I Drank (Nearly) All the Boxed Wine in the World. These Are the Best Kinds.

In college, I used to keep a box of wine in my fridge—Franzia, Chillable Red. The box of the people, I would say. My peers at that small liberal arts school knew they could stop in and find me, at any given moment, sipping on my second or third Mason jar full of the stuff. Because it was in a box, they also knew there was always a glass waiting on them, should they so choose to rap on my door. Outside of my five-year stint as a chain smoker (in the literal sense, not the music sense), I have struggled to find something more unifying than sharing a box of wine. So I've carried boxed wine with me, quite literally, into my thirties.

The difference, however, is that at a certain point, most of us start drinking wine out of actual wine glasses... well, at least, most of the time. Our taste evolves beyond the indistinct red blend nestled in the fridge. We no longer slap the bag. We show growth. Fortunately enough, the boxed wine game has evolved, too.

The notion of boxed wine may conjure up a certain cultural aesthetic, something that fancier folk might call tacky. The snobs may turn their nose up at the sight of a white box showing a heavy pour sloshing in a glass. But I genuinely wanted to see what the field beyond Franzia looked like these days. To do so, I tested far too much boxed wine, and now I find myself using words like "tannins" and "body" and "nice ass cardboard."

Because I am who I am, this list predominantly focuses on reds. For those who may be looking for a white, fear not: Many of these brands also have especially good whites. To get you started, House Wine's Chardonnay and the Naked Grape's Pinot Grigio are excellent bets. And there's a rosé that snuck in below, for good measure. With that, this is my assessment of the best boxed wines out there right now.