Tuesday, August 5 2008
Colonel Berlusconi, In a Box, With a Certificate
Tube be or not tube be?
Photo by Lars Klove, NYTimes
It's a world turned upside down. And who's to blame? Well, probably Tetra Pak, if you want to be technical. But the Swedish food packaging corporation really only came up with the idea of using laminated cardboard containers with aseptic filling to store food, not the idea of selling wine out of boxes. Still, technology wants to be free, and eventually an innovator (an Australian named Tom Angove, of course. Aussie's'll try anything once) put a plastic bladder with a pouring spout into a cardboard box and sold it in a value-price position.
Da sinistra a destra, da sinistra a destra, we'll restore
order with our spiffy and intimidating combat-Ascots!
Instant success: the rest is history. And now if government corruption,collapsing morals, social unrest and Brunello scandals weren't enough, Italian authorities have decided to allow DOC-designate wines to be sold in bag-in-box. According to the Italian Wine News,
Green light to the use of bag-in-box for Italian Doc wines. The decision, that has been taken by the Ministry of Agriculture after a very long debate, permits the use of bag-in-box with nominal capacity equal to or exceeding 2 litres.
Bag-in-Box has some good points, and some bad. Although there are producers who'd have you believe it's the answer to all your packaging needs, and some who are even using a business model that says high-quality vintage wine can come from a box, it's not as clear-cut as it seems. Yup, B-in-B has lower packaging costs and lower carbon footprint/environmental impact, but it's not really good for long-term storage, and it's not appropriate for ageing wine. Even the most wildly optimistic advocates hem and haw about periods longer than 12 months in a box, and because the bags have poorly-understood oxygen transfer rates, nobody will answer whether the wine can improve in storage or if it will just spoil.
But for short-term drinking? It's a neat solution: after all, most wine is consumed within an hour of purchase. Anyone who packages ready-to-drink wines in a convenient and low-impact package need only overcome the stigma of bum-wine and price resistance.
Looks like the Italians are slowly giving way to new ideas--interesting enough, as they've done this before. Until the Roman conquerors got far enough north, they stored all of their wines in clay amphorae, an ancient greek technology. The northerners showed them how to make the fascinating new packaging technology, the barrel: light, strong and waterproof, barrels were an ideal transport and storage mechanism for Roman wine. What will the future hold? I'm visualising a doohickey like an iPod, where you can dial up thousands of different wines, depending on your mood and thirst.
Call me when the future gets here.
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