Since many of the best boxed wines are also available in bottles (at about twice the price), a Real Simple tasting panel conducted a blind test of six such wines (the 2002 Delicato Chardonnay; the 2002 Hardys Chardonnay; the 2002 Banrock Station Cabernet; the 2002 Delicato Merlot; the 2002 Hardys Cabernet Sauvignon; and the 2002 Banrock Station Shiraz), bottle versus box. Panelists were given two glasses — one filled with the boxed wine, the other filled with the same wine from a bottle — and asked to guess which was which.

The result? Two panelists chose correctly on all, one chose wrongly on all, and the other five — the one trained sommelier among them — were each right half the time, without any consistent pattern. In other words, if you're worried about the quality suffering because of the packaging, don't. No one's going to have a sip of boxed wine and say, "This has overtones of cardboard." As one panelist remarked about a box-to-bottle comparison of the 2002 Hardys Cabernet Sauvignon from Australia: "I can say that these are different, but I can't say which one is better."