Canned Wine: The Great White Hype

It's the next big thing, the wine disruptor and the favorite beverage of the famously hard-to-please Millennial market, but is canned wine more style than substance?

Interest in canned wine is booming, and hardly a day goes by when some original thinker – either in print or online – pens another ode to the joys of wine in a can. As far as trends go, it is right on point – appealing to a notoriously hard to reach demographic through its convenience, cool packaging and all-round hipster vibe. As an editor, I get inundated with pitches from writers desperate to expose this incredible new development in the evolution of wine.

I normally tend to avoid such stories. I've never liked fads, whether they be critter wines, fruit-flavored whiskeys or sour beers (don't try to sell me your faulty ferments dressed up as a "new style" of beer), so it was interesting to actually look into the data behind canned wine and see if it was likely to become more than simply another passing craze.

Looking at the Nielsen data is instructive. According to the research giant, sales of canned wine enjoyed impressive growth in the US of 77.5 percent in the past 12 months, cornering around $80 million of the market. Impressive, that is, until you put it in context of the ready-to-drink alcohol market. While 77.5 is big, it is dwarfed by hard seltzers, which grew by 193 percent over the same period, and malt-based cocktails, which grew by 574 percent. And while $80 million isn't chump change, it amounts to 0.011 percent of the US's $70 billion wine market.

(Of course, canned wine is also a way for wineries to penetrate that elusive target market, the Millennial. The sheer number of stories appearing about how wineries need to crack this particular nut could lead many to think that the Boomers are no longer an issue and that poor, neglected Generation X is not worth the marketing effort. "Thanks for all your money over the past 25 years, folks, but we've found someone else who is younger and more attractive than you.")

So, it was interesting to come across some research into canned wine in my inbox. Ordinarily, my desk is metaphorically swamped by tsunamis of poorly typed sewage masquerading as "information", churned out by seemingly millions of unfoundedly enthusiastic marketing and PR drones; most of it is spurious bullshit. Imagine how happy I was to receive a report of actual research into what people think of canned wine.

The release was about the first blind taste test comparing the same wines from a bottle and a can, poured for a randomly selected group of 86 people, varying in age from 21 to 74 years. Sounds great, I thought. Until I read further.

The first issue I had was that the company offering this purportedly independent scientific study was called WIC Research. Now maybe that stands for "What I Call" Research, or "Wichita Ice Cream" Research, but I'm prepared to suggest that it stands for Wine in Can Research. Almost inevitably, it turns out that the company is a wine-in-a-can marketing research and consulting company. I began to catch a faint whiff of bovine waste.

That was allayed as I read through the methodology. Four wines were presented blind, each one poured from a bottle and a can. (For completists, the wines were all from New York: Coyote Moon Chardonnay, Villa Bellangelo Dry Riesling, Bridge Lane Rosé, and Coyote Moon Moscato.) Interestingly, no reds were involved and the agricultural aroma thickened.

Half of the tasters had never tried wine in a can before and more than half (57 percent) self-identified as having higher subjective wine knowledge than their peers (but of course they did).

While the full results are being prepared for a "journal article", the preliminary findings were fascinating. Participants were given three options: I prefer wine A, wine B or no difference. And the results? Well, you would hardly imagine it, but the overall conclusion comes down solidly in favor of canned wine. In fact, it starts by saying that tasters expressed no strong preferences between canned and bottled wine (and, in fairness to the wines involved, they are made to be simple, uncomplicated wines for immediate consumption, so you wouldn't expect any other result).

However, by looking at it wine by wine, a different story emerges. The Chardonnay was preferred in bottle form by 48.8 percent of tasters, compared to 45.3 percent and 5.8 percent no difference. For the Riesling, those figures were 42.9 percent, 31 percent and 26.2 percent. For Moscato they were 47.7 percent, 46.5 percent and 5.8 percent. Only for the rosé was there a clear preference for the canned wine (37.2 percent to 31.4 percent, with 31.1 percent undecided).

The overall scores had 48.5 percent opting for bottled wine, 45.3 percent for canned and 5.8 percent no difference. This last figure was then arbitrarily added to the "preferred cans" score to give canned wine a narrow victory of 51.1 percent to 48.5 percent, and that is how to massage figures into giving you the result you want, so caveat lector; be careful what you read.

So, disappointingly, we still await proof that canned wine is anything more than a passing fancy. Hype or hip, that is the question. Now if only we had a straight answer.