For July 4, wine in a box could be a winner

Jon Bonné Food and wine writer • Profile

July 4^th is approaching, which probably means you’re firming up plans for all those picnics, road trips and backyard meals.

It’s also the time of year when glass wine bottles, with their attendant corks and coverings, can be less elegant than annoying.

True, screwcaps allow you to leave your corkscrew in the kitchen. But you’re still toting a hunk of glass that weighs nearly as much as the wine inside.

Which is part of the reason why wine boxes, once popular (and then scorned) in the late ’70s and early ’80s, are making a comeback.

But there’s a difference this time: The wine inside is very much more likely to be worth drinking. Old-school box wines tended to be pretty nasty. In the past two years, however, several decent “superpremium” (wine-industry doublespeak for “not total plonk”) wines have gotten the box treatment.

The packages themselves aren’t much different from the Reagan era. The wine is stored in bags of multilayered resin film mostly manufactured by the Scholle Corp. of Irvine, Calif., which pioneered the “bag in box” concept 50 years ago as a technology to hold battery acid. A new push-button tap has replaced old pull levers, and the boxes seem to keep wine fresh for four to six weeks after opening (more than enough time to polish one off).

Perhaps the biggest splash has come from California’s Black Box label, which sold 265,000 cases last year of its $18-to-$25 three-liter boxes, equivalent to four standard bottles.  The Australians are also contenders — no surprise, since they popularized the sale of what they call “cask” wines, and proved that the boxes could attract waves of new customers.

“That package created wine drinkers,” says Roberta Morris, director of global market development at Scholle, which manufactures about 70 percent of the wine-box packages on the market.

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And now other U.S. companies are broadening the box category.  The most forward-thinking is Three Thieves, a two-year-old partnership between California vintners Joel Gott and Roger Scommegna, and Charles Bieler, U.S. sales director for Chateau Routas of Provence.

You might recall Three Thieves from their retro-cool one-liter jugs of zinfandel and Cabernet sauvignon, which flew off shelves last year. Their latest idea? One-liter Tetra Briks of wine, which they’ve introduced under their Bandit label. The soft-sided Tetra Brik, manufactured by Swiss-based Tetra Pak, is already used for everything from soup to those ubiquitous juice boxes; its aseptic lining keeps contents inert and fresh. The same Tualatin, Ore., facility that boxes Three Thieves also packages chicken broth.

Europeans have embraced these boxes for years. In fact, Scommegna was inspired by watching Italian grandmothers grab them off the shelf.  (Tetra Briks account for nearly a third of wine sales by volume in Italian supermarkets, nearly as much as the standard 750-ml glass bottle.)

Americans, who love the new when it comes to anything but wine, are latecomers to the Tetra Pak party.

“This stuff is exciting, but it’s terrifying,” says Bieler. “It’s not automatic and people have to take a bit of a leap of faith. Where did 750 [milliliters, the standard wine-bottle size] come from anyway?”

Two factors work in the Thieves’ favor.  One is quality: They’re talented winemakers, and the wines are usually respectable, sometimes surprisingly good. Their initial effort — 20,000 cases of Bandit Bianco, made from Italian trebbiano grapes — was a runaway hit.

The other is price. At $6-7 per liter, you get 25 percent more wine — decent wine, mind you — at a price just a notch above Two-Buck Chuck. In part, they’re passing along their own savings. Even second-rate glass and cork are expensive, but a Three Thieves Tetra Brik costs the company just 10 cents, about the same as a cheap cork. Shipping costs less, too, both because of the reduction in weight and that the squared-off Briks mean there is no wasted space between containers.

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