Bags, Packaging

A box wine (or wine cask) is a wine packaged in a bag, usually made of aluminium PET film or other plastics, and protected by a box, usually made of corrugated cardboard. more...

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The bag is sealed by a plastic tap, exposed by tearing away a perforated panel on the box, and used to dispense the wine. The most common sizes are 1.5, 3, 4 and 5 litre.

History

The wine cask was invented by Tom Angove of Angove's, a winemaker from Renmark, South Australia, and patented by the company on April 20, 1965.

Cask wine is also known as "goon" in Australia ("goon" is diminutive slang for flagon, the large bottles used before casks), and the bag alone known as a "goon sack" or "goon bag", while in the United States a common slang appellation is "space bag" (most earlier versions had a silvery, foil-like appearance). The practice, usually by students, of consuming cask wine at parties is known as "gooning".

Advantages

While cask wine may have a poor reputation, the packaging method does have its benefits. The chief advantage to bag-in-a-box packaging is that it prevents oxidation of the wine during dispensing. Wine in a bottle is oxidized by air in the bottle which has displaced the wine poured, wine in a bag is not touched by air and thus not subject to oxidation until it is dispensed. Bag in a box packaging is not necessarily inferior, but is simply preferred by producers of more economical wines because it is inexpensive.

Box wine is not subject to cork taint or spoilage due to slow consumption after opening. A bag of wine, once removed from the box, will float on water. This allows quick cooling of a white wine by immersion in an ice bath.

Other advantages of boxed wine include efficiency of storage and transport of rectangular boxes, and elimination of bottle breakage.

Cask wine is typically cheaper than bottled varieties, often around AU$10 (GBP£4, US$8) for 4L in Australia.

Disadvantages

The bag is not hermetically sealed and has an unopened shelf life shorter than bottled wine. Most casks will have a best-before date stamped.

As a result, it is not intended for cellaring and should be drunk within the prescribed period

Manufacturers of 'higher class' bottled wines have complained about the cheapness of 'cask' wines, arguing that they provide a cheap means for alcoholics to become inebriated. In particular, the lower level of alcohol excise levied on cask wine in Australia (compared to beer and bottled wine) has been criticised as encouraging binge drinking.

Read more at Wikipedia.org