Two US companies, Nuvino and Spotwine, are marketing bagged wine as an innovation that takes the snobbery out of wine while preserving the quality, but the real sales pitch is convenience. Little wine pouches keep the flavour in but come in a small size and don’t require a corkscrew, the literature says.

My first thought is that these are just a variation on the South Australian ingenious invention of the bag-in-a-box. Love it or hate it, the world had room for it when it arrived on the scene in 1965.

Up side

There are some pluses. The ones that come to my mind are that you don’t have to worry about glass, the pouches are lightweight and the carbon footprint is reportedly far better than for a bottle. I’m taking them at their word for the last one, although I have some doubts. For a hen party, it looks fun. For a night home alone where I want some wine it makes sense because I’m not going to have to put a plug in a nice bottle and let it sit for a day or two.

The romantic hikers make it look appealing and you can take along small amounts of different wines, fun.

The size is good, at 18.7cl, a size where you don’t find a lot of decent wine. I was a little surprised to hear this called the equivalent of a glass, but then I’ve become European in my drinking habits.

If you’re used to topping the glass up to the brim, that’s a glass, and four of them make a standard 75cl bottle, not six to seven glasses.

You can chill them faster, and for the busy crowd the pouches are aiming to please, that’s probably a big plus. Nuvino says they keep for up to 18 months.

Also, you don’t have to worry about finishing the bottle.

Down side

Here come the wine snobs, or at least the wine-lovers who have strong feelings about things like wine having a nose and some complexity, not just flavours that pop out of a pouch unharmed. The pouches probably make economic sense with standardized products, so call the wines “premium” but for me that sounds like drinkable versus plonk.

It’s not really table wine, though, since it’s designed for people who are mostly too busy to sit down to eat.

And then there’s the bottle sharing – it’s nice to have some of the same wine and talk about it a bit. I like corks and corkscrews, as well as a glass that helps the wine ease out into the world.

Each Nuvino pouch is $4, making it $16 (about CHF15) for a bottle, pretty high-priced for the equivalent wine in a bottle I think, but since there is no information about who makes the wine, it’s hard to compare.

And what a shame, you don’t get to worry about finishing the bottle.

But there are times when none of those things make sense.

The second list is shorter than the first. Where does that leave us? With a wine for every occasion and every potential drinker, I’m thinking.