UGA grad wants to make bag-in-box wine better | Online Athens

UGA grad wants to make bag-in-box wine better | Online Athens
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UGA grad wants to make bag-in-box wine better
By JOE VANHOOSE - joe.vanhoose@onlineathens.com
Published Wednesday, October 12, 2011 Updated: Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - 12:53am
Tripp Middleton enjoys a glass of wine, but that’s the only glass he wants involved with his wine consumption.
http://onlineathens.com/food/2011-10-12/uga-grad-wants-make-bag-box-wine-better
10/14/11 4:03 PM
Middleton is a box wine convert. After reading about how the quality of 3-liter bag-in-box wines was improving, he tried some himself — and he liked
it. He just didn’t like everyone to know.
“The taste and the environmental benefits appealed to me,” he said. “I just didn’t want a box sitting on my counter.”
Now, it doesn’t have to. The University of Georgia graduate has created the Boxxle, a patent-pending dispenser for premium wine casks.
“It’s an attractive dispensing method,” Middleton said. “You have that, and you have the fact that bag-in-box wines already are much better for the
environment.”
Bag-in-box wines produce roughly half the carbon footprint of glass bottles, according to a 2010 Wine Intelligence study. Bag-in-box packaging also is
the preferred packaging choice by wine drinkers regarding environmental consideration, the study confirmed.
Still, Middleton was apprehensive about making the switch from glass to box. All he knew about bag-in-box wine were the 5-liter packages he and his
friends used to drink in college.
More refined makers like Black Box, From the Tank and Bota Box are much different.
“There are a lot of high-quality, good wines out there now,” he said. “And because they’re vacuum sealed, it keeps the oxygen out, so you can go
weeks between your first glass and your last glass.”
That doesn’t mean box wines don’t have problems.
Besides the perception, the gravity-fed system — to get wine out of the bag inside the box, drinkers must put a hole in the box and pull a spigot out
over a ledge — often fails with a glass or two of wine still in the bag.
Customers then must pull the bag out of the box and squeeze the remaining wine into their glasses.
That’s exactly the problem Boxxle was made to fix. Well, that and the whole “I don’t want a box of wine in plain sight” issue.
“With the Boxxle, you open up the box of wine and pull the bag out and turn it 180-degrees,” Middleton said. “It applies pressure from below using
spring force, so it’s a constant pressure.
“The spigot is at the top, so you can fill your drink right there on the counter or table.”
Middleton plans to make the Boxxle out of heavy-duty plastics. The current bag-in-box winemakers are interested because it could get them into bars
— bars that don’t want boxes sitting in view of the customers — that typically have turned them down.
He also wants to get the device in higher-end home furnishing stores like Williams-Sonoma and Bed Bath & Beyond. The Boxxle will sell for about
$100.
“I hope to make it my day job as we near the end of manufacturing,” said Middleton, who currently is an investment manager. “It’s nice to think you
could do something that would make a good environmental impact.”
Middleton plans to roll the Boxxle out in March. He’d like to unveil it in with a wine tasting.
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UGA grad wants to make bag-in-box wine better | Online Athens
Bag-in-box wines only.
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