Tag Archives: box wine

The other problem with boxed and canned wine?

woman in black and white dress with wine glass
“Would that I had a box of $6 a bottle Argentine malbec. Who knows? I might even give up cocktails.”

It’s our old pal availability – of course

Last month’s post detailing the problems with drinking box and canned wine for dinner – and that weren’t about quality – didn’t include one other handicap.

It’s not easy to find either on store shelves, save for a handful of national brands. It’s an especial problem for boxed wine; periodically, I’ll get a release about a new and exciting box, but it will only be for sale at three stores, two on one coast and one on the other.

In other words, our old pal availability.

This came to me when I was looking through my tasting notes for something to do as a wine of the week, and I realized that one of the wines that I marked to use came in a box (though not one that I had used for the dinner post).

Ha! I thought. This would be a perfect followup to the dinner post – and it is, but for the wrong reason. It’s almost impossible to buy the wine in the U.S. There’s one retailer on Wine-Searcher, none on Pix, and only three on the first page of a Google search.

Which is a damned shame, since this is just the kind of wine to keep around the house. It’s the 2021 Trampa Malbec, which I got as a sample. The suggested retail price is $24 for a 3-liter box, which works out to $6 a bottle.

And I liked it — and this comes from someone who doesn’t much care for Argentine malbec. From my notes: “Simple and straightforward — juicy, bright berry fruit, not much in the way of tannins, and something oakish that isn’t too oakish. Outstanding value at $6 a bottle.”

In this, it’s exactly the kind of cheap, quality wine – in a non-traditional package, as well – that the wine business claims it needs and wants so it can attract younger consumers. So is it easy to buy? Of course not. And we know why that is, don’t we, three-tier system?

Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

Photo: Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Is the $95 Tablas Creek box wine the key to easing out glass bottles?

Jason Haas
Jason Haas: “I thought it would be successful, but the magnitude of the reaction still took me by surprise.”

Or – and more likely — is it just one more small step in doing what needs to be done to glass?

Last week, I wrote that consumers weren’t all that interested in alternative wine packaging, and that the 750-ml glass bottle was just fine, thank you very much.

So what blows up the cyber-ether at almost the same time? The news that Tablas Creek’s $95 box wine sold out in hours – a development that many heralded as the first sign that box wine was now acceptable for something other than the stuff that old ladies with cats buy.

The Toronto Globe & Mail, hardly sensational, asked: “Is a box wine revolution on the way?” And an editor I work with, almost as cynical as I am, said, “Jeff! We need a box wine story! It has arrived!”

It turns out that Jason Haas of Tablas Creek, as smart and innovative as anyone in the wine business, was almost as surprised at all of the excitement as I was.

“I thought it would be successful,” he emailed me, “but the magnitude of the reaction still took me by surprise — both when we announced it on our blog (with the most comments a blog piece I’ve written has ever received), and again with some of the highest-ever engagement with the posts about it on social media, and again when we sent it out and it sold out in four hours.”

Haas says he wanted to put some of his 2021 Patelin de Tablas Rose into a 3-liter box (the equivalent of four bottles) to see if there would be demand for expensive box wine. Box wine has never been much more than a niche in the wine business, accounting for about 10 percent of sales. And, for the most part, its wines cost no more than the equivalent of $8 a bottle, and usually much less. The Tablas Creek rose works out to about $24 a bottle – very pricey indeed for a box.

So when it sold out in four hours, tremendous enthusiasm. Many of us want to believe we can find a way past the 750-ml bottle and its 18th century technology, and no one wants to believe that more than I do. I’ve practically made a career writing about it.

But the media, Winestream and otherwise, overlooked a variety of caveats in covering the story:

• There were just 300 boxes of the wine. Selling out is impressive, but it’s not like it was the winery’s entire production of 2021 rose. Or a Big Wine product.

• Haas says the winery’s mailing list numbers 40,000 people, and “more than that through our social media channels.” Call that total 100,000 to make the math simple, and a basic business formula predicts sales of up to 1,000 boxes.

• Tablas Creek is well known and highly respected; that its followers wanted to support the box is not surprising. Another producer, with less of a reputation (and they know who they are), may not have been as successful.

• The winery didn’t try to sell the boxes through the three-tier system – which, to my mind, was the smartest decision in the entire marketing process. I’m guessing most wholesalers and retailers would have said, “Nope, not a good idea, don’t do it.”

None of this is to denigrate what Haas did or to say he shouldn’t have done it. As noted, we need to find an alternative bottle. But one small success is not a victory, and not when it’s running up against survey after survey that says what the survey last week said.

