Alliance for Innovative Wine Packaging
The Alliance for Innovative Wine Packaging sent me a press release about a show they're doing at Copia on October 27. We'll be in Tampa by then, far away from Napa's food and wine center, but I'd love to hear a report from anyone who goes.
I'm intrigued by wine packaging in general (see, for instance, my piece on wine bottles), and I like seeing new packaging concepts. I once heard an analyst speak about market trends in wine, and he argued that screw caps may not be the ultimate wine closure, but they've made consumers willing to accept experimentation. New solutions that go beyond the bottle and cork can now gain traction in a marketplace that would have been dismissive five years ago. Just ask Three Thieves, the winery that puts its wines into jugs and boxes.
These alternate containers and closures have a lot of benefits. New closures help diminish "cork taint," the foul smell that often comes from cork and can kill a wine, and new packaging gets around the main problems with bottles: Their awkward shape makes storage difficult, and glass is breakable. Boxes with inner bags keep oxygen out of the wine even after you've started pouring it. (And as my friend Rebecca once pointed out, bags can be smuggled into the ball park more easily than bottles.) Robert Haas recently suggested to me that the best container for wine might be a can. A bold statement, but perhaps there's something to it: No damaging light or oxygen can get to the wine, the material is durable, and it's easy to open. There's a lot to be said for exploring new packaging.
- Boxed Wine
Recently, Melissa and I offered to bring wine to a casual birthday party. She texted me from The Spanish Table: She had bought a wine we had tasted before, Alandra's simple, fruity, friendly red table wine, but she had bought it in a box. (She also...
- Tablas Creek Talks Closures
If you've ever heard me talk about screw caps, you know I'm a fan. But Jason Haas, general manager of Tablas Creek, makes a more nuanced argument about closures at the winery's blog. Screw caps are great, he says, but so are corks. It depends...
- Hold On To Your Wine
You and a friend sit down to dinner and open a bottle of wine. You eat, you talk, you drink, but when the meal ends, the bottle isn't empty. You don't feel like finishing it, but the sink's drain is an ignoble end for good wine. You could...
- Bandit
(guest photographer Tim Holmes) In 2002, California suffered a wine glut. Too many grapes, too much wine, too few buyers. The press were beside themselves, gleefully anticipating reduced prices on California wines and waggling fingers at producers...
- Screw Caps
Kim Crawford's 2002 "Unoaked Marlborough Chardonnay" is a good wine, if not the standout that Sauvignon Blancs from the same region are. But it is not the wine that I want to write about, it is the bottle. More specifically, the closure. For Kim...