The best boxed wines to buy now

Times

18 hours ago

The boxed wine market has been turned on its head since the old 'garbage in, garbage out' maxim of previous decades. Better wines — that is, fresher whites, fruitier reds and zippier pinks — are increasingly being shipped in giant flexitanks and boxed here, making for more affordable options. In addition, since the first bag-in-a-box wines appeared in the Eighties, there have been huge technical advances that mean bags are now less porous and taps more airtight.
There are limitations, though. Judging from the two dozen-plus boxes and pouches that I tasted for this article, this is a far from perfect wine format. A few were merely flat and dull, while others were oxidised and clearly well past their best. Take my advice and ignore any claims that wine stays fresh for up to six weeks. Provided that you keep your opened box in the fridge, or somewhere cool and dark, in my experience you've got three weeks tops. Annoyingly, too few producers stamp their boxes with the packing date so it's impossible to know just how long it was hanging around on a hot supermarket shelf before you got to it.