The History of Boxed Wine

Boxed wine was invented in Australia, but the United States lent a helping hand. In the United States in the 1950s, the Sholle family created a bag-in-box packaging system for battery acid. Around the same time, Thomas Angove was running his family’s vineyard in South Australia; it was called Angove Family Winemakers. Frustrated by glass as the primary packaging option due to its fragility and because he felt the wine would eventually go bad, Angove began to look for an alternative. Inspired by shepherds who drank wine from goatskin flasks, Angove came up with the idea of packaging wine in a bag. At first, the design utilized a spout that had to be sealed shut after it was opened using a peg or paperclip. Then another wine company, Penfolds, was inspired to create tinned wine and worked with an Australian inventor named Charles Malpas to create a special tap. After wine-in-a-bag took off in Australia, winemakers there discovered the American bag-in-a-box storage method pioneered by the Sholle family and applied it to wine. Boxed wine soon became the standard and quickly became very popular throughout Australia. In fact, prior to the introduction of boxed wine, the drink was relatively unpopular in Australia and reserved only for special occasions because it was very expensive — boxed wine changed all that and, in fact, it is still popular in the country today! Boxed wine was introduced to the United States in the 1980s when Franzia, an Australian company, decided to market the boxed wine that was so popular in its home country in the United States. Other brands followed suit, but Franzia remained the most popular and well-known brand of boxed wine at the time. In the United States, boxed wine developed a reputation for being affordable but low quality, however, some brands have tried to change this in recent years. Today, boxed wine is available at most liquor stores in the United States and remains extremely popular in its native Australia.