(