Unboxing day

The invention of the original cask in the 1960s had an enormous impact on Australia’s wine drinking habits as more recently has the ability to have wine home delivered. Campbell Mattinson ponders the true cost of online wine orders.

WOULD YOU pay $85 for a cask of wine? This isn’t a theoretical question.

A cask of wine ran across my desk recently and the asking price was/is $85. Before I give my own answer to this question – because it’s not as simple as it might sound – let’s first acknowledge that the history of the world can be summed up in one pithy phrase: people will pay for convenience. If it turns out that the price of convenience is the future health of the planet, in most cases the lure of convenience will still win the day.

Wine is not immune to this lure; it might even owe its existence to it. But nowhere, perhaps, is convenience more of a factor than in the way wine is packaged and distributed. The invention of the original cask in the

1960s had an enormous impact on

Australia’s wine drinking habits as, more recently, has the ability to have wine home delivered. Over the past 20 years I’ve spent a lot of time hanging around post offices picking up wine samples, and I’m always fascinated by the volume of wine delivered as pre-selected monthly packs.

I SHOULD add that the ‘future of the planet’ quip above was a general one, and not aimed at wine, or the developments I’m about to discuss. In fact, if the wine itself is any good, then this $85 cask idea is a good one, and perhaps even good for the planet.

The brand is called Unbottled, and its pitch is simple. There are many existing cask options that are good for general quaffing, but if you want to drink premium wine, then a bottle is generally your only real option.

Enter Unbottled. It’s a cask with high-grade branded wine in it. Indeed, the first releases are a partnership with Halliday 5-star winery Brash Higgins.

If I didn’t get so much wine delivered to me as ‘free’ media samples, I’d be tempted by this 2-litre Unbottled offering. I’ve tasted the wines – a grenache mataro, a cabernet franc, a chenin blanc and a cinsault – and the quality of the wine in the box is good. I personally baulk at $85, but as a concept, I like it.

I also – in fairness – like the sound of rival cask brand Hey Tomorrow and its $65 offerings quite a lot, though I’ve not tried their wares.

So too do I like the sound of a similar ‘trend’: bottled wines that are uncorked (or unscrewed) and re-bottled into 100ml tasting samples. Here’s where the sky really is the limit. I recently tasted a range of wines from outstanding Barossa Valley producer Alkina that had been re-bottled as 100ml samples using Coravin wine preservation technology. Some of these wines come with a $295 per bottle price tag. These, needless to say, are in scarce supply. Re-bottling them into small bottle sizes gives the winery the chance to get them into many more mouths.

And as every winery in the world knows, if you can get a wine into someone’s mouth, then you have a great chance of getting it into their hearts, and once you have it in their hearts you’re almost certain to get it into their cellars.

THE GOOD news about these Alkina samples – which are not commercially available – is that the wines presented beautifully. That is, they had survived the re-bottling process perfectly. The sad truth about most wine media samples is that the bulk of each bottle is wasted; a double shame given that these weighty 750ml bottles were freighted, which of course has an environmental cost.

I’m not so gung-ho as to suggest that all wineries should re-bottle their media samples into 100ml ampules, but it’s a development worth watching.

Though of course media-samples are small fry to the real game here. Imagine if you could buy 100ml samples of the best wines in the world? If the price was (proportionately) reasonable, it’s a salivating prospect. Langton’s (part of the Endeavour Group) is well and truly onto this idea already, using it for its Langton’s Taste Academy. Langton’s has been re-bottling commercial wines for a few years now, and has even successfully re-bottled wines that, in 750ml form, come with a $2500 per bottle price tag.

Now that’s interesting. ⬤