They say that trends in the wine trade take a long time to be accepted & adopted by the consumer, yet in the case of packaging, alternatives to glass bottles have been with us for over 30y. Bag-in-box has been ever-present in our supermarkets since the 1970s, more often than not a figure of fun for wine snobs, even though the technology used in its manufacture now is way better than when it first arrived. Glass bottles have been around since the mid-17th century &, 350 years on, are still the packaging format of choice for almost all alcoholic drinks. Despite the grand claims of the Tetra Pak/bag-in-box brigade, the results of the latest WSTA/Wine Intelligence survey make for sobering reading for proponents of some of the new bottle formats. Only a third of the 1000 regular wine drinkers surveyed said they would consider alternatives to glass packaging.
