Over the past few months, I've noticed a number of new boxed wines cropping in the booze section of the grocery store. Whenever I see them, my mind floods with memories of stealing glasses of Franzia wine from my parents' tap back when I was in high school. (Needless to say, even back then, I could tell they were crap.)

But the new boxed wines, at least in their hype, suggest that they are an improvement over the swill imbibes of old. A sucker for anything new-fangled, I picked up a box of Hardys Shiraz earlier this week. It was $13 off, so I figured that even if it was completely undrinkable, at least I would have also killed my curiosity about the marriage between good wine and boxes.

The verdict? Awful. Absolutely undrinkable. Almost as bad as I remember, which just goes to show that putting lipstick on a pig and saying it's from Australia doesn't make it any more appealing.