Why a three-liter size instead of five? "The smaller size is a signal that it's different. Back then, it was an exclusive offering at Harris Teeter grocery stores and we wrote that it was "consistently disappointing." Others must have disagreed, however, because the Wine Group says the brand sold so well that the company decided to put it in a box and roll it out nationally. We first ran across FishEye, in regular bottles, as part of a tasting of the house brands of big chain stores last year. But with America's increasing interest in wine and more of a willingness among wine-drinkers to experiment - consider the rise of screwcaps, for instance - the people at the Wine Group clearly figured the time was right for something new, so they introduced FishEye in three-liter boxes with heavy promotion. The most common size of wine in a box is five liters - that's almost seven regular bottles of wine - and we'd guess the demographic those wines attract are our parents. Over the years, we've written positively about two boxed wines: Target's Australian Chardonnay Wine Cube (2005) and Carmenet Winery "Vintner's Collection" Cabernet Sauvignon (2002), which is no longer produced. People ask us all the time if we've found a boxed wine we like and the answer is that, even though we've conducted broad blind tastings and there's certainly nothing inherently wrong with a boxed wine, we've found the wine inside the boxes generally to be unpleasant. The big player in the field is the Wine Group, based in San Francisco, which is the world's third-biggest wine company by volume because of its ubiquitous Franzia boxed wines.
Australians, for instance, drink about half their domestic wine from boxes, according to Australian statistics. Boxed wines have been around for some time now and are far more common in some countries than the U.S.
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