So, remember back to the days when nobody, but nobody would buy wine in a screw-top bottle instead of cork? Because it meant the wine was cheap and undrinkable?
Fast forward to today and it is increasingly unusual to find actual corks (made from the bark of the cork tree) in a bottle? Sometimes they are plastic corks, sometimes they are glass corks, sometimes it’s just a screw-top. Turns out that you don’t have to worry about those drying out and crumbling and ruining the contents of the bottle (nothing worse than “corked” wine).
So, a good friend of mine in Berlin is an avid camper (and opera aficianado, btw). He buys boxed wine for camping – not the cheap boxed wine, but more expensive stuff (yes, you can buy Barolo in a box) because, among other things, it doesn’t go off so quickly because the air doesn’t get to it, even when the wine has been opened. Also: easier to transport in a backpack.
What a lot of folks don’t realize is that quite a bit of wine is shipped in large plastic containers and filled into bottles at destination (for example, wines from, say, Australia or South Africa or, yes, even France). They are not aged in bottles and the bottles wrapped individually in bubble-wrap to be transported across the ocean to their final destinations. (Look on the back label, often you can see where the bottles were actually filled…on your side of the Atlantic.)
Just like the twist-off cap on the wine bottle was once shunned and is no longer (never had a bottle of twist-off get “corked”), box wines are a bit behind the curve. There are actually a lot of good reasons to buy them. The better ones are good value for the money.
Heck, a favorite retsina from Greece is Malamatina, which has a crown on the bottle, for which you need a bottle opener:
NB: our favorite whites grow across the Rhine from our house, and we buy our reds in the Ahr Valley just 20 mins away (the site of the devastating floods in July – our favorite Ahr vintner lost 50,000 liters to the flood and had to wash and re-label thousands of bottles). We like good wines and have a lot right around the corner from – in this area, we drink much more wine than beer.