‘Like it’s been rinsed through a bag of boiled sweets’... it’s our canned red wine taste test
Vin in a can, vin in a tin, call it what you will, canned wine is creeping into our lives. Waitrose moved all wines permitted to be sold in small bottles out of glass and into cans to reduce its carbon footprint in 2023 and the supermarket says its sales of canned wines were up 36 per cent in 2024, no doubt partly as a result of this shift. Meanwhile canned wine, once pitched as the perfect package for summer festivals and train journeys, is also moving upmarket. Canned wines from the Canned Wine Co were served at the UK Theatre Awards last year; British Airways has canned wine on its in-flight menu and the chef Tommy Banks lists his own canned wines on the menu of his Michelin-starred restaurant, Roots, in York.
But what do customers think of wine in cans? Reactions still seem to be, shall we say, mixed. I’ve given my only five-star rating to a red wine from southern Italy sold by Waitrose and that’s a lot more generous than the average 3.5 stars it gets from the 11 customers who’ve reviewed it on the Waitrose website. I took a look at these and found that only one person had disliked the wine but quite a few were aggrieved about the can. Of course one issue with cans – as some of those reviewers point out – is that, unlike a bottle, they can’t be resealed. Many cans come in the 250ml size which is quite generous if you’re not sharing it and only want one glass.
A number of the cans I received for review had also been in the can for some time, in a few cases coming up for three years, which suggests canned wines have not been quite as popular as some of those selling them hoped they might be. Given the newness of the format, I don’t yet have enough tasting experience to properly understand how well wines might keep in cans. But the wines I tasted that had been hanging around a bit were mostly wines I have tried before and they did feel to have lost freshness and vitality without gaining anything to compensate for that.
Finally, canned whites and rosés are more abundant than canned reds. But shout-out to the excellent Brixton Wine Club which specialises in canned wines and has a wide and interesting selection as well as a website that makes it easy to order.
