Why Boxed Wine, the Former Frat Party Favorite, Deserves to Be Taken Seriously

Once synonymous with hazy college parties and “slapping the bag,” boxed wine has quite the reputation. But push open a spout today, more than 50 years since it first graced grocery store shelves, and you’ll find the product has come a long way.

Top natural winemakers are finding that the packaging marries well with the young, easy-drinking styles they produce. Meanwhile, other professionals ranging from wine program directors to shop owners are recognizing the product’s merits when it comes to sustainability and freshness. No longer seen as just a vessel for cheap wine designed to chug, there are more quality boxed wine options out there than ever before.

Less Exposure to the Elements

One of the main reasons that professionals are excited about boxed wine is because the format combats the effects of oxidation, which is the biggest culprit of wines that don’t taste quite right. 

As soon as you open a traditional bottle of wine, it’s exposed to air. This kickstarts a series of chemical reactions that slowly convert the wine’s ethanol into acetaldehyde. The effects of oxidation range from muddying the wine’s color to altering its aroma and flavor, ultimately resulting in a wine that’s totally undrinkable. 

But if you opt to package wine in a box, there’s far less exposure to air, which means you can keep your wine fresh for a few weeks as opposed to a few days. That was the biggest reason winemaker Andrew Jones wanted to test packaging his Field Recordings natural wines in a boxed format. “The bag-in-box concept works great at keeping the air off of it,” says Jones. “It’s great at keeping things super bright and fresh.”

A More Sustainable Solution

Boxed wine is also more sustainable than its bottled counterparts, drawing some eco-minded wine professionals to the product. Nearly half of the wine industry’s carbon footprint results from producing glass bottles and then shipping them all around the world. On top of that, glass is much harder to recycle than cardboard and two-thirds of the glass bottles used in the U.S. end up in a landfill.

Laurel Livezey, the wine program manager at Sonoma County plant-based restaurant Little Saint, was looking for more sustainable options to round out the program when she came across Ami Ami, a natural wine boxed product crafted with grapes from the Languedoc region of France. 

“Sustainability and environmental impact is a huge part of our mission,” Livezey says. “So, I love having great wine in packaging that’s not as heavy as glass and uses less fuel to ship.”

The restaurant started serving the wine during high-volume periods like happy hour. Livezay noted that boxed wine holding onto its freshness longer than a bottle is an added sustainability benefit because it lessens the waste of service. 

“The happy hour wines can sit while we are closed and still be fresh when we reopen on Thursday, so that’s hugely valuable to me,” she says. “It makes me happy from a sustainability standpoint that we don’t have to dump half a bottle of wine because we finished out our week and still had a bottle open.”

An Evolving Technology

When Jones set out to create Boxie, Field Recordings’s slate of three boxed wines, the first hangup was a lack of quality packaging options. But he says the technology on bags and spouts has evolved a lot as more producers explore boxed wine.

“I’ve been interested in alternative wine packaging for over 10 years,” says Jones. “We opted to do cans at first because I wasn’t comfortable with the expiration dates on the bag-in-box, but materials have gotten so much stronger that it became something that we felt good about giving a try.”

As materials improve, so does the taste. The team at Wine Enthusiast recently conducted a blind tasting of wines with alternative packaging and found some bag-in-box products actually could hold a candle to their bottled counterparts.

Though boxed wine hasn’t completely shed the stigma, high-quality producers getting into the game is helping the category gain legitimacy. Max Goldenstein, the general manager at Silverlake Wine, a shop that carries boxed wine like Boxie, likened it to the hurdle that screw-top wine faced about a decade ago.

“Education is going to be extremely important as the wine industry as a whole pushes for this kind of change,” Goldenstein says. “Some people look at a screw top and think it can’t be a good bottle of wine, but there are exceptional wines that have screw caps on them and there are exceptional wines that come in a box.”