Is this the end of the wine bottle?

Picture the world before the invention of the bottle: if you wanted a nice glass of claret at home, you’d have to send a boy round to the tavern to fill up a jug — unless you were rich enough to have a whole barrel in your cellar. Around 1630, a new tougher glass was invented in England which, when combined with the cork, meant that wine could be transported and stored safely and inertly. We owe the amazing variety of wine available to us at the touch of a button to this invention.

What’s peculiar is how little has changed in 400 years. For most of us, buying wine still means buying a bottle. This is bananas, because most wine is drunk within hours of being purchased, and the glass bottle then discarded. It’s not as if there aren’t alternatives. In wine producing countries, there’s more of a dividing line between wine that you might keep — which comes in bottles — and everyday stuff for boozing. Carton wines are common on the continent while in France it is sold ‘en vrac’ — out of a petrol pump type thing. Bring your own jerry can. The Aussies meanwhile are wedded to what are charmingly called bladder packs. What we call boxed wines were in fact invented by an Australian, Thomas Angove in 1965, just as wine was becoming an everyday commodity in Oz, and not just for toffee-nosed Melburnians.

But they’ve never quite caught on over here. When I worked in a wine merchants in the late 1990s, the wine boxes sat on the top shelf gathering dust and slowly cooking in the summer heat. Which is a shame as boxes have a number of advantages over the bottle. They take up less space when you dispose of them.