Most of you will be familiar with the bag in box concept, that staple of festivals and student life back in the day where you had plonk on tap in an easy to carry package.
The concept for producers is that they can make the wine a lot more cost effective by packing 3 or 5 litres into a compact unit that skips the extra cost, weight and space requirements of the traditional glass bottle, but our high excise duty in Ireland has always made this a big challenge to actually deliver as a retailer. As most bag in box wine is at the cheaper end of the price scale, and the reality can be that you’re paying more in tax than you are on the actual wine — there’s a saucy €12.75 duty + the VAT on 3 litres of wine — the economies in scale in percentage terms is often too small to provide a significant cost benefit for buying in the larger format.
However, when one of our quality organic producers, the family owned Tempore in Spain’s Aragón region, came to us with a few bag in box options, our eyes lit up. Generación 76 is an organic single vineyard Tempranillo in Lécera, the village where brother and sister Victor and Paula Yago Aznar transformed the old family grape growing operation 20 years ago into a state of the art winery with a modern and distinctive range of wines. It’s Victor that adorns the 76, a smooth, aromatic and beautifully expressive Tempranillo that’s scooped multiple gold medals.
The new 3 litre bag in box works out around a third less in price per unit (glass, flagon, bucket, or whatever your vessel) than the standard 750ml bottle, so there is real value here. The box operates from a small tap which you uncover and release at the bottom, and the wine will keep for a good month after opening, even though we’d be really surprised if it lasted that long. Quality wine on tap is right here.
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