Time was, when we wanted to take some wine along for a more festive backpacking or cross-country ski trip, we’d fill up the old bota bag, eliminating the heavy bottle and even the need for cups.
You just removed the cap on the spigot and passed it around, happily squirting streams of wine into your mouth, on your face, in your eyes — it all depended on your hand-eye coordination.
The lining on our bag long ago hardened and cracked. It probably was some kind of unspeakable plastic that would leave health experts aghast these days. We never got another one.
You can still get botas, albeit with better liners, and even with neoprene shells, as well as the traditional leather.
But another way to haul wine around the backcountry is the PlatyPreserve bottle, made by Cascade Designs in Seattle. The company also makes Platypus water containers. Both are made of tough BPA-free plastic, and both can be flattened and folded when empty to tuck away in the recesses of your pack.
The PlatyPreserve system claims to keep your wine from oxidizing too much, because you can squeeze air out as the wine level goes down, and the tight cap keeps it sealed.
As to the other enemies of wine, light and temperature, it’s dark in your pack, but probably not so cool. On the other hand, I’ve never known a jug of wine to last long enough on a camping trip to warrant too much fussiness about those details.
In the interest of research, I filled a PlatyPreserve bottle with a $9 red wine (You thought I was going to risk an expensive bottle?) on a Saturday afternoon and stuffed it in my pack. On Sunday we took off on a day trip, sampling the wine about 2 that afternoon with lunch.
It was a decent wine that I was familiar with, and nothing awful had happened to it. No plastic taint, at any rate. I squeezed as much air out as I could and resealed it.
As we unpacked at home, I noted that in spite of all the bouncing and sloshing, the seal seemed to have held and nothing had leaked — always a plus with backpacking liquid containers, especially containing red wine.
A sample of the wine a day later showed some loss of flavor, I thought, but the wine was still quite drinkable.
Pressing onward in the name of science, I tried putting wine in the regular Platy water bottle, made with the same plastic, just clear, with a cap I don’t believe is as airtight as the PlatyPreserve bottle, although you can squeeze air out and close it with some success. Still, the wine fared just fine over a two-day test, and the bottle didn’t leak in the pack.
So, if you’re not planning to keep the wine around more than a couple of days (who does that?) either bottle would work as well, I think.
The bottom line is this: Right now, I could only find the PlatyPreserve bottles (1 liter) online for $12.95 each. The kicker is that shipping is about $7. REI sells only the four-pack online for $44.95, but you can avoid shipping cost by picking them up when they arrive at the store.
The Platy water bottle (1 liter) sells for $7.95 off the shelf at REI.
You can find a complete list of sources at cascadedesigns.com.
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