“Plus there is the hormonal rush of spending the cash.”

Maybe I’m not like everyone else (or maybe I’m just a cheap bastard like Ugly) but I do not get any hormonal rush - not even a little bit, whatsoever by spending large amounts of jack.

Now cashing a large check and depositing it into my bank account, that kind of makes me smile. Probably because it happens so infrequently.

Since I run a wine website, people think I know stuff about wine. So if I sip something and go “mmmm, that’s good” I’m more likely to get good responses from other folks than if I sip it and make a sour face.

When I’m with other people, I always try to hide my response until everyone has tasted. A few times, I’ve lied and gone the other way to see if it affected other folks (it did). “I’m just kidding, this wine sucks.”

I like a lot of box wine, but the truth is that really really good wine will won’t be making it into a box in the near future. It’s a vicious cycle. Since people perceive box wine as worse, you can’t charge $100 for 3L. So if a wine maker has a really good specimen, she’s going to sell it in bottles where she can get more $$. And since folks aren’t putting good wine in boxes, the sentiment will remain that box wine isn’t as good.

This will change though. Screwcap tops went through the same process. They’re better for the wines, but no one was using them because it lowered the bottle price. However, a lot of mid-range quality/priced wine and brave wineries started using screwcaps (the price of cork helped too) and the perception has slowly gone away. Only the snobiest of wine snobs brush up screwcaps. (In fact, snobs now talk about how the screwcap is better, bla bla. And they’ll talk about how the box is better when the boxes go for $100 a piece too.)

The same will happen with box wine. Paris Hilton and others who are going to put B- wine into boxes will make it more likely for B+ wine to get into boxes, making more likely for A- wine, etc, etc, until we can’t remember when (really really) good wine didn’t come in boxes.

And keep in mind that I’m only talking about the cream of the crop. There is already very good wine in boxes. Box wines rival 95% of what’s out there in bottles and is definitely a good option for your everyday drinking wine. (It’s generally too big to work as a gifting wine and there aren’t enough options to appease someone who like to try a lot of wine.)