Beer blahs? Bring bubbly to the beach
Want to turn your picnic into an elegant outing? Jon Bonné takes a look at Champagnes and wines that are easier for you to carry along — and open
 Courtesy Focale 3 - Reims Nicolas Feuillatte Champagne mini bottles: Wait, is blue putting the moves on pink? |
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Sun, sand and ... corkscrews?
Oh, I think not. In this season of road trips and outdoor concerts, trips to the shore or the woods, no corkscrew means one less item to haul. Winemakers have bent over backwards to find new alternatives to corks. Quality wine is getting as easy to open as beer.
Screwcaps, a curiosity just three years ago, are now commonplace. Caps for white wines are still more common than ones for reds, but for a quick-drinking bottle, you can find no shortage of options. Almost all New Zealand winemakers have abandoned corks as well as many in Chablis and Bordeaux, where you’d expect the cork to reign supreme. The screwcap market is so flush as to have warranted a handful of devices meant either to ease unscrewing (a task, let's be honest, that requires about half as much brainpower as mastering the Wave) or to make the process more elegant (file under hat-on-pig, or maybe Champale-in-a-goblet).
My hands-down favorite closure remains Alcoa’s Vino-Lok, a glass stopper with a rubber O-ring that’s as elegant as it is practical. After early trials, primarily in Germany, Vino-Lok is now popping up here. The stoppers not only are a cinch to remove — easier than a bottle cap — but also have the virtue of almost perfectly sealing your wine. U.S. vintners have caught the glass-stopper bug, and not just for cheaper wines. Peter Rosback at Oregon’s Sineann has put several high-end reds under stopper, including his $35 cabernet franc. Napa’s Whitehall Lane is following suit with its $75 reserve Cab.
For true beach days, the 187 ml mini bottle is the way to go. Just like box wine, 187s are making huge strides, with sales up 20 percent in a year, according to ACNielsen data. As with the boxes, the problem here is quality: Much of the wine in minis ranges from dull to undrinkable. Good chardonnay, in particular, seems to be in short supply, though that has lots to do with the eternal glut of bad chardonnay. Still, standouts can be found. Fans of Little Pengiun shiraz from Australia can rejoice that the popular Yellow Tail wannabe has embraced the mini format. Those big berry flavors are most definitely made for summer. (We await a Yellow Tail mini.)
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But the best mini arrivals in the past few months are matching blue-and-pink 187s from Champagne Nicolas Feuillatte. Though the packaging for Feuillatte’s “1/4” bottles is too girly even for the most self-assured of men, the new offering has two big virtues: 1) real Champagne in an attractive bottle, much like Pommery’s Pop and Piper-Heidsieck’s Baby Piper; and 2) a spiffy wrist strap that secures around the bottle neck. The colors — hot blue and fuschia — limit its customer base, but I’d almost be willing to live with the man-purse implications just to strap a bottle of Champagne to my wrist as I carry my beach towel. Almost.
(Public-service announcement: If you happen to try any of these in the sun, don't forget to drink plenty of water. Hydrate, people, hydrate. And don't give the beach patrol reason to suspect.)
The explosion of options in box wine will serve you well, too. For sheer convenience, the one to beat remains the single-serving Three Thieves Bullet, but Boisset’s French Rabbit — a series of collapsible, earth-friendly 1-liter boxes — offers similar convenience and slightly better wine. Sourced from vineyards in France’s Languedoc and Roussillon regions, the pinot noir and merlot aren’t bad, despite being on opposite ends of the chic scale, and the cabernet sauvignon was impressive.
That’s more than can be said for most new 3-liter boxes, which are improving but still need work. If you can overlook the names, Fish Eye shiraz and Killer Juice cabernet, two entries from California heavyweight The Wine Group, work quite well as paper-cup wines. The Fish Eye offers pretty peppery aromas as you go, unusual for inexpensive fruit-juicy shiraz. Otherwise, though we’ve found decent picks before, your options slide downhill rapidly.
Perhaps the weirdest new packaging move is the Australian-born Zork, a sealed, hollow pop-off plastic cap with a peel-around fastener. It lacks the quick-and-dirty virtue of the screw cap and, despite what advocates insist, its looks scream “cheap” to me — though it’s being used on wine in the $10 to 15 range. On the up side, inadvertently twisting in a corkscrew doesn’t appear to do any major damage to your wine.
With so many new packaging options, the next challenge for beach wines is quality. Table wines have staked their claim, and now’s the moment for better wines to follow suit. That’s not to say we need Barolo in a box, but if there were wine justice in this world, good Beaujolais would come in mini-bottles.
Of course, if there were wine justice in this world, people wouldn’t be scrunching up their faces at the word Beaujolais.
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