Wine in a box gets serious.(Up front: news trends advice)(Buyers Guide)

Time was, if you served boxed wine at a party, you got a bad reputation, while your guests probably got bad wine. Today wines sold in a box are increasingly going "premium": They bear a vintage year and are made by producers associated with reputable, moderately priced bottled wine.

Our tests of 10 boxed wines--or cask wines, as the wine industry hopes you'll call them--revealed that you can get a decent glass of wine from a box, and for much less than comparable wine from a bottle. The savings are even greater if you often don't finish a full bottle. That's because boxed wine keeps for up to a month after it's opened; wine in a bottle, sometimes just a few days. Also, boxed wine never suffers from being corked--acquiring a moldy or musty flavor that can come from an inferior cork.

The Banrock Station and Hardy's wines we tested are from Australia, where boxed wine has long been in the mainstream; the rest are from California, Prices for a 3-liter box (the equivalent of four bottles) ranged from $10 to $25. Judged in expert blind tastings, the wines lacked the complex blend of flavors that characterize better wines. But they were as good as many of the bottled chardonnays and merlots we've tested, and were neither overly simple nor unbalanced.

The wines lived up to their claims about freshness weeks after being opened. However, wine ages less gracefully in an unopened box than in an unopened bottle, and boxes should be consumed within six months to a year of ...