Choosing Box Wine
By Karina | October 19, 2009
Lately, and I admit to feeling funny about writing this post - but lately, I’ve been choosing box wine. OK, so it’s a silly thing to say! but you know, it turns out there are kind of significant environmental benefits. As much as I love wandering around the wine store choosing bottles based purely on label art, if I want to enjoy a glass of wine with dinner it does NOT behoove me to open a whole bottle – there’s this terrible feeling that one must finish the entire bottle, and that’s just not good for your waistline, your regularly scheduled bedtime, or your wallet. So I have started to buy boxed wine so I can have a glass or two with no worries and no commitments.
And there is an added benefit of being more ecologically friendly! Glass bottles are best to store wines in as they age, but they are also really really heavy. It’s that weight that creates a significant environmental impact. There are a lot of greenhouse gases produced during transportation of that heavy glass!
As the “Better World Better Wine” wine page (developed by several box wine producers) discusses:
since 99% of wine sold in the US is designed to be consumed upon release, if all these wines were packaged in [Boxes] we would save 1.5 million tons of CO2 per year. This would be the equivalent of taking a quarter of a million cars off the road.
Regardless of the cracks we could make about taking cars off the road when there’s wine involved, the NYTimes says:
More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.
After all I talked about carbon footprinting my wine choices when I wrote about buying wine in CA last year – but it’s easier to manage buying carbon netural wine when you’re actually at the scene of wine making. If you’re having it shipped out to you from the left coast it takes a little more work to make it carbon neutral!
For this round of experimentation (though I will admit to some prior experience with cheap box wine) I started out with Black Box wine. I read somewhere that it was quite good, so when I found it at my local shop I went ahead and picked some up. It turns out that it is pretty good wine – and after all, other countries have been quick to enjoy the benefits of the boxed wine for quite some time. Black Box wine is sold in 3-L boxes and these are more expensive than the 5-L boxes I have had passing acquaintance with, so that in itself tragically and superficially leads me to believe that this is a more premium wine in a box. The merlot is quite good, but I wouldn’t recommend the pinot grigio.
It turns out that there are many kinds of boxed (or tetra packed) wines that are apparently quite good and eco friendly – there’s a good list of them here. (Though I’ve avoided the tetra pak because I plain don’t have a way to recycle them locally.) With plain boxed wines, the cardboard is recyclable, but the bag and spigot may not be. According to Black Box: “remove the bag and recycle the box with your paper products. Recycle the bag if your community accepts plastics belonging to recycling category number 7.” We do recycle number 7s so I guess I just need to chuck the bag into my recycling bin next time I finish a box.
Do you have experience with box wine? Any recommendation, or do you feel a strong aversion to the whole concept?
[[Photo by flickr user slack12 via creative commons license.]]
Topics: Food, Waste | 16 Comments »
Thanks for the tip on the Black Box wine! I love the idea of boxed wine, but having only had some spectacularly bad boxed wine at my parents house (and yes, it was the dreaded old lady pink zinfandel), I haven’t tried any others. I have tried several tetra brick wines, which were okay, but like you, can’t recycle the container, so given the choice, at least I can recycle glass bottles. But next time I need to pick up some wine, I’m going to give boxed wine another try!
awesome! let us know what you think!
Now, I would just like to find wine made from organically grown grapes in boxes! :)
that would be amazing – if you do, please let us know about it!
[...] Choosing Box Wine | Tiny Choices tinychoices.com/2009/10/19/choosing-box-wine – view page – cached Lately, and I admit to feeling funny about writing this post - but lately, I’ve been choosing box wine. OK, so it’s a silly thing to say! but you know, it — From the page [...]
In Australia, Banrock Station and Yalumba do nice cask wine – it’s definitely more for quaffing than fine dining, but they’re great for bbqs and casual dinners. Banrock Station also contributes a percentage of sales to restoring wetlands.
thanks for the suggestions! I will look to see if they’ve got these boxes over here, too.
You had to know I was going to jump in on this one. Is boxed wine really more eco-friendly? Maybe, if we are defining eco-friendly as lowering carbon emissions. But there’s a lot more to environmental impact than CO2. And personally, I do not want to drink wine out of a box lined with plastic that could leach chemicals into my favorite beverage.
Do we know what these chemicals are? Well, we have a few ideas. But the problem is that plastic packaging manufacturers are not required to disclose all the chemical additives added to plastics. So we really don’t know.
I do know that glass is inert.
Perhaps the real solution is to stick to glass but cut our consumption.
you know, Beth, it’s always a pleasure to have you jump in!
I definitely know that the real solution is to stick with glass from local vineyards (there are a few near me) and to limit consumption. It would help me kick about 5 lbs, probably, too! especially considering that number 7 plastic is such a wonky catch-all.
I do think though that I’m not drinking enough wine for any possible chemicals that have been leached into my food to actually hit my system hard. most of these chemicals are bioaccumulative if they are harmful, and I’m not going through enough wine that it would be harmful – I’m guessing! I would say here that this is a situation where I personally am willing to take the possible hit to my body in order to avoid a larger global problem like climate change, while still enjoying my glass of wine.
(Another problem I’ve run into when buying bottles of wine is that corks have been on again/off again in short supply, so many wineries use plastic corks – and it’s nearly impossible to tell before purchase if the cork you’re getting is actually CORK. do you have a good way of telling?)
[...] Tiny Choices chooses box wine. [...]
Karina,
Never really gave this topic much thought at all but you are absolutely 100% right. I would have thought that making the paper would have more of an impact on the environment than bottles would but I was not factoring in the transportation issues.
Quite frankly I have always liked boxed wine myself. Its actually cheaper and like you said, you do not feel like you have to finish the whole bottle.
Great post
-Wesley Barras
When I studied abroad in Ireland last year, I had loads of great wine out of boxes! And, when I moved to California later that same year, I decided to keep that tasty tradition alive: I’m a HUGE fan of BotaBox wines. Their merlot is pretty good and the shiraz is very good. I actually didn’t care for the black box merlot, especially since it cost more (like $2! GEEZ!) than the BotaBox.
I picked up a BotaBox of pinot grigio that I haven’t opened yet, but you’ll be the first to know how it is!
Just to chip in on the boxed wine. I don’t drink enough to really get some use out of this but some tips. If you have bought a half or quarter bottle of wine (really any glass jar will do) that has a screw top lid, save it. For those times you don’t finish the bottle pour the remaining wine into this smaller container (the closest to the exact amount left the better). The smaller container has less head space and will therefore keep your wine tastier longer.
What to do with the bag from the bag in box wine. I just got this tip this summer and it was a good one. If you are a camper, hiker or just lay on the beacher you can re-purpase this bag as a water container!! Super light for the backpacker and costs you nothing. Just give the bag a good rinse first!
We also like the BotaBox. Our local health food store sells a boxed organic wine called Badger Mountain that’s good, too.
We almost always have a box ‘o wine in the fridge ;)
oh here’s the link
http://www.aboutboxedwine.com/wine/badger-mountain-pure-red-organic-wine/
[...] and drink wine but it has been an epic fail thus far. Tiny Choices talks about it here and here (Like the author, I also regularly choose my wine based on the bottle art). So sometimes I feel [...]