I’ll confess that I enjoy a good bottle of wine now and again. Maybe even a little more often than “now and again”. Hey, what can I say? I must have a bit of the Roman bacchanalian in me. One thing living in New york, though, is that wine is damn expensive. Even the cheap good stuff runs over $12 a bottle. Which is probably a good thing as the cost of dropping $24 a week or so can get expensive.
You know that whole stop your Starbucks drinking thing for would-be millionaires? Well it’s twice that bad for wine. Which has always made me wonder: how much of the cost of the wine we buy is due to bottles and all that fancy packaging? I mean, what if they put the stuff in boxes….the good stuff, I mean? Couldn’t you knock off a few bucks? I know, the snobs out there are like “Oh, a box of wine, that is so low rent.” Well, maybe, but we live in an increasingly sensible society (OK, big assumption). I guess what I mean to say is, there seems like there’d be a demand for good wine in a box or a bag or wherever so that it’s cheaper. Screw what the snobs have to say. Wine is wine. It’s the stuff you drink that’s important, not the thing it comes in.
Well, I’ve pondered this time and again and have long expected some entrepreneur to come up with a good boxed wine Looks like my waiting is over. This piece over at Slate talks about a company in No Cal that is doing just that. A brand called Three Thieves is run by Napa Valley wine maker Joel Gott and venture capitalist (of course) and vineyard owner Roger Scommegna, and Charles Bieler, a New Yorker whose family used to own Chateau Routas, in Provence.
The Thieves made its debut in 2003 (in a jug, actually) and started to sell really well. And now others from this company and some in Australia are giving the drinking public what it wants. The article here discusses many of the new box/jug/tube wines and gives a nice little review of them. It’s good to see the marketplace at work. Now drink up!