A Good-Buy Wine for Thanksgiving

By Dana McMahan FoodConnect Louisville dana@foodconnect.com Here’s the extent of my knowledge about wine. There’s red and white (and pink); some is sparkling; it’s best to plan to have some at any family gathering. A glass (or three) of wine is bound to make for a nicer Thanksgiving. For a meal and gathering that stretches as many hours as the typical Thanksgiving feast, opening bottle after bottle won’t leave much in the budget for Christmas shopping. So if you’ve joined those of use who know enough not to turn up our noses at wine in a box, pick up a box of WINE4 Grilling from Trinchero Family Estates in Napa. The 3-liter (equivalent to four bottle) box sells at World Market wine shops for $14.99 right now. This light and easy to drink red is a mix of Zinfandel, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. I can’t pretend to discuss wine intelligently, though I drink it most days, so I’ll leave it at saying this is an enjoyable affordable wine – perfect for a family gathering. If you haven’t caught on to boxed wines yet, it’s time to give them another look. Forget about the big cheap boxes you drank at college parties (think Franzia) and think instead of a perfectly decent table wine. The wine is actually bagged – it’s just presented in a box. And happily, you can recycle the plastic bag and the cardboard box. A big advantage to boxed wine is that it keeps far longer than bottled wine. The packaging keeps out oxygen, keeping the wine fresh for up to four weeks. (Not that I’ve ever seen one last that long in my house!) And the cost savings to the vintner over traditional wine bottles is passed along to us. If you’re still not convinced, know this. According to a recent article in the New York Times: More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars. I’ll drink to that!