Because, as winemaker Charles Bieler told me recently, glass bottles aren’t going away just because we want them to. And Bieler, who makes wine in kegs and TetraPaks as well as bottles, knows more about than most.

So credit to Tablas Creek for taking a much needed small step. Let’s hope someone else has the courage of Haas’ convictions and takes the next step to help the box become as common as the bottle.

Do wine drinkers really care about the trends that the marketers say we care about?

wine store
Organic wine? Not really, thank you.

Not really, says one survey, citing little interest in cans, “healthy wine,” and organic wine

One of the problems with deciphering the wine business is that there is almost no good data. If we don’t even know for sure how much wine is sold in the U.S. each year (and we don’t, apparently), then how can we know what’s going on with even more abstract concepts?

I mention this because I’ve spent much of the past couple of months writing about wine trends, both here and for several freelance pieces. Those trends included “healthy” wine, canned and box wine, and organic wine, and how each will be key parts of the wine business this year.

Turns out I may have been wasting my time.

That’s because the Wine Opinions consultancy recently asked its group of mostly high-frequency wine drinkers (those who drink wine at least once a week) about canned wine, wine that is “better for you,” and wine made with organic grapes. The results were stunning:

• Organic grapes: Just 9 percent said they would buy more wine made with organic grapes this year.

• “Better for you” wine did even more poorly – only 5 percent said they would buy more wine marketed as “healthy.”

• And cans and boxes? Hardly worth mentioning, with only 3 percent saying they would more wine in cans, while potential box purchases were more or less flat for 2022.

What’s going on here? How can these results be so different from what the experts have told us is going on?

The answer, I think, rests with the highly conservative nature of all those high-frequency wine drinkers. If it doesn’t come in a 750-ml bottle with a cork-style closure, then they’re not especially interested in it. And many of the wines in the survey are certainly not of the 750-ml glass bottle variety.

Age didn’t even particularly matter, save for the organic and healthy categories. Younger wine drinkers, who are supposed to be more open to cans, boxes, and all the rest, didn’t show that much more of a preference for alternative packaging.

And where age did matter, it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Yes, there were significant differences in the number of drinkers older than 40 and those younger than 40 in buying “healthy” and organic wine, but those younger than 40 didn’t embrace either with much enthusiasm. Just 17 percent of respondents under 40 said they would be more likely to buy “better for you” wines in 2022, and the number was only 21 percent for organic wine.

One out of five people from a demographic that doesn’t buy as much wine as their elders hardly seems like enough to build a trend around, does it?

Photo: “Wine store” by stu_spivack is licensed under Creative Commons

Winebits 570: Box wine, wine drinkers, restaurant trends

box wine

This week’s wine news: Why isn’t box wine more popular? Plus, identifying U.S. wine drinkers and restaurant wine trends for 2019

• No boxes, please: Box wine, despite its increasing popularity, remains a minor part of the wine business. It accounts for just four percent of wine sold worldwide by volume; box sales have declined in Australia, one of the few places where it’s popular; and younger wine drinkers prefer bottles to boxes. One expert thinks he knows why: The technology was developed for battery acid, and producers treated the wine they put in boxes much the same way, using it for lower quality products.

• Parsing the wine drinker: A study has divided U.S. wine drinkers into six groups in one of those exercises that only marketing types can understand. The study uses terms like social newbies and premium brand suburbans to divide us by age and demographics. As near as I can tell, the idea is that younger wine drinkers are more adventurous and older wine drinkers buy the same brands of chardonnay and white zinfandel over and over. Which, of course, isn’t all that new; perhaps it means something the marketing gurus in the audience?

• Restaurant wine trends: Of which there aren’t any in 2019, if this forecast from a restaurant consultancy is accurate. It lists 13 trends for next year, including higher prices, new spins on Asian food, and “motherless meat.” But it doesn’t say one thing about restaurant wine, which makes perfect sense given what we’ve seen of restaurant wine over the past couple of years. So don’t expect the conundrum that is restaurant wine — higher prices, mediocre quality — to be solved anytime soon.

Winebits 531: Two wine rants and three-tier reform

three-tier reformThis week’s wine news: Two wine analysts may be even less optimistic about the future of wine than I am, plus Internet retailer Wine.com calls for three-tier system reform

• Napa Valley worries: Author James Conaway, who has written three books about California’s most prestigious wine region, is “pessimistic and alarmed about the valley’s state and direction.” That’s the word from Mike Dunne in the Sacramento Bee. Conaway is afraid Napa will morph into a “viticultural Disneyland, vineyards as sideshows, wineries as thrill rides.” “I don’t see any hope,” he told Dunne. “It’s too late for it to become an agricultural Yosemite.” That’s as gloomy a view as I’ve heard, but not surprising given the news out of Napa in the past decade as the region tries to decide how to manage its unprecedented growth. When land costs as much as $1 million an acre, it’s difficult to sustain an agricultural vision.

