Waitrose Soft & Juicy Chilean Red 2.25-litre box (£14.95 for 2.25-litre box, Waitrose) One of the more stubborn prejudices in wine is the notion that it must come in a glass bottle to be any good. It’s a received idea that has an element of the self-fulfilling prophecy about it: a producer won’t risk trying to sell their best wine in a different kind of package, since they know a large proportion of its potential customers will not even consider buying it. Producers who choose an alternative package have to accept that the medium becomes the message: the wine is no longer simply wine, it is a box wine or a canned wine, a different genre altogether, one in which economy or convenience takes precedence over the quality of the wine itself. Not that either or both of those latter factors can’t be powerful persuaders in their own right of course: a box of Waitrose’s aptly named Chilean quaffer can be opened and stored in the fridge for considerably longer (up to three weeks) than its bottled equivalent (a few days), even if the saving versus a bottle in this case (2.25l is 3 x 75cl at £4.99 a pop, or £14.97) comes to a mere 2p.
Vinca Organic White Wine, Sicily, Italy (£20 for six 187ml cans, vincawine.com) If you tasted Waitrose’s Chilean blind, first from bottle and then from bag-in-box, you would not be able to spot the difference. And that’s the same for any box or (thanks to better technology developed over recent years) canned wine: so long as it’s consumed before its best before date, the wine will be in the same condition as it would have been in a glass bottle. Of course, the very fact that boxes and cans have a sell-by date rather contributes to their reputation for not housing the best stuff. But while it’s true a producer wouldn’t sell a wine they wanted consumers to age for longer than a year after purchase in anything other than glass, it’s also worth asking how many bottles of wine you hold on to for more than a day or hours after you’ve bought them (answer for most wine drinkers: none). Certainly, if you’re going to be drinking the wine right there and then, in a park, at a picnic, or on a train, I can see no reason why you wouldn’t go for a bright, stone-fruited white such as Vinca’s Sicilian in a can over a cumbersome, breakable bottle of something similar.
The Uncommon Bubbly White Wine, England (from £4.50, 25cl, ocado.com; Waitrose) There’s another factor that might make you think twice before dismissing what are, in a cringe-inducing bid to make them seem somehow insurgent and youthful, sometimes dubbed “alt-packaging”: many glass-bottled New World wines spend much of their lives in what are effectively massive 24,000-litre bag-in-boxes. These so-called flexitanks are used to ship wine to the UK, saving both cost and carbon, before the wines are transferred to their final bottled form at UK bottling plants. But perhaps the most persuasive case for going beyond glass from time to time is that the quality of boxed and, more recently, canned wines has improved enormously in recent years. Among the alt-packaged brands I’ve enjoyed recently are the box (and “paper bottle”) specialists When in Rome and Le Grappin, and the canned brands Wild Steps and The Uncommon, with the latter’s beautifully packaged English fizz a refreshing, elderflower-scented and very convenient can to crack open at an Indian Summer picnic or post-work commute.
Follow David Williams on Twitter @Daveydaibach
