Angove's 1965 bag-in-box kept cask wine fresh and changed how Australia drank

In the 1960s cheap Australian wine came in half-gallon flagons that let air in, broke in transit and were awkward to pour. Riverland winemaker Tom Angove wanted an alternative and revived an old idea: put the wine in a flexible bag and support the bag with a box.

Angove patented the improved container and pack for liquids in April 1965. The key mechanism is airless flow: as wine pours out, the bag collapses, so no air enters to oxidize what remains. The cask that resulted stayed fresh far longer than a half-opened bottle.

The bag-and-tap system that William Scholle invented in 1955 for industrial liquids supplied the engineering, and SIG's history records the first commercially viable bag-in-box wine system in Australia. By 2015, fifty years on, one in every three glasses of wine drunk in Australia came from a cask.

Let the bag collapse; no air ever replaces the wine

Airless flow keeps opened wine fresh for weeks instead of days.

Cardboard and film weigh a fraction of glass, cutting shipping costs.

No breakage and easy carrying opened new places to sell wine.

Bulk economics let wineries sell decent wine at a lower price.

The elegant fix is often in the container, not the contents: change how the product is held and shipping weight, waste, breakage and shelf life all improve at once.

The cask became a global category and SIG grew bag-in-box into industrial, dairy and beverage lines; premium wineries later upgraded casks with better films and taps, though bottles returned for fine wine.