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Pour a good red wine from a plastic-lined box with a tube for a dispenser and many people would say a cozy evening in front of the fireplace has been ruined. Even worse is the notion of popping open a can to let the sparkling wine flow.

For many wine drinkers this might border on sacrilege. Wine should be poured from a bottle. Period. This is why alternative packaging has had a hard time breaking through. The reason for the scepticism is more psychological than scientific. In a plastic container or a can, wine is well protected from light and oxygen, the most important criteria for a long shelf life. However, this packaging remains only a niche in the wine-drinking country of Germany.

Ernst Buescher, from the German Wine Institute, considers plastic-lined boxes for wine, which have a tube spout inserted on the side down low so the wine flows easily, advantageous on some occasions.

“If I want to just have a small glass of wine in the evening, the rest of the wine left in the box remains well protected from air,” he said. “Viewed purely on a technical level, it is not bad packaging.”

But the spout has an “image problem” in Germany, he said, which has limited the packaging to cheaper wines. Buescher added, however, that more and more wines packaged that way were coming onto the market.

The Berlin Internet wine dealer hauswein.de offers three liters of high-quality wine packaged in boxes. Markus Hayn, chief executive of the company, said the wines easily fetched up to $20 per liter.

German wine producers, especially the well-known vintners of the Rhineland or the Pfalz, hold the key to the box packaging becoming accepted in the country, he said.

“The reservations people have about the box are principally declining. The packaging often has a trashy image, but it needn’t be that way,” Hayn said.

If the quality is there, then sceptics can be won over, he said. In the struggle to improve boxed wine’s cheap image, hauswein.de has come up with a stylish design for its boxes.

Buescher is more critical of wine packaged in a can. “A lot of what makes up the wine is lost when it’s consumed [from a can], especially the aroma, which is just as important as the taste.”

Nevertheless, companies repeatedly have tried bringing canned wine onto the market. The most successful thus far is the canned Prosecco Rich, made by an Austrian company. Its success, however, certainly owes a lot to an advertising campaign featuring hotel heiress Paris Hilton.

It’s no wonder conservative wine drinkers wrinkle their noses at the pop-top drink. They are not, however, the intended buyers.

“The producers want to tap into a younger targeted group,” said Sylvia Bloemker, spokeswoman for Ball Packaging Europe. The company supplies the cans for the Prosecco and has two operations in Rhineland-Pfalz.

“We still see growth potential in the market. It will, however, remain a fine and small niche market,” Bloemker said.

In her opinion, cans are the best packaging for many drinks because the material is impenetrable, keeping out both light and air.

About five years ago, Markus Geyer of the Pfalz area and some colleagues came up with a canned wine product they called WOI, which stood for wine on ice. It was a mixture of wine, soda and lime. The word “woi” in the local dialect means wine.

Several years of work went into product development and there were some pitfalls along the way. One prototype burst in the office vault where it had been hidden for security. Something went wrong when it was being filled and the yeast continued fermenting in the can.

WOI was introduced to the public in 2005 at a trade show for the beverage industry in Nuremberg. It disappeared from the market in the ensuing years.

A half-dry Liebfrauenmilch from Rhine-Hessen is used in another product called Elsa, which came onto the market in September and is currently sold only in Russia. Its targeted consumer group is primarily young, trend-conscious women between 25 and 35 years old, according to Rexam Beverage Can, the Berlin company that makes the can.

Rexam says it makes 40 million cans for wine and Prosecco annually. In the Netherlands, this includes the canned wine Wild Pelican, and in the British market a French sauvignon blanc and an Italian pinot grigio are available in a product called cancan. DPA