Henry Jeffreys

Is this the end of the wine bottle?

• From magazine issue: 18 April 2020

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  Is this the end of the wine bottle?

  

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But they’ve never quite caught on over here. When I worked in a wine merchants in the late 1990s, the wine boxes sat on the top shelf gathering dust and slowly cooking in the summer heat. Which is a shame as boxes have a number of advantages over the bottle. They take up less space when you dispose of them. And once tapped the wine should last three months, so there’s no need to finish off the bottle at the end of the night. Though of course you could just say: ‘Darling shall we drain the box tonight?’ There’s not much else to do at the moment, after all.

And yet we remained wedded to our bottles. Partly because, until quite recently, wine was still a status symbol in Britain, we wanted even our cheapest wine to come in a bottle with a picture of a château on the label. But gradually, as it has become just another drink, we have become less precious about containers. Canned wines are proving popular, particularly when commuting (you remember commuting, right?).

Now, finally, boxed wines are having their moment. It helps that the quality has improved: previously only the worst wines went into boxes. But now the Wine Society does a five-litre party pack of its excellent Domaine Jaume Cotes-du-Rhone, working out at about £6.75 a bottle; St. John has a wine merchant arm offering, among other things, its house wine in boxes to take away.

It’s not just home drinkers who realise that for bulk-drinking the wine bottle is an anachronism. Many restaurants now offer wine from a keg. At St Leonards in Shoreditch, the excellent house Beaujolais comes out of a tap. And why not? It’s just a return to how things were before the wine bottle. You could even send a lad round with a jug and ask them to fill it up for you. Though not at the moment, obviously.