The Gift Exchange

Just when you thought screw caps and synthetic corks were the latest trends in the wine world, Italy’s Agriculture Ministry announced this month that select Italian wines may now be sold in boxes. That’s right, Italian wine is going green.

While this announcement may make some haughty connoisseurs gasp, wine in a box makes sense environmentally and economically. Indeed, vintners in the United States would be wise to embrace the trend that is slowly gaining acceptance worldwide.

Wine in a box has been around for more than 30 years — though with varying quality. In America, boxed wine has always maintained a less-than-desirable image and negative quality assumption. However, savvy wine producers are now talking about ways to reduce their carbon footprint, including the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of wine and selling the beverage in alternative, lighter packaging instead of heavier glass bottles.

Interestingly, the majority of wine consumers in the United States live on the East Coast while 90% all of wine production occurs on the West Coast, making for a large amount of carbon-dioxide emissions from simply trucking the wine from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Subsequently, switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

Some other compelling reasons to consider drinking wine from a box:

-Boxes are perfect for table wines that don’t need to age in the bottle. Of course many of the world’s top wines do require bottle aging, but not the majority of wine being produced currently with modern methods.

-Boxed wine is superior to glass bottle storage in resolving that age-old problem of not being able to finish a bottle in one sitting. Once open, a box preserves wine for about four weeks compared with only a day or two for a bottle.

-Drinking boxed wine is also much more economical. Having an affordable glass of wine may be the best way to keep our 15-year bull market for wine consumption running. It also would help keep per-glass prices of wine from rising as the dollar falls.

So what’s the problem and why haven’t we been drinking wine from a box all along? The image and the quality of boxed wines that can be found on supermarket shelves. However, Italy’s announcement to begin “boxing” some of their finer wines will hopefully inspire other winemakers. Recently, a few decent Malbecs and Burgandys have been creeping into the market thanks to the 1-liter TetraPak. Hopefully more are to follow….

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