People come up to me. In bars, in coffee shops, in the lobby of my apartment building (stop that, by the way, it’s getting creepy). And they ask me to comment about the breaking news in wine that day. Justine, they say, Justine! Comment on this wine news! The world wants – nay – needs to know what you think about this! Well, one of these questions deserves to be addressed digitally and publicly. It is the question of what I think about wine in self-serve tanks coming to supermarkets.
I think I like it. It harkens back to the days when people would get their beer in a bucket. I, of course, am gleaning that knowledge from the song “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” by Hank Williams:
Well my bucket’s got a hole in it
Well my bucket’s got a hole in it
Well my bucket’s got a hole in it
I can’t buy no beer
God knows I love a good boozy throwback. But on the other hand, it’s incredibly inelegant. Check out this picture:
photo from theconsumerist.com
Tacky. And wine is an elegant thing. Wine producers put a lot of time and effort into their bottle and label designs in order to make the whole experience of buying and consuming a bottle of wine more pleasurable for you, the drinker. This design seems to be saying, Don’t gas pumps make you thirsty? Drink from this nozzle, buddy!
Perhaps if the wine tanks were more pleasingly designed with branding from the wineries whose wine is being pumped through said nozzle it might be a more acceptable aesthetic experience.
Another problem would be the possibility of wine-jackers. That is to say, people (I’m guessing college-aged dudes, probably of the caliber I chose to hang out with in my school days) who would pay for a fill-up and choose to fill up their bodies direct from the tanks, nozzle in mouth.
So, everyone who has been running up to me in the streets and showing up at my office (security has asked me to ask you to please stop), I think it’s an intriguing idea (and green, forgot to add that, definitely eco-friendly) and with some tweaking could be the way of the wine-future.
