Bargain Bin: Yellow+Blue Malbec
Finally! An eco-friendly boxed wine we'll drink
Wine is a carbon Bigfoot: All those heavy glass bottles and time spent on trucks and planes add up. Wine producers have been playing with glass alternatives for years (see Franzia), but we've never tried a boxed wine we could get behind until we were introduced to Yellow+Blue (get it?) by Scott Pactor, the picky palate who owns the beloved, organic-oriented Appellation Wine and Spirits.
The unoaked Argentinean Malbec is made from certified organic grapes, then boated to Canada where it's packaged in paperboard Tetra Paks, a process that produces about a fifth of the greenhouse emissions used to make and move glass bottles.
Eco-friendliness aside, at $12 a liter, it's the perfect fall picnic wine—soft and juicy with ripe plum and blueberry flavors and enough complexity to surprise the wine snobs. Just don't forget to recycle.
