Cask wine - in Italy?!

Apparently there is a move in Italy to start making, or bottling, high quality wine in boxes. You might be surprised when you think about the land of chianti and barolo, and I can’t see it ever really taking off; you don’t even see screw cap wine in Italy at the moment.

A couple of things to note however: obviously the first being that just because wine comes in a bottle, does not mean it’s high quality. Italy is a big table wine consumer, and has a history of drinking wine exclusively with meals. Could this just be a more convenient packaging...?

Italians are not snobs about wine, and unless you go to more up market restaurants, anyone asking for the wine list is likely to get a bottle dusted off from the cellar. Most of the time you have caraffe wine, which often comes out of barrel – it’s like wine on tap. And you can get it in nifty quarter, half litre or litre glass jugs.

In the supermarkets in Italy (sensible people who haven’t confined alcohol purchases to complicated and expensive licensing laws), you can get huge four litre bottles of wine, which I have always imagined are more for cooking but then I wouldn’t know – I’d never get through one quickly enough anyway.

Some families I know even make a special trip to a producer at the beginning of the year to buy what they call a damigiana – it’s this enormous bottle (the biggest size is 54 litres) which you take home with a special filtering system whereby you can siphon the wine off into bottles. The idea behind it is a year’s worth of table wine drinking.

So who knows? Maybe the humble cask is about to enter its heyday in the old world.