve actually found box wine to have several advantages. It’s said to be less environmentally unfriendly. (They say more environment friendly but with its plastic bag and valve it doesn’t quite measure up against drinking water. 😉 Because it can last much longer than an open bottle of wine you can have different ones “open” at the same time and enjoy some variety.

So, all I can say is: More power to box wine! 🙂

[Additional Note: This is not to say that one should give up on bottled wine of course. The better wines only come in bottles and I’ll still get those for the “special” days. But for table wine you use on a day to day basis box wine rules.]