Food & Travel...

Boxed wine is shaking off tackiness and gaining a green-reputation instead.

As Serious Eats reported, a standard wine bottle (750 milliliter) traveling from a California winery to New York produces 5.2 pounds of carbon emissions; a three-liter box of wine generates only half the amount of emissions per 750 milliliter. (Here’s the original New York Times Op-Ed on the subject).

Opting for a box is especially significant when you consider that, while the majority of wines are made on the West Cost, the majority of wine drinkers are east of the Mississippi, and the U.S. is fast becoming the largest market for wine in the world, so the lighter we can make our wine shipments, the more emissions we’ll save. According to the NY Times, if we drank the wines that are consumed within a year (that’s 97 percent of wines) from a box instead of a bottle, it would reduce greenhouse gases by “about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.”

One impediment to boxed wine right now is quality: the best wine rarely comes in a box. But, all that could change with a little consumer demand.

Read more about wine at Dr. Vino.

Photo of shiraz in a box from Everyday Wine.