Boxed wines have come a long way from when they were something you might side-eye as you picked up a bottle or two of the good stuff at the package store. Boxed wines are economical, eco-friendly, and they are delicious; using a Boxxle wine dispenser removes the boxed wine stigma, making it something you’ll be proud to (conveniently) serve.
This is where I should probably admit that I’ve had a negative perception of boxed wines since I was in college. Mind you, none of my friends or I were drinking anything that special at the time when I formed this opinion. But after having tried a particularly nasty white wine poured from a friend’s refrigerated box, I was convinced that boxed wines were something people only bought when they couldn’t afford better. People like us broke college students who wanted to drink wine instead of beer. Judgmental, much?
Over the years, I’ve managed to hold on to my bias against boxed wines, simply because I never had any reason to try them. It’s a pity, because I’m just now learning that by ignoring boxed wines, I’ve managed to miss out on a bit of a revolution.
Think about this … if you want a single glass of wine, what do you do? Typically, you’d grab a bottle of your favorite, open it, and the clock would start ticking. You would now be, whether you wanted to be or not, in a competition between how quickly you could finish the bottle and how quickly the remaining wine left in that bottle would go bad.
A day or two is about the best you can expect before oxygen and oxidation kill your remaining wine, and although you can purchase gadgets that expel air from opened bottles to make the wine last a little bit longer, the race is still on.
Now think about this … once opened, boxed wine is good for up to six weeks. Boxed wines typically contain three liters, which is the equivalent of four bottles of wine … and yet one box of wine typically costs the same as one bottle of wine.
So right there, we can agree that boxed wine is longer-lasting and more economical than buying bottled, right?
But what about taste and quality?
To make a long story short, boxed wines are no longer the vintners’ red-headed step-children. Black Box, Bota Box, Wineberry, and a host of other producers are making wines that not only taste good, they are winning awards, too.
Now consider this: drinking wine from a box creates less waste than drinking from a bottle. The cardboard box that holds the wine is recyclable everywhere, and if you live in an area that recycles number 7 plastics, you can even recycle the plastic bladder.
So boxed wines are more economical, more eco-friendly, the wines they hold taste great … but they still come in an ugly cardboard box that requires you to put your glass below the counter or below the refrigerator shelf in order to dispense the wine.
That’s where the Boxxle wine dispenser comes in.
Boxxle not only makes wine-by-the-glass more convenient by raising the tap for easier dispensing, it puts the wine in a container that will look good on your countertop or in your refrigerator. It all sounds intriguing, right? That’s what I thought when I was offered the chance to give it a try.
Boxxle is an approximately 11.5″ tall x 6.5″ wide x 9″ deep (including the spigot) plastic and stainless dispenser. It has handles on the side for easy maneuvering, and it has rubber feet on the bottom to keep it from sliding on slick countertops.
Loading the Boxxle wine dispenser is ridiculously easy. When you lift its lid, you’ll see a black spring-loaded plastic platform …
… push it down.
The next step is to take one last look at your wine’s cardboard box, and imprint the contents in your memory before you open it up to remove the plastic bladder.
Mmmmm, Malbec.
See how the spigot on the wine bladder is pointing to the bottom of the bag? That won’t work. You have to twist it 180º so that it now faces the opposite direction; this is easily done.
Next you plop the bladder into the Boxxle, and line the spigot up with the notch under the lid. See how this all fits together? Don’t forget to remove the little foil seal from the spigot before dispensing!
Any just like that, you’ve got a wine dispenser that looks good anywhere.
When you want a glass of wine, you simple press the button and fill your glass. It’s like the adult version of having an ice-cream dispenser in your kitchen, and you’re in charge! You can take as much or as little as you’d like, as often or as seldom as you’d like. It should go without saying that the Boxxle was a big hit at our Christmas gathering this year. 😉
The only thing I can think of that might improve the experience is if there were a way to label the dispenser with what you are drinking. If you always drink the same thing all of the time, then this won’t be a big deal to you; we bought several reds to try during the review process (purely for research, of course), and there was a point where I asked Kev what we were trying this time, and he wasn’t sure without taking a taste.
Oh, and that brings up the one con I’ve found to drinking boxed wine: it’s not that simple to keep up with how much you’ve actually consumed! When you buy a bottle of wine, you can see exactly what’s inside that bottle at all times, and you know exactly how much you’ve consumed. It’s not quite as easy to keep track with the Boxxle, as you can just keep filling your glass when you pass by it over several days or weeks, and the Boxxle keeps going and going … until it doesn’t. Sure, you can open up the Boxxle, pull out the bag and mentally measure its contents, but eh.
Kev and I aren’t going to cancel our memberships to the Christoval Vineyard or to Four Point Cellars, but having excellent wines that are so easily dispensed will make those membership deliveries stretch a bit further. We’ll always have certain bottled wines that we’ll want to enjoy, but now we can supplement them with excellent economical boxed wines that are conveniently and efficiently dispensed from the Boxxle.
The Boxxle Wine Dispenser retails for $99, and it is available directly from the manufacturer or from other retail sources such as Amazon [affiliate link]
Source: Manufacturer supplied review sample
What I Like: Elegant dispenser that makes it possible to get every last drop out of the boxed wine’s plastic bladder; Raises the wine’s spigot to above the glass rather than below the counter or refrigerator shelf
What Needs Improvement: It would be nice if there were a way to label the Boxxle with its contents; There is no real way to see how much wine you have left inside (but then, that’s as much a problem with any wine in the box as it is with the Boxxle)