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Comment by resolutebat | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I was at a student party in France, and somebody brought in a 4L floppy plastic bag of the cheapest wine possible. It was just as unwieldy as it sounds, and the wine inside was terrible, so I never saw one again and even most French people I've related this anecdote to have never seen or heard of one.

Then a clever Australian invented boxed wine, which hides the plastic bag in a cardboard box with a little spout, and now wine in a bag is commonplace and almost (but not quite) respectable.

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I once met the son of one of Chile's largest wine producers. He had recently set up his own wine export business. When he mentioned he was also selling cask wine (i.e. wine in a cardboard box with a plastic bladder), I assumed this was cheap, inexpensive wine. He told me that he sold some of his better wines this way because a lot of European hospitality businesses preferred it. Makes sense when you consider that it will keep much better than bottled wine once 'opened'.

One advantage of those (unlike the milk bags) is that they don't let in very much air. The bag just deflates as you pour/draw. The much reduced exposure to air is great for those (not me) that drink their wine over days/weeks.

Also handy for camping trips or "no-glass" environments (e.g. boats)

We would take the bag out, inflate it a bit, and use it for a pillow when on longer hiking trips.

Why not leave it filled with wine, and just accept the fact that the pillow will get smaller as the trip progresses.

Gasses compress, fluids don't.

This is a rock festival hack in Finland. But it means you can't cut the corner of the bag for that last tiny dribble of wine.

Another clever Australian invented the practice of removing the bag from the box and hanging it on a Hills Hoist clothes line.

https://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTcvMTEvMT...

Goon of Fortune!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goon_of_Fortune

I've bought a few boxes of wine in US grocery stores. It's just a plastic bag in the box.

It's handy for people who want to drink 1-2 glasses of wine a day, because the wine spoils slower than in an open bottle.

I haven't bought one in awhile because I prefer beer.

> It's handy for people who want to drink 1-2 glasses of wine a day

In college one year, I had a randomly-assigned roommate who occasionally celebrated "boxed wine night", during which he would attempt to drink an entire box over the course of the night.

This is how I learned that boxed wine is apparently also handy for people who like to drink absurd amounts of cheap wine, since each box is typically equivalent to 4 bottles.

You can probably guess how "boxed wine night" usually ended for him. Even so, his academic grades were excellent, go figure.

The smartest person I know would drink an entire bottle of vodka in an evening when he was a freshman.

He quickly stopped that behavior, though. (I think I told him he made a fool of himself and he didn't need to do that to impress people.)

I personally never had the stomach for that much alcohol. I once drank a single bottle of wine (4-5 glasses) in an evening and I could hardly handle it.

That somebody had simply taken the bag from the cardboard box it was sold in, for some reason (maybe space).

These are called cubi in France (from cubitainer) and used to be hard plastic containers but have been bags in cardboard boxes for maybe the last 30 years or so.

They have a reputation for being used for the cheapest wine possible (which was likely the case if you were students) but can also be used for better wine, it's actually a rather good storage device as it still excludes oxygen once open unlike regular bottles.

The only time I would buy box wine, in my younger days, was when going to a music festival. Usually Glastonbury where the camping and fun starts a full two days before the festival proper.

The reason for the box wine? When you've finished it you can inflate the bag to use as a camping pillow.

When I was a college student they started selling small tetrapaks of wine that made them look like protein shakes. I would play catch with them after drinking some of it, and I can only imagine how much more fun that would be with a bag. I would have loved to have seen the explosion.

Also, I can't help but feel like storing wine in a floppy bag is our natural way of things. After all, we used to store it in animal skins.

> boxed wine, which hides the plastic bag in a cardboard box with a little spout, and now wine in a bag is commonplace

Never seen boxed wine personally and would never consider it respectable

You can get it at US grocery stores and some of it is competitive on quality with other wines in the same or slightly higher price ranges. It's fairly popular for family dinners, e.g. when there aren't guests over but Mom and Dad want a glass.

I could bet $50 you wouldn't tell random BiBs vs random glass bottled wines in a blind tasting.

Thats not the point. I would not even considering buying it in a bottle. So thats a loss for the company that makes that choice.

Plastics also tend to leech into your liquids, for your information, especially over long periods of time, which is very relevant for wine but not as much for your soda

The point is that you probably wouldn't tell it from bottled wines of other brands, that's basically superstition, as is the belief that metallized PET can leach anything into your booze in non-homeopathic quantities.

In Europe it's fairly common to find wine in 3L boxes. The quality varies, but the same is true for the ones you find in bottles.

Supermarkets also buy and bottle their own wines so you often find the same wine in both bottles and boxes.

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