You Can Take It with You Not too long ago it was pretty brazen to consider bringing wine along with you on a hike, a camping trip or a boat ride. After all, any wine worth drinking comes in a glass wine bottle… or does it? Camping, RV road-tripping, boating and hiking are all great ways to spend the summer. Fresh air, starry nights and good company – who could ask for better holiday components? But there is one concept that often becomes problematic when planning such excursions and that is trying to figure out how to have wine with dinner. Boats and RVs are generally equipped with great fridges and food storage facilities but no amount of cupboard space will stop a boat from rocking. Clever kitchen stores are now selling plastic, metal – even collapsible wine goblets so that you can imbibe while on the move, but no degree of unbreakable glassware will keep your wine bottle from shattering into a million pieces, releasing every precious drop inside. While a glass wine bottle has high potential to break open during outdoor excursions, the adventurous wine drinker now has cause to celebrate, as the ever-evolving wine industry has come up with some great solutions in wine packaging. Solutions that solve the age-old dilemma, ‘How do we get our wine up the mountain so that we can drink it at the top?’ Most of us are familiar with the concept of bag-in-a-box wine. This was an extremely popular method of packaging wines in the seventies and eighties, putting wine into a bag with a spigot at the bottom which could then be distributed through a hole in the box. Traditionally packaged in boxes that ranged in size from four to 16 liters, these wines tended to be rather un-spectacular and were often used in cooking. These wines still abound on liquor store shelves but the giant cardboard box packaging does send a message to consumers that the wines inside are less than exquisite. Enter the alternative packaging solutions: making delicious wine portable for people on the move. Bag-in-a-Box wines have traditionally been of lower quality, it’s true. But times have changed, and we are now starting to see higher levels of quality wines being packaged in this very method. Why, one might wonder, would anyone want to put a ‘good’ wine into a cardboard box? Well, the secret is in the bag, not the box. To clarify, every time that a wine is exposed to air, it lessens the quality of the wine. This is called “oxygenation” and, in layman’s terms, it means that the wine is spoiling. Putting wine into a plastic bag that deflates every time wine is poured out simply screams of genius, as the wine never comes in contact with oxygen. The result – a longer-lasting wine. So, Bag-in-a-Box is brilliant, and despite the negative image that has been ingrained into the minds of consumers over the decades, it makes a lot of sense to put wines into these boxes, as long as they are meant to be drunk quite young. Australia has been a real leader in this trend, putting some of their premium wines into bags and wrapping them up in either two or three liter boxes. In a smaller format, juice and soup companies have been putting liquids into Tetra Pak containers for years. Now the wine companies are doing it too, but with a twist: the wine’s containers are called “Tetra Prisma”, referring to the package’s eye-catching octagonal shape. The nature of this package’s design makes it re-sealable and even shrinkable, as you can squeeze out the extra air once the wine has been poured, further serving to preserve the wine. For all you hikers out there, your backpacks will thank you when you are trying to re-pack them after stopping for lunch. And just when we thought we’d seen it all, along came Wolf Blass Winery with an idea that’s so old, it’s new again: Polyethylene Terephthalate (that’s plastic bottles for us English folks). It doesn’t take a genius to understand the benefits of bottling wine in plastic – when you drop these bottles, they bounce instead of breaking. Now that’s a party wine if ever there was one! The added bonus to these bottles is that they are light as a feather, so you really can carry a case home from the store. Whether you are planning an RV trip this summer, hiking the Trans-Canada Trail or just a little clumsy at parties, these wine packaging alternatives are the answers to your prayers.
Little Penguin Chardonnay $37 – $38 (3 Liters) Lindeman’s Cawarra Chardonnay $25 – $27 (2 Liters) Ciao Primitivo Merlot $13 – $15 (1 Liter) Wolf Blass Bilyara Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon $15 – $17 (750
mL) French rabbit Family Reserve Red $20 – $22 (1 Liter) |
