Boxes of Wine

You ever walk down the aisle of a grocery store, look at a particular product (say, a 3 gallon jug of Prune Juice or Spam) and wonder: Who Buys This Crap? I do that virtually every time I walk through a store especially when I see the King of the Unpurchasable Product, the "Box of Wine." Of course, you have seen this product. It's cheap wine shipped in a plastic bag that is contained in a large cardboard box with a large dolphin-killing nozzle. The wine itself looks like strangely gasoline because they make it so it's both Red and a White. It can therefore go with red meat or white meat! For the wine afficinado who's also on a Beer Budget worthy of only the best Milwaukee's Best Light Ice brew, this is utter perfection.

The earliest entrant into the Box-of-Wine market was Franzia, which is so high-brow that it does not have a website. For those of you interested, you can identify a "trashy" consumer product as one that the manufacturer does not bother to put up a single page on the Web. Hell, even Spam (the international meat of mystery) has its own website: http://www.spam.com/.

Back to Franzia: It claims on the side of the box that 1 of every 8 glasses of wine drunk in America is done out of a box rather than the snobby means out of a bottle. That's almost 17%. So, these people are out there and drinking this stuff. Who the hell are the types of people that would? Let's analyze the features:

1) Cheap as hell. $9.99 for 3 liters -- That's about 10 bucks for almost a gallon. It's almost cheaper than milk and about 50% the cost of Orange Juice.

2) Very alcoholic. At 9%, it's 3 times more alcoholic than Budweiser.

3) Discreet. You're not carrying around either an obvious glass bottle of Southern Comfort nor a large box of Bud for the cops to see (or appear on the TV show "Cops"" when you're caught on camera wearing your wifebeater undershirt chasing your estranged wife out the front door).

The perfect consumer of this wine (and I can back this up by true empirical evidence) is the international travelling student (or backpacker) between 18-21. The boxes of wine are consumed at these backpacker hostels more than water. (At this point, I need a snippy joke to close, but I can't develop one. I won't quit my day job.)