Wine casks losing popularity

ARE  the wine cask’s glory days over? Fewer Tasmanians are drinking from casks.

Cask wine now in favour

ARE  the wine cask’s glory days over? Fewer Tasmanians are drinking from casks, in line with national trends.

And overall, fewer Australians are drinking wines.

Roy Morgan research ­inspired by the 50th anniver­sary of the Australian invention shows 17 per cent of Tasmanian wine-drinkers partook of cask wine in an average four weeks in the year to March, or half the 35 per cent in 2007.

The proportion of Tasman­ian adults who drank any sort of wine was 42 per cent, down from 48 per cent in 2007.

Nationally 45 per cent drank some kind of wine, down from 50 per cent.

Wine drinkers from South Australia were slightly more likely to drink their vino from a box, at 18 per cent, befitting the home of the invention.

The national average was 16 per cent.

Those least likely to drink chateau de cardboard were Victorians, at only 14 per cent.

Men were slightly more likely to drink cask than women, at 18 to 14 per cent.

“Since winemaker Thomas Angove invented cask wine packaging in 1965, the plastic bladder in a cardboard box has become a worldwide phenomenon,” Roy Morgan consumer products general manager ­Andrew Price said.

“However, it seems cask wine’s glory days could be over.

“Whether this trend is simply a symptom of the more widespread decrease in wine-drinking, or the result of competition from a myriad of cheap bottled wines now available is hard to know.”

The higher the socio-­economic level, the lower the ­affection for cask.

For example, 26 per cent of wine-drinkers from the cash-strapped FG socio-economic quintile and 24 per cent of those from the budget-bound E quintile opted for cask wine, compared with only 8 per cent from the most affluent AB quintile.

People over 65 and those aged 18 to 24 were more likely to drink cask wine, attributed to affordability.