Good-Bye Wine Bottle

Filed in archive Wine News on July 16, 2006

First it was the corks getting tossed aside for screw caps. Now our wine bottles are getting traded in for cartons. What next, sippy cups? How about attaching a straw to the side like you see with kid's juice cartons?

Now, as someone who out of convenience and the fact that my grocery store has a fabulous wine selection, often purchases wine while doing my weekly food shopping, I can see how plastic can be better than glass when it comes to bagging and hauling it home. I can't tell you how many times I've had to beg for a paper bag around my bottle before they toss it on top of my loaf of bread or carton of eggs.

However, I'm still sticking with my stance that it ruins the entire romance around serving wine when you turn it into some sort of techno-friendly package.

Here's another opinion from At last, Tetra Pak wines worth drinking: Today's high-tech paper containers have completely inert liners, so there's no contamination or discernible plastic flavour. And, ironically, soft cardboard containers can preserve the taste of an opened wine much better than glass. That's because the cardboard boxes can be squeezed to expel excess air -- the most common spoiler of wine -- before the screw cap is twisted back on. You can't do that with rigid glass bottles.

Unfortunately, in spite of my fondness for Tetra Pak cartons as a packaging format for lower-priced wines, most of the Tetra wines launched into the Canadian market over the past year haven't had much, content-wise, to recommend them. They're of the type I call soda pop wines: one-note wonders with a hidden dose of residual sugar and a flavour more candied and artificial than natural. I've been moderately impressed by one white, Vendange chardonnay from California, but the reds have been mediocre.

No longer. A line of three new Italian boxed wines, two reds and a white, was just introduced to the Ontario market and they're terrific for the money -- clean, fresh and polished. And they have an added plus: They're made from organic grapes, grown without chemical fertilizers, weed killers or insecticides.

Developed for the Canadian market by producer Botter Family in conjunction with Toronto-based importer The Case for Wine, the playfully packaged wines are called Alex, Anna and Luca, after the siblings in the third grape-growing generation of the Botter family.

Photo from: LanPak Brings Wine Innovation to Ontario