In (cardboard boxed) vino veritas

I have always felt that the poor cousin to ‘wine in bottles’, those 3 liter ‘wine in card box' should have some advantages... At a minimum, I have felt that the pouches in those boxes at least keep the wine fresh for a lot longer than wine from an opened bottle of wine. Finally today, I ran into an interesting op-ed piece in the Times that proclaims the advantages of switching to cardboard boxed wine. It is not just freshness, cardboard boxed wine actually helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions...

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.

What’s more, boxed wine is superior to glass bottle storage in resolving that age-old problem of not being able to finish a bottle in one sitting. Once open, a box preserves wine for about four weeks compared with only a day or two for a bottle. Boxed wine may be short on charm, but it is long on practicality.