• Boxes, bulk wine, and blends: Or how about a wine business where what we drink is made like juice boxes, and varietal character is as quaint as the blacksmith? Elliott R. Morss, PhD, isn’t quite that alarming, but it’s not far from what he writes to that scenario: “The growth in blends is also notable. It means customers are focusing less on specific grapes and region and trusting more on the bottler. As the blend demand grows, so will the demand for bulk wines. …” The blog article is a little geeky, but the trends that Morss outlines apply to all of us who want our wine to taste like the grape and region it came from.

• Three-tier Ecommerce? Wine.com, the largest Internet wine retailer in the U.S., wants to reform the three-tier system to make it 21st century e-commerce friendly. You won’t learn much more that that – if that much – from this very poorly written news release, which combines PR-, wine-, and supply chain-speak to create a language that even I had trouble understanding. The point, though, is that the retailer sees U.S. wine sales declining and wants to do something to make it easier for consumers to buy wine. Says one Wine.com official: “Limiting the market size of your own customers is not a recipe for growth.”

Mini-reviews 104: Maybe Christmas wine, maybe not

christmasReviews of wines that don’t need their own post, but are worth noting for one reason or another. Look for it on the fourth Friday of each month. This month: Maybe Christmas wine, maybe not

• Le Petite Frog Picpoul 2016 ($30/3-liter box, purchased, 12.5%): I really wanted to like this French white, made with the picpoul grape. But all it did was make me appreciate the Rene Barbier white that much more. The La Petite Frog is pleasant enough, with soft lemon fruit, but could be fresher and more lively; at the equivalent of $7.50 a bottle, it’s not two bucks a bottle better than the Barbier. Imported by Kysela Pere et Fils.

• Norton Malbec Reserva 2014 ($16, sample, 13.5%): Premiumized grocery store red from Argentina that is about as boring as possible, and with entirely too much oak (even if I liked a lot of oak). It is focus group wine, made for the Cellar Tracker user who wrote: “Nice, smooth and very drinkable, especially at this price point.” Imported by Guarchi Wine Partners.

• Seaglass Pinot Noir Rosé 2016 ($10, purchased, 12.5%): This California grocery store pink was more than I expected, with barely ripe strawberry fruit and surprising freshness instead of the cloying, almost sweet quality, that some of these wines have. It’s a little thin on the back, and not quite up to a wine of the week, but you won’t be unhappy by buying it.

• Tenuta Marsiliana Maremma Toscana 2012 ($32, sample, 14%): This Italian red, a Super Tuscan heavy on the cabernet sauvignon and merlot, is professionally made, but doesn’t suffer from being more New World than Old in an attempt to get 92 points. Look for more black fruit and less acidity than in a traditional Tuscan red, but it does have that earthy finish and elegant tannins. Highly recommended, but availability may be limited.

Wine of the week: Black Box Merlot 2014

black box merlotWhy spend $25 for California red wine when the Black Box merlot costs just $4?

It’s not so much that the Black Box merlot is the wine of the week; I’ve written about Black Box over the past nine years. What makes it newsworthy these days it that it’s not all that different from wines that cost five and six times as much.

How far has the wine business fallen?

The three-liter Black Box merlot ($16, purchased, 13.5%) is sitting on my kitchen counter next to a bottle of $25 Santa Barbara pinot noir. The wines are so much much alike that it’s terrifying – the same overdone chocolate oak, the same very berry fruit, and the same direct, simple structure. Yet, the pinot costs six times as much (since one Block Box is equal to four bottles). What’s even more terrifying is how they aren’t alike – the Black Box merlot has acidity and tannins, and tastes like California merlot. The pinot noir has almost no varietal character, and is another example of cynical, post-modern winemaking.

Know, too, that the Black Box merlot is as it has always been, competent cheap wine that probably isn’t worth writing about. But the discounting that is so common these days has turned it into a tremendous value. The suggested retail price is $25, which is $6 a bottle, but you can easily find it for as little as $15. At that price, it would be a serious contender for the 2017 $10 Hall of Fame if not for the horrible oak, which tastes like not unlike those band candy chocolate bars.

So buy a box, have a glass when you want, and giggle at all those maroons who spent $25 to get what you got for $4.