Wine and tradition: this is a principle to which I am very attached.
I grew up with the belief that wine should be the most sincere expression of the typical characteristics of each “terroir”, values handed down from generation to generation.
I grew up listening to my mother tell how my grandfather pruned the vines, pressed the must and made wine as a good farmer without ever having studied oenology.
I have read dozens of appellation regulations that ruled down to details such as the shape of the bottle allowed, the type of closure permitted and the words allowed on the label.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I too, consciously or unconsciously, appreciate a nice heavy bottle, a neat label with raised lettering and a one-piece natural cork stopper.
It’s never too late to change my mind!
My generation had experienced directly neither wars nor pandemics (I am very sad to have to use a verb in the past tense here). As a child, I never saw floods, landslides and fires every year. I don’t think climate change is up for debate.
It’s not too late to change my mind!
The bag-in-box format has been seen for years as a black sheep. The screw cap is still viewed with much suspicion in Italy. I myself wrote an article (https://www.wineplusclub.com/is/2021/07/09/really-duckhorn-puts-his-well-respected-name-on-a-can-of-seltzer/) just a few months ago in which I expressed great surprise to see that a prestigious Californian brand like Duckhorn had also launched its wines in cans.
Now I am reading a recent Wine Intelligence survey on the development potential of canned wines: it shows that British consumers have gone from an interest of 21% in 2017 to 32% in 2021 and Americans from 33% in 2017 to 42% in 2021.
In short, whether we like it or not, now almost half of Americans and a third of British have no difficulty at all in approaching canned wine.
PS: At the time of writing I am in the centre of Tuscany, a region rather inclined to wine. in the quest to discover and taste wine in a can I have visited all the supermarkets in my county but I have found one and only one type, a canned sparkling wine to be precise. There is still a long way to go in traditionalist Tuscany!