No corkscrew needed.

The NY Times has an article about the coming new thing with wine: wine in a box. Or, as the article takes great pains to make clear, wine in a bag in a box. (The bag is air-tight, and contracts as wine is drawn off, so the remaining wine is never exposed to air and thus doesn't oxidize.) They claim that 20% of all wine consumed in this country comes from a box, and a third of all wine in Norway and a half of all wine in Australia. Can't prove it by me: all the wine consumed in my house comes from bottles, and to the best of my knowledge, all the wine I consume at restaurants does too.

The article says that the wine in a box concept grew as a replacement for jug wines in the 80's, and that they expect that consumers will appreciate the concept as they realize that wine is more important than the packaging. As proof of this, they point to the success of a silver-medal winning chardonnay now being packaged in 5-liter boxes for $25 (that works out to about $3.75 per normal 750-ml bottle), as a step up from Gallo's Delicious Red, which is 5 liters for $9.

Yeah, I don't think so. Maybe it'll work for the current equivalent of jug wines, or things like that Delicious Red (described on the website as "grape wine and natural flavors", a red wine best served chilled, and - I think - with 3.5% residual sugar, which to me is pretty sweet for a white wine and death in a red wine). But not for real wine.