Meet the wine sellers thinking inside the box

The partners behind new brand Hey Tomorrow are out to prove good wine in environmentally friendly casks is the way of the future.

About five years ago, Sacha Imrie was working in an upmarket bottle shop and studying for the Wine and Spirit Education Trust diploma when she developed a surprising interest in cask wines.

“I was given a WSET brief to look at all the different packaging options for wine,” says Imrie. “And what could have been a very boring essay turned out to not be very boring at all, because I became really interested in the environmental benefits of bag-in-box wines.”

She learnt that packaging wine in cask leaves a much smaller carbon footprint than putting the same wine in glass bottles. And she realised that moving more wine into cask was one way her industry could perhaps contribute to slowing the climate crisis.

“Most of the things I read on this topic, like the wine climate atlas, are winemakers asking, ‘How are we going to deal with climate change in the future? Where are we going to plant? Where are we going to get our water from?’ There’s not much about how we can reduce emissions to try to stop it happening.”

But she had trouble rustling up the same excitement she felt about bag-in-box among her colleagues or customers – partly because of prejudice based on memories of dodgy goon-bags, or the fact most cask wines just didn’t taste very good.

“And when the quality isn’t there, it becomes a barrier for people to try cask,” says Imrie. “Even though the problem isn’t with the bag-in-box itself.”

Fast-forward to mid-pandemic last year.

Imrie and her partner Shane Barrett – both now working with Tigerbird International, the group behind Melbourne restaurants including Bomba and Daughter in Law, and wine merchant Samuel Pepys – were locked down at home, and Imrie was expecting a baby.

After having to tip yet another bottle of nearly full wine down the sink because she was drinking only a half glass now and then, the couple realised that if they were able to get the same wine in cask, it wouldn’t go to waste: the whole point of bag-in-box technology is that, because the liquid inside is not exposed to air after the first pour, the wine stays drinkable for weeks on end.

“We realised casks could be a powerful tool to help people drink less,” says Barrett. “It’s not an obvious association. But people are drinking less these days – and at the same time they want to drink higher quality.”

This insight, fuelled by an increasing sense of environmental dread (itself fuelled by the pandemic), motivated the couple to start working on their own range of cask wines.

Importantly, they knew the packaging had to be carefully designed: as Imrie points out, one of the reasons upmarket cask wine hasn’t taken off is that people just don’t want to turn up to a friend’s house with a big ugly box, no matter what’s inside it.

“Also, look at the semiotics of what a wine bottle represents,” she says. “What it signifies is really important: looking at it, straight away people know what to expect of the wine inside. That’s why we have used different colours on our boxes: so people know what style of wine each one is.”

Crucially, says Barrett, the contents of these new casks needed to be really good wine, sourced from really good winemakers.

“I worked at Chin Chin when it opened,” he says. “We had Tom Carson from Yabby Lake winery do wine on tap for us. I saw how you could change perceptions by using a well-known brand to create customer confidence. That’s the core of our cask idea: we’re trying to use the brand or names of the wineries to instil confidence in the consumer.”

The other partners in Tigerbird – Kelly O’Loghlen, Andrew Fisk and Jesse Gerner – came on board, and the group has just launched a new two-litre cask brand, Hey Tomorrow, initially featuring five wines from leading winemakers around Victoria, with wines from other states to come later.