The strange allure of wine tinnies

Sep 27, 2023

Zoe Strimpel

Some years ago, on a trip up America's Pacific Northwest, I spent a night in Portland in a hotel that was depressing in the way that not-quite-posh, not-quite-cool hotels can be. As part of its attempt to inject a sense of pizzazz into my cavernous room, there was a welcome pack whose starring feature was a can of Pinot Noir – the size and shape of a Diet Coke can, with a joke on the side about this being ‘soccer mom’ wine. The reference to hassled housewives ferrying their progeny about to games, desperate for surreptitious booze, depressed me further and I added ‘wine in tins’ to the list of vulgar American inventions I’d forever resist.

While neither the eco side of them nor the promise of hipster high times in parks really worked on me, the fact is that they are novel and thus fun

Flash forward a decade and wine in tins has departed the domain of pissed suburban mums and entered the world of the hip, expensive and desirable. Of course, hipster marketing works by gobbling up the ugliest, most unappealing trends and spitting out something that even fairly trend-resistant people like me want to buy, so perhaps the rise of the posh wine in tins is no surprise.

All the same, I was somewhat sceptical – and surprised – on recently finding myself in a Dalston bar to celebrate the launch of Djuce, a Stockholm-based brand of posh ‘sustainable’ wines in tins. In the context in which I encountered them – among eco-reverent Scandi entrepreneurs and Gen-Z partyers – Djuce wines made perfect sense. The tins, as its handsome founder, the entrepreneur Philip Marthinse told me, are good for the environment because they save harmful glass bottle waste. Indeed, customers buying online are told that they are ‘wine-drinking heroes’, that in choosing 12 cans instead of four bottles, ‘you are saving 72 per cent of the Co2 emissions on the packaging. Delicious, responsible and eco-friendly’. The power of green marketing is astonishing: only one out of three of those adjectives relate to pleasure or taste.

But the lifestyle element is, I intuit, the real key. The cans all have cute designs, akin to the artistry on beer tins following the transformation in packaging brought about by the craft brew movement. It took Peckham and Brockley and Camden pale ales to make beer look gorgeous and thus appeal to sceptics like me. And it's taken northern European hipsters to make tinned wine (potentially) alluring.

I arrived at the party thinking ‘at the end of the day, it's wine in tins’ whether you’re in Dalston surrounded by red-lipsticked, bushy brow-sporting coolsters nibbling sashimi or not. But laid out artfully in buckets with ice, these tins of wine did seem different. For a start, they are shaped more like Red Bull cans than the squatter, overbearing aluminium receptacles for Diet Coke (and that grim Oregon pinot noir). At 250 ml, these are ‘the holy grail of wine packaging,’ as the Djuce marketing material confidently proclaims. They have a smooth, thickened layer on which are graphics depicting, among others, a naked couple entwined (the Austrian Pinot Blanc, Gruner Veltliner, Riesling mix), a thin woman in a bikini and vest with a giant cat helmet over her head (the Provencal rose), and a hipster couple kissing on the beach (Austrian fizz).

The wines on display came in four flavours – I mean varieties. There was white (the Riesling blend with the naked couple), red (an unspecified ‘juicy red’ from Austria), rose (a Croatian Syrah from a producer called Bibich) and bubbles (a somewhat bland mix of Grüner Veltliner, Riesling, and something called Muskat Ottonell). There are other options available to buy from Italy and France, but among those on show in Dalston, the Riesling and Croatian rose were my favourites. Both were clearly quite well-made, the rose almost sherry-like, though their promise of delicacy seemed a bit flattened out, or deadened, by their life spent in metal. At any rate, I got through several ice-cold cans, returning repeatedly to the refreshing Riesling. To me the red tasted watery, and reminiscent of the pinot for soccer moms, nor could I shake the sense that red wine ought to come in bottles whose labels bespeak the physical world of vats and barrels. And while cans of fizz could more easily work than the others, this, alas, was more like dull lemonade with bubbles and would fail to liven up the picnic.

That said, tinned wines certainly are portable, made for party coolers. They are also friendly to the single drinker. One doesn't always want to crack open a bottle and commit. But the downsides are considerable: Djuce wines are essentially mummified once sealed in metal and kept from air. So there's no pleasure or interest in unleashing a 2016 or a 2020; it’ll be as good as it was the moment it went in. Fresh, young, and essentially a bit dead.

Still, I took a few cans home from the party. And while neither the eco side of them nor the promise of hipster high times in parks really worked on me, the fact is that they are novel and thus fun. Yes, I admit it: fun. A young friend who came round, the sort who trades cryptocurrencies and thinks I am an out-of-touch oldie, and was instantly captivated when I offered him the Riesling with the cool naked pair having sex. He also drank down the fizz, while I stuck to low-alcohol beer, grateful to be able to be a good host without having to open a bottle. I’ve got a few more too, and my neighbours are keen to try them, so much so that a party idea has formed around their presence lurking in my fridge.

Djuce wines are not as good as good bottled wines. But if they are sterile-seeming, they’re also not bad; the Riesling and the Croatian rose are really elegant if slender in scope. But who cares? The point about Djuce wines is the packaging. Those cans are so fetching, so expertly marketed, that whether you like what's inside it or not, you won't be able to help having fun – or at least trying to.

Pack of six cans for £36. djuce.com.

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Zoe Strimpel

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