Is Australia About to Revolutionise Wine - Again?

Australia deserves credit for having popularised new forms of wine packaging twice. Is it about to make that a hat trick?

In 1965, Australian winemaker Thomas Angove took packaging developed for car battery acid and adapted it for wine. Other Australian businesses, including Penfolds, followed his lead, and the bag-in-box, or ‘cask’ was born. For many years, over half of Australia’s and New Zealand’s wine was sold in that format, a market share it still enjoys in the Nordics.

Caps

In 1964, Australia’s Yalumba winery decided to try sealing bottles with screwcaps and began talks with Le Bouchage Mechanique in France. Nine years later, they - along with Tahbilk and Penfolds -released their first wines with Stelvin closures. At the time, this pioneering effort proved to be a step too far for Australian consumers, but at the turn of the century, the freshness of these and other wineries’ screwcapped