{"id":1165,"date":"2015-03-08T21:13:46","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T03:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/?p=1165"},"modified":"2015-03-08T21:13:46","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T03:13:46","slug":"think-inside-the-box","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/think-inside-the-box\/","title":{"rendered":"Think Inside the Box"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wine-in-a-box\u00a0turns 50 years old<\/a> in 2015.\u00a0 This is cause for great rejoicing and celebration.<\/p>\n

Box wine has come a long way since it debuted in Australia in 1965.\u00a0 Back then, according to\u00a0George M. Taber’s excellent book A Toast to Bargain Wines<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0the plastic bladders inside the box (or “cask”) were the same as those used to transport battery acid.\u00a0 Drinkers had to snip off a corner of the bladder to pour the wine and then re-seal it with a little peg provided in the package.\u00a0 Sounds like they were more trouble than they were worth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Eventually the packaging improved, but for a long time the wine didn’t.\u00a0 Maybe you remember the vile “Burgundies” and “Rhines” that were the norm as recently as a decade ago.\u00a0 I still shudder to think of some of the Rhines I once poured down my throat, sickly-sweet concoctions that were just a headache in a box waiting to get out.<\/p>\n

Everything changed in 2003 when an entrepreneur named Ryan Sproule introduced Black Box.\u00a0 Sproule’s brainstorm was that he could sell quality wine at a cheap price and still turn a profit if he could just get past the stigma that all box wines are junk.\u00a0 Showing an admirable can-do zeal, Sproule hustled his wine himself, offering free samples to retailers and only later revealing that it came in a box.<\/p>\n

Black Box turned into a hit and made Sproule rich.\u00a0 More importantly, it raised the bar for quality in box wine.\u00a0 The era of faux-Burgundy as the industry standard was over:\u00a0 Box wine sellers had to raise their game, produce serious wine or else surrender the market to Sproule and his imitators.\u00a0 Bargain-hunting boozers are the beneficiaries.<\/p>\n

Sure, some box wine is still sub-par.\u00a0 Wines with uninformative descriptive names like “Crisp White” or “Chillable Red” are likely to be the worst.\u00a0 (Call me a snob, but I don’t trust any wine that won’t tell me upfront what grapes it’s made from.)\u00a0 Yet even these are better than they used to be.<\/p>\n

A few years ago Wine Spectator<\/em><\/a> reviewed 39 box wines.\u00a0 Amazingly, all but two scored in the 80-88 range, rated as either “good” or “very good.”\u00a0 One shocker was a Carlo Rossi cabernet, 5 liters and going for around $15 at the time, that scored 84 points.<\/p>\n

Carlo Rossi, king of the jug wines, pulling a very respectable 84?\u00a0 For 5 liters?\u00a0 That’s value, maybe even the best value you’ll find anywhere in the liquor section.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday, box wine.\u00a0 You’re looking great these days.\u00a0 Many happy returns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wine-in-a-box\u00a0turns 50 years old in 2015.\u00a0 This is cause for great rejoicing and celebration. Box wine has come a long way since it debuted in Australia in 1965.\u00a0 Back then, according to\u00a0George M. Taber’s excellent book A Toast to Bargain Wines,\u00a0the plastic bladders inside the box (or “cask”) were the same as those used to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":1166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[152,327,324,329,328,330,326,325,323],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1165\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brutalhammer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}