The social drinker

Supermarkets seem to be full of boxes of wine these days. To my mind, this is a sign of the growing maturity of Irish wine drinkers. Boxes of wine are handy, often cheap, use low-impact packaging, and cannot be dropped and broken like bottles.

The Australian innovation, which dates back to the 1960s, works by creating a pressurized bag that sits inside the box. An airtight seal is then created, which allows wine to come out, but prevents air from getting in. Each glass poured from the box is like opening a new bottle, without the worry it might spoil later.

This, in turn, means you can limit yourself to the odd glass without worrying that the rest of a bottle is slowly going off in your fridge. Cooks benefit when a recipe calls for a small glass of wine, while environmentalists enjoy the fact that cardboard is less damaging for the environment than glass, and has a low carbon footprint.

The most common problem with boxed wine is that most producers reserve boxes for their worst wines. The public has resisted wine in a box for so long that the public’s fears have become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Of course, you cannot really blame the box for this problem, but it means you have to be selective.

There are one or two other issues as well. You cannot keep wine in a box indefinitely. The bag will let in very small amounts of oxygen, and that oxygen will make the wine taste less fresh. That’s why wine in a box usually has an expiration date of about a year, while bottled wine does not. Once opened, you need to keep the box in the fridge, and finish the contents in less than a month.

Next week: four decent wines you can buy in a box in Irish supermarkets.