6 thoughts on “Best line of the day for my brother John”

  2. Bro, it ain’t the container, it’s what’s in the container. You’d be drinking wine from goatskins if everyone thought as you do. 🙂

    Besides BMWs consume only Hefeweizen.

  3. Where is the aesthetics? Some of the real pleasure for a true oenophile is the ritual of enjoying the wine, beginning with the uncorking. A connoisseur doesn’t drink this living beverage just to get a buzz, or because he believes it will make his heart last longer.

    Tell me the plastic liner doesn’t have an effect on the taste. A glass bottle certainly doesn’t. Want to keep the wine for more than a day invest in a saver. Boxed wine drinkers might as well drink grape juice with Everclear.

    Hefeweizen is a girly beer that needs fruit to be drinkable.

  4. I agree with you, John, about the ritual of the cork. But there is a whole other type of wine drinking, the daily glass or two, that a five-glass bottle just doesn’t accommodate. Wine savers are fabulous, really, but they don’t work that well. I, personally, find red wine stored overnight — even when it’s vacuum packed — to be oxidized to the point of tasting rancid. Wine boxes prevent oxygen from intruding on the wine, thus preventing oxidation and making it possible to serve and drink exactly the amount required, without leftover.

    Chemical analysis and blind tastings have not found the plastic used in wine boxes to be detectable in the wine. The wines that are finding their way into boxes are better than traditional jug wines, but still aren’t wines that need a decade of age to mature. Most wine is into the glass within 48 hours of purchase. The risk of cork taint is vastly greater than the risk that the plastic will bleed into the wine.

    I recently gave an excellent bottle of Alsatian Pinot Gris to a friend, and she cracked wise because it had a screw top. (That shows you the kind of friends that I have, ridiculing a gift.) She assumed that a screw top indicated a cheap wine, which it once did. But times have changed. The excellent Sauvignon Blancs of New Zealand are 100% bottled with screw caps, and other aromatic whites are following not because it saves four cents a bottle but because screw caps preserve the freshness of the wine better than corks. By sneering at a screw top on a $32 bottle of wine, she was not showing her sophistication but her ignorance.

    Wine boxes are the next packaging revolution in wine. They will not replace the bottle and cork that have proven themselves protective of long-lived vins de garde; we’ll never see Petrus or DRC in boxes.

    But when it comes to everyday wines, boxes are superior to naturally corked bottles. They’re cheaper, more environmentally friendly, more convenient, and preserve the wine better than corked bottles. Like screw tops, it’s going to take a while for people to adjust. But people will.

  5. The screw top works fine, and can seal the bottle well, but long-term storage has yet to be proven. I drink many of the Marlborough Sauvignons, a great value especially, compared to Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre. Kent Callaghan, in Elgin, AZ switched to screw tops many years ago, and I love his product. There is nothing quite like the sound of the cork coming out of a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Côte-Rôtie . There is, on the other hand, that little problem with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA).

    The debate is still out on which is greener. Many areas do not recycle that type of container. Likewise, many consumers do not recycle. Production and shipping costs, however, seem to favor the box.

    I am sure I prefer not to drink my wine from co-extruded ethylene vinyl alcohol (EVOH) – a five-layer co-extrusion with EVOH sandwiched between two layers of polypropylene shaped like a bag and surrounded by a box. Kind of like Ken’s BMW gas tank. I will stick to silica, thank you.

    Drink up, and if you like the wine or do not know the difference, it really doesn’t matter how it is packaged, priced, or what the vintage is. In my experience, the storage and serving temperatures seem to be the biggest factor and more often than not, is incorrect.

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