Bota Box Pinot Grigio Honest Review: I Tried Every Boxed Wine So You Don’t Have To

My honest review of Bota Box Pinot Grigio.

This series of posts is designed to help you choose the right boxed wine for you. No one would ever pay me for my opinions, so you can rest assured my reviews are 100% unbiased ?

Overall value of the wine is primarily graded by taste and the number of ice cubes needed to make it drinkable. Wines are rated on a grading scale of F to A+, because wine rating systems are arbitrary and I like letters more than numbers.

So join me as I suffer through three liters of every Black Box, Bota, Barefoot, and whatever else I find on the shelves of Harris Teeter.

Bota Box Pinot Grigio Honest Review

Price Range

$16-$19

Origin

All Bota Box wines are produced at Delicato Family Wines’ Certified Sustainable California winery. So at least they have that going for them.

Packaging

By far the most difficult boxed wine brand to open and pour without half the wine spraying down the side of the box. The spout just doesn’t protrude far enough, so you have to do some elaborate thumb yoga if you don’t want to spill it all over the everything.

Visually, it’s fine. Nothing special. It’s recyclable and BPA free, so points for that if the earth is something you care about.

Tastes Like

Full disclosure: I’m picky about Pinot Grigio, so this was probably destined to go poorly from the get go. If you’re one of those people who love Pinot Grigio and happily drink $7 dollar bottles of it daily, then you would probably be a-okay with this wine.

I, however, am not one of those people, so I found almost zero redeeming qualities in this wine. It has literally no acidity, which makes the slight sweetness pretty unbearable. Taking big sips of it leads to instant regret, but I also wanted to make it go away as quickly as possible. The entire experience was filled with existential dread.

In more straightforward terms, it tastes flat (I would say it’s one dimensional, but that’s an insult to lines) and unforgivingly pineapple-y with an aroma of an orange that has past its prime.

# Of Ice Cubes Needed

Sadly, not even ice helps much with this one — it just adds to the flatness and lack of acidity. If you have some bitters lying around though, the combination of two ice cubes and a drop of Angostura made this 10x more drinkable.

Food Pairings

Something salty or scalding hot enough to make your mouth mistake the wine for water.

Overall Value: C-

I’m only giving this a C because I think people who drink low-tier Pinot Grigio on the reg would find it mostly inoffensive. I’ve also suffered through Barefoot’s On Tap Rosé, which sets the boxed wine bar so low that even fermented swamp water could get a passing grade.

In short: if you like cheap Pinot Grigio, give it a shot and let me know if I’m being unfair. If you don’t like cheap Pinot Grigio, blindly believe what I’m telling you and save your money for greener pastures.

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Read Also:

• Black Box Sauvignon Blanc Honest Review
• Provisions Pinot Gris Honest Review
• Black Box Cabernet Sauvignon Honest Review