Thinking inside the box
On the necessary return of bag in box wine, food-based gossip and extra-hot cheese snacks.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
Wine in a box has been around since the 1960s. While first popularised in Australia, it’s now omnipresent in fridges in the south of France, and dominates wine sales in many Nordic countries.
Locally, by contrast the cask feels relegated to the 1980s and 90s where it eventually earned a deeply low-brow reputation.
Central Otago winemakers Dicey Wines are attempting to challenge those undertones with their recently released version of a bag-in-(recycled cardboard)box wine, a pinot noir whimsically named Dice. And this absolutely isn’t the $26 box of unspecified “red wine” I purchase self-consciously every now and then to make sangria or mulled wine. In fact, it’s far from it.
“We’re old but new” says James Dicey of Dicey Wines. He launched Dicey Wines alongside his brother Matt Dicey in 2020. And while the Dicey brand is relatively fresh, the brothers come from four generations of viticulturalists. Their father, Robin Dicey, was the first viticulturist of Corbans Wines and later, was instrumental in starting Mt Difficulty.
According to a study by the Wine Institute in California, 29% of the carbon emitted from wine-making comes not from agriculture, but rather from the bottles. Bag-in-box packaging leaves a softer footprint on the environment, as it reduces the carbon associated with glass bottle production, shipping and recycling. A New York Times article from 2008 said, “Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars”.
While a bottle of wine can spoil relatively quickly – sometimes in as little as two days, the physics of box packaging “allows the wine to stay fresh, vibrant and delicious for up to a month,” Dicey says. That’s because the wine sits in a vacuum-sealed bag, which has an airtight spout that allows you to pour as much wine as you like. Meanwhile, whatever remains in the bag is safe from wine-spoiling oxygen. It means less vinegary wine, and less wastage.
So why the grimaces upon mention of box wine? Why does it get such a bad wrap? It’s less about the box and more about the wine that inhabits it, explains Tradecraft founder Morven McAuley, who worked alongside Dicey on developing the casks.
She recalls working for a winery that produced boxed wine “a long time ago” and how a “staggering percentage” of their total sales were wine in a box. What went into the bags was lower quality wine made from unwanted juice that would otherwise go to waste. “Initially that's where boxed wine came in and so naturally it gained that reputation, which was fair to be honest,” she says.
Breaking with tradition, Dicey’s boxed wine has been treated with exactly the same care as their bottled wine. The grapes harvested are either organic or sustainably certified, the wine is fermented in small format open top tanks, and aged in French oak barrels. “So it's still a wine snob's wine,” McAuley assures me.
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While they’re open to filling boxes with other varieties, for now it’s just pinot noir. “It’s the hero of Central Otago,” she says. It also tends to be a wine that’s more out of reach from those of us who linger around the lower shelves in the wine aisle. Dicey’s box isn’t cheap at $80, but that’s filled with the equivalent of 2.65 bottles of wine. When you put it into the context of a $40 price tag for a decent bottle of Central Otago pinot, it’s not bad.
The wine industry, McAuley says, has some PR issues. “What used to be just a simple ‘I'll grab some wine on the way home, and I'll come over for dinner’”, has been transformed by a bewildering array of options: natural wines, Pals, sparkling water, fancy sodas, low alcohol beers and beyond. “Personally, I think that's exciting, but for the traditional wine industry, it's definitely encroaching on their market share,” she says.
In response to that climate, McAuley is on what she describes as a “crusade” to make wine more inclusive. “Part of the reason some of our audience isn't engaging with wine, is because wine tends to be portrayed as incredibly cerebral, where everything has to be deconstructed, analysed and over thought”. But, she says “in actual fact, wine has one purpose and that is to be bloody delicious”. To her, the casual connotations of the box offers an alternative to those more exclusive wine associations. It’s wine you can take to the beach, bring to a barbecue or pour into a tumbler at the kitchen bench after work.
While boxed wine may help democratise some elements of wine drinking, it raises another problem: how do you evoke the tradition and romance of wine without the bottle?”
A glance back in time might help answer that conundrum. New Zealand’s wine industry and wine drinkers have adapted to new packaging before. In the early 2000’s, as cork taint plagued the industry, an alternative had to be found. Enter: screw tops. At the time, there was outcry surrounding the perceived loss of romance, drama and ritual of corks, and corkscrews. “You could argue that we're kind of in the same place with glass bottles,” she says. The impacts of climate change will be felt brutally within the wine industry and beyond, so it’s imperative we at least begin having conversations about alternatives, says McAuley. As it was with cork, “we are likely going to have to let go of some of those things that we love or consider to be a fixture in our lives,” she says.
“The caveat is that the packaging isn't perfect yet,” says McAuley. As it is now, the plastic innards can’t be recycled, but in their next iteration the packaging will be 100 percent recyclable. “We were like, do we wait until the package is perfect?,” says McAuley. “And the answer was, no, because we need to engage in this conversation now, we need people to start developing a habit that means they can appreciate that sometimes really good wine can come in a box.”
There’s an inevitability that some will remain hung up on the negative presumptions that surround drinking wine from a box, but McAuley is unfazed. “For me, wine is about the people I’m with, the environment I'm in and the occasion I'm drinking it – that supersedes the packaging it came in,” she says. “Once it's out of the bottle, I couldn't give a toss what it arrived in.”
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Weekly bites
When Countdown raised the price of its infamously cheap home-brand pizzas from $4 to $9 recently, it made headlines. The pizzas which include flavours like Quattro Formaggi, Pepperoni, and Roasted Mediterranean are all made in Italy. The price rise could easily just fall into the ongoing tales of inflationary woe, but this week Stuff business reporter Daniel Smith posed the question, how could a pizza imported from Italy cost less than a coffee in the first place?
Best known for his soulful ballads, singer-songwriter Teeks, real name Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui), makes music to cry to. As well as being really good at making sad songs, it turns out Teeks is also really good at making pasta, and is in a broad way, very passionate about kai. Last week, I had a chat with Gardiner-Toi about food on the marae, flat cooking rosters and the best music to play while cooking.
Celebrity gossip and food seldom intersect, but this week lovers of celebrity scandal and kai were treated to not just one, but two scandalous stories of the sort. On Tuesday, New York restaurateur Keith McNally banned comedian James Cordon from all of his restaurants after Cordon was abusive to restaurant servers in response to finding egg white in the egg yolk omelette he ordered (yes, egg yolk). In an Instagram post McNally described Cordon as “a tiny Cretin of a man”. On the same day, in a Daily Mail tell-all, the ex-nanny of Don’t Worry Darling director Olivia Wilde and her former husband actor Jason Sudeikis alleged that a “special” salad dressing made by Wilde for her now-boyfriend Harry Styles played a major role in the breakdown of the marriage. As a certified salad dressing fan, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed following the tireless work being done by journalists to uncover the adulterous dressing recipe.
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The weekly snack
Herr’s Carolina Reaper Cheese Curls, $5 from Circle K: Full disclosure here: I’ve absolutely eaten these before. Many times in fact. Still, I thought they were worth a mention because I can imagine that many snack lovers would be rightfully put off by the mention of Carolina Reaper and whatever its notoriously high Scoville number is on a packet of chips that are also awash with flame imagery. But consider this a promise: if you can handle a bit of spice you’ll be fine with these. That is to say, if you come across them, you should give them a go. They’re cheesy, with a forceful (but somehow still pleasant) whoosh of heat. I’ve often thought that there’s some kind of equation I could make about how good a snack is based on the number of rotations of my kitchen I do in a period of time as I travel from snack bowl, to stovetop on repeat. Let’s just say the RPM in this case would be high.
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
