A few years ago, boxed wine was the kind of thing you had when you couldn’t really afford the good stuff. It was looked down upon. Apparently, now, that’s all changing, and boxed wine is actually what we should all be buying. Unless you’re buying super posh wine that needs to sit in a cooled cellar and age for a few decades, there’s no actual advantage to having wine in a glass bottle, but that’s such an ubiquitous method of wine delivery, no one has really questioned it.

I recently stumbled across Laylo, a premium boxed wine retailer, that highlights the reason that the box may be greater than the bottle.

1. Less waste - wine in the box lasts longer so if you find you have half-opened bottles of wine that keep going off, this could be a solution. I’ll be honest, this is not such a huge problem in my house.
2. Better packaging - although glass bottles are a good option for recycling purposes, they are also a carbon heavy product, given the high temperatures required to fire and shape the bottle in the first place. Apparently the boxed version uses 90% less carbon dioxide which is a staggering amount.
3. Easier to ship - the box shape is easy to stack and ship, making it a cheaper and less wasteful product to transport around.

The one question mark is over the plastic tap and whatever is used inside the cardboard to actually hold the wine. Laylo acknowledges that this is harder to recycle kerbside, but offer a free-postage envelope to return the plastic and they commit to recycling every part of it. Other boxed wine suppliers don’t offer this, so then it depends on whether the plastic tap waste outweighs the above mentioned benefits.

Ultimately, I feel like boxed wine is a great alternative to the glass bottles, and next time I top up the wine stocsk I’ll try some to see if it’s a workable solution. It also just proves to me that even when you think you’ve got a great eco-friendly option for something, there’s usually more that can be done!