A Glass Act – Black Box Sauvignon Blanc

The Johnnies defeated Augsburg 63–0 last weekend, a score that raises questions less about football and more about whether someone should have intervened at halftime on humanitarian grounds. The alumni have dispersed. What remains is the need for a wine that does not demand you finish an entire bottle in one sitting out of obligation, guilt or the creeping anxiety of oxidation.

Black Box Sauvignon Blanc. Marlborough, New Zealand. Three liters—fourteen dollars if you time your purchase during a promotional period at Coborn’s Liquor, eighteen otherwise. Thirteen percent alcohol by volume. Four bottles’ worth, depending on your generosity when pouring, dispensed via what the professionals in the wine world call a spigot. This mechanism, unlike the tedious child-safety lock masquerading as a corkscrew, keeps the wine fresh for weeks even without refrigeration—a technological achievement the French refuse to acknowledge exists.

Look: Pale straw, clear, unremarkable. This is wine. It looks like wine. If this level of visual drama disappoints you, the problem is not the wine.

Nose: Grapefruit, lime, cut grass—the standard Marlborough credentials presented without apology or elaboration. A faint tropical note suggests passionfruit, though it could just as easily be the label designer’s wishful thinking. Clean and bright. Mercifully free of the wet hay some winemakers call “earthy” when they mean “we stored this next to a horse barn.”

Taste: Green apple, white grapefruit, acidity that could strip paint or wake the dead, whichever comes first. Light-bodied, crisp, the kind of refreshing that doesn’t demand you pretend to taste notes that aren’t there.

Finish: Leaves promptly and without fuss, like a houseguest who understands social cues—a skill we’re still developing but deeply admire in our wines.

Serve it right: Freezer-cold. Thirty minutes, minimum. Serving this at room temperature constitutes an act of open hostility—against the wine, against yourself, against the entire concept of refrigeration, which humanity spent centuries perfecting, and you are now casually dismantling through negligence or spite. When properly chilled, this Sauvignon Blanc inspires the spirit of Don Quixote—nobility, honor and the impossible dream. Served warm, it reveals its true nature: plastic undertones and existential despair. One begins to wonder if this is, in fact, Boone’s Farm wearing a
disguise.

Pairings: Dinner with companions who understand that cost and quality need not be synonymous. Evenings when water feels insufficient but opening a bottle feels unjustifiable, particularly when you have an eight a.m. class and poor impulse control. Study sessions that abandoned their stated objectives an hour prior but persist due to momentum, social obligation, or the shared delusion that productivity might still occur.

Verdict: The finest boxed wine we have encountered, and we have conducted enough cardboard-based research to have developed both informed preferences and a mild existential crisis about our sample size. Worth keeping in regular rotation. Worth recommending without asterisks or apologies. A wine that earns respect not through spectacle but through the steady competence of delivering exactly what it promises—a standard most institutions, bottled or otherwise, fail to meet.

Rating: 8.5/10. Far too good for most pregames, though we suspect it will end up there anyway.

If our unironic enthusiasm for three liters of spigot-dispensed Sauvignon Blanc strikes you as inconsistent with the authority we claimed to possess, we can only offer this: we contain multitudes, and most of them need a drink. Dignity, it turns out, is less about the vessel than about what resides within it—a lesson we are still learning, one box at a time.

— Gabe Evenocheck & Ben
Bugbee

Council on Undergraduate Wine
Affairs

(This column is intended
exclusively for readers 21 years of
age or older. Legal counsel has been
consulted and remains nervous.)