BOX WINE

A 'box wine' (or 'wine cask'^[1]) is a wine packaged in a bag, usually made of aluminium PET film or other plastics, and protected by a box, usually made of standard corrugated cardboard. The bag is sealed by a simple plastic tap, which is revealed by tearing away a small perforated panel on the box, and used to dispense the wine. The most common sizes are 1.5, 3, 4 and 5 litre.

Contents

History

Brands

Advantages

Disadvantages

References

See also

History

The wine cask was invented by Tom Angove of Angove's, a winemaker from Renmark, South Australia, and patented by the company on April 20, 1965.
Cask Wine is also known as "goon" in Australia, and the bag alone known as a "goon sack" or "goon bag", while in the United States a common street-slang appellation is "space bag" (most earlier versions had a silvery, foil-like appearance.) The practice, usually by students, of consuming cask wine at parties is known as "gooning". At these parties cask wine is often drunk within the context of a drinking game, called Goon of Fortune. In this game the cask is attached to a Hills Hoist clothesline, which is spun. The person who is standing underneath the spot where the bag stops drinks the wine.
The wine cask is now facing a new competitor with Tetra Pak introducing an environmentally friendly 'Prisma Pak', similar to that used for fruit juices. The Prisma Pak was introduced into Canada in 2006 with the launch of 'French Rabbit' in one litre containers. There are a number of new launches of wine products in Prisma Pak in Canada prior to end 2006. It has just been launched into Australia as 'B-Pak' through the 'Cheviot Bridge' wine company under the Long Flat brand.

Brands

Common brands of bag-in-box wines include:

★ Fish Eye

★ Hardy

★ Franzia

★ Almaden

★ Cross Country

★ Vella

★ Black Box

★ Killer Juice

★ Target Wine Cube

★ Wine Block

★ Delicato

★ Golden Gate

★ Corbett Canyon

★ Coolabah

★ Sunnyvale

★ Stanley

★ Stonehaven

★ Bum Cum in a Drum

★ SUNNYVALE FRUTIA LEXIA! AU$6, that's cheaper than bottled water!

Advantages

While cask wine is often of a cheaper variety, the packaging method itself is arguably superior to other methods. The chief advantage to bag-in-a-box packaging for wine is that it prevents oxidation of the wine as it is dispensed. Whereas wine in a bottle is oxidized by the volume of air in the bottle which has displaced the wine already poured, wine in a bag is never touched by air and thus never subject to oxidation until it is put in a glass. Thus, bag in a box packaging is not inferior per se, but is simply preferred by producers of more economical wines such as Franzia because it is inexpensive.
Box wine is not subject to cork taint or spoilage due to not drinking the wine quickly enough after opening. A bag of wine, once removed from the box, will float on water. This property allows quick cooling of a white wine by immersing it in an ice bath.
Other advantages of boxing wine include greater efficiency of storage and transport of rectangular boxes, and elimination of the risk of breakage incurred by transporting wine in bottles.
Cask wine is typically cheaper than bottled varieties; often around AU$10 (GBP£4, US$8) for 4L in Australia and can be found to be around $8 on special at many bottleshops, and on rare instances has been seen to be sold for $6.
An empty goon bag can also be inflated and reused as a pillow.

Disadvantages

The bag is not hermetically sealed and as a result has an unopened shelf life that is shorter than that of bottled wine. Most casks will have a best-before date stamped. ^[2]
As a result, it is not intended for cellaring regardless of quality and should be drunk within the prescribed period.
Many people consider a glass bottle and the uncorking to be part of the ritual of wine drinking.
Manufacturers of 'higher class' bottle wines often complain about the cheapness of 'cask' wines, arguing that they provide a cheap means for alcoholics to become inebriated. In particular, the lower level of alcohol excise levied on cask wine in Australia (compared to beer and bottled wine) has been criticised as encouraging binge drinking.^[3]

References

1. Wine cask
2. Boxed Wine
3. Drinking problem is lack of will on overall measures

See also

★ Bag-In-Box

★ Fighting varietal

★ Jug wine