Saturday,
June 16, 2007
My Dear: A Nice Glass of
Boxed Wine, Vintage June 2007 ?
The
ANNOTICO Report
Wine
in a Plastic bottle, or Wine in a Can, BUT Wine in a BOX ???
Screw tops weren't bad enough!!!! ??
Then
too, a Freshness Date with a Best when Served By clearly printed on the package ?? What happened to Vintage???
A Wine with a name of "Fish Eye"???
As
a validation for Boxed Wine, they cite that Australians drink about half
their domestic wine from boxes. That's a Recommendation???
Aussies drink
Anti Freeze out of the Auto Radiator!!! :) :)
But
I was surprised to see that there are several offerings from
Franzia is the largest selling boxed wine, (Sold by the Franzia family in 1973) and Target its biggest
customer.
Thanks
to Pat Gabriel
The
Wall Street Journal
|
By Dorthy J. Gaiter and John Brecher |
|
June 15, 2007
Boxes
We
were surprised to see an ad for wine "casks" during this year's
Oscars. Boxed wines and the Academy Awards don't seem like a natural match,
even in a year in which "Borat" was
nominated. It turned out that the ads were just the beginning of an aggressive,
$4.5 million television campaign by the makers of FishEye
wine. Among their claims: that the wine stays fresh in its bag-in-box for six
weeks. To us, that sounded like a challenge. Having slowly filled our
refrigerator with partially emptied boxes of wines over the past month and a
half, we're happy to say we survived the experiment and we're back with a full
report.
Boxed
wines have been around for some time now and are far more common in some
countries than the U.S. Australians, for instance, drink about half their
domestic wine from boxes, according to Australian statistics. The big player in
the field is the Wine Group, based in
Pumping
Up the Volume
The
most common size of wine in a box is five liters -- that's almost seven regular
bottles of wine -- and we'd guess the demographic those wines attract are our
parents. But with America's increasing interest in wine and more of a
willingness among wine-drinkers to experiment -- consider the rise of screwcaps, for instance -- the people at the Wine Group
clearly figured the time was right for something new, so they introduced FishEye in three-liter boxes with heavy promotion.
We
first ran across FishEye, in regular bottles, as part
of a tasting of the house brands of big chain stores last year. Back then, it
was an exclusive offering at Harris Teeter grocery stores and we wrote that it
was "consistently disappointing." Others must have disagreed,
however, because the Wine Group says the brand sold so well that the company
decided to put it in a box and roll it out nationally. (It is also still
available in bottles.)
Why a
three-liter size instead of five? "The smaller size is a signal that it's
different. Consumers need a signal that something has changed," Laurie
Jones, a Wine Group spokeswoman, told us. Clearly, the company's eye is on a
younger, more-affluent demographic, too -- just look at where the ads are
placed: "Desperate Housewives," "Lost," "Brothers and
Sisters," "Boston Legal" and "Grey's Anatomy,"
although, really, we just can't imagine Dr. McDreamy
offering Meredith a glass of wine from the box in his refrigerator. We can,
however, see The Chief, still missing his wife, tapping the cask a glass at a
time over a couple of weeks.
In
any case, the target consumer, the Wine Group says, is "influential 25-40
year old wine drinkers." And Ms. Jones says sales are strong: Wine Group
is expecting to sell about a million nine-liter cases of FishEye
this year, including both boxes and bottles. "Everyday wine drinkers are
using this as their house wine," she said. "It used to be a big
magnum of Mondavi in the refrigerator door."
Indeed, according to ACNielsen, sales of premium three-liter box wines,
including brands such as Hardys, FishEye
and Black Box, rose 43.4% by volume for the 52-week period ending April 7.
FishEye claims -- and other boxed wines make similar claims -- that its wines will keep well for six weeks after opening
because the plastic bag inside the box collapses and therefore keeps out air.
We decided to test the claim. We bought seven boxes of FishEye
Chardonnay (vintage 2005, "best when consumed before Nov. 6, 2007").
They cost $16 each, or about $4 per regular bottle. Our idea was that we would
open one every week for six weeks and empty about a sixth of the contents. Then
we'd taste the six boxes against a newly opened box six weeks later. We opened
the first box, found the pour spout and tapped the bag. Then we tasted the
Chardonnay and it was OK, but harsh. We decided that we couldn't very well
perform our test with this wine because it didn't taste that good to us to
begin with, so then we tried FishEye's 2006 Pinot Grigio, which was fairly pleasant and not too sweet (though
it smelled and tasted more like Sauvignon Blanc), and its Shiraz, which was
tasty -- "soft and pleasant, with integrated acidity and nice fruit."
The
Over
the next six weeks, we opened one box of
A
Pleasant Surprise
At
the end of the experiment, first we tasted the box of Pinot Grigio
we'd tried weeks earlier. It was still pleasant, with some lemon, peach and
kiwi. It tasted somewhat watery, but not at all oxidized. It didn't taste like
it had been open for six weeks.
Then
we put all of the boxes of Chardonnay and
The
Chardonnays, on the whole, continued to taste pleasant enough but a bit harsh.
Three smelled and tasted notably sulfuric. All tasted of pineapple -- sometimes
sweet pineapple and sometimes watery pineapple. One was clearly the best. It
tasted riper, fresher and cleaner than the rest. This turned out to be the
newest box, the one we had just opened. But our second favorite was the wine
we'd opened the third week of the experiment, and our third favorite was the
very first we'd opened, all those weeks before. Overall, the boxes we opened
first and last were the best; the boxes opened in the middle weeks were the
ones that tasted and smelled less fresh. But none of the
boxes tasted oxidized or obviously off. We've tried some wines by the
glass at tony wine bars that tasted far more over the hill.
We
sampled the Shirazes next. Once again, none of them was obviously oxidized. The
difference among them was that a couple tasted vibrant and alive -- these were
wines we would take to a picnic ourselves -- while others had the same basic
tastes, but they'd lost life and seemed somewhat dull and flat. In any event,
none of them tasted as sweet, alcoholic and heavy as many jug wines on the market
and even many under-$20 wines in bottles.
When
we checked the bottom of the boxes, it turned out that our favorite
So,
the bottom line: It's true. The wine really does keep for six weeks. It has its
ups and downs in your refrigerator, but it will keep fine. Would we keep a box
of wine in our refrigerator for six weeks? Well, no. Today, there are so many
interesting, affordable wines on the shelves that we'd rather taste several
wines than one wine in a big box. That said, the FishEye
Shiraz, at the equivalent of $4 a bottle, is a perfectly nice wine for a party
this summer -- and, yes, if you have any left over, you can keep it around
until the dog days of summer without it turning hairy.
You can contact us at wine@wsj.com1.
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:
Italia
Italia
Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com (3 years)
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net