Wherein Merlot Diffuses Panic About Boxed Wine, Yet Again...

In a rather frantic style of a man soaked in petroleum at a fireworks display, a close friend of mine recently contacted me in a panic concerning his wife choice of catering company to service a party he is hosting on the Long Island Sound estate for a certain celebrity actor, director, writer who is married to an English duchess and whose "hot bottom" has remains the subject of rather base, if not prurient international media fixation. 

 

This chap's panic stemmed not from the selection of meats, cheeses or pastries, or from the strumpets his caterer hired to bring finger foods to his A-List guests, but from the catering company's aversion to boxed Merlot. Have imbibed with me on numerous occasions, both on my houseboat here at the 79th Street boat basin, and at my weekend retreat in the Berkshires; he was well informed as to the benefits of boxed wine verses traditional incantations.

 

The benefits of boxed wine are well known. However, to the uninitiated, it might prove instructive and illuminating to review the benefits of the most maligned beverage in the America consumer's pantheon of libations.

 

Presently, just 20% of American wine is produced for the box.  This in spite of the obvious advantages over its bottled cousin, the 750ml bottle, which typically adds as much as 4 dollars to the price of the god's nectar. Boxed wine, on the other hand adds just .63 cents to its cost for packaging, a far superior method for distributing the beloved juice of the heavens.

 

Make no mistake, the advantages of boxed wine are not limited to the economies of scale one can achieve by selecting primarily boxed wine over the omnipresent bottled varieties. Price, therefore ought to be considered a factor but not the primary factor that makes Boxed wine a superior choice over its bottled nemesis.

 

Boxed wine simply stays fresher, longer than its corked brethren. That means one can purchase a 3 liter box of Merlot, for example, which is the equivalent of 4 bottles of the tangy taste treat, at a deep discount; and feverishly pour glasses and glass of the nascent nectar for weeks and weeks without worrying about losing half bottles to the spoils of spoil, a problem that positively pre-nicaean, and tragic in proportions, when one thinks how many centuries of spoiled wine mankind has endured from that momentous time, dating from the fourth century B.C., when The Nicene Creed was adopted at an ecumenical council convened in the city of Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor by Constantine I in A.D. 325.  Constantine was indeed a most felcherious wine lover, and would no down be an early adopter of boxed wines where he walking among us today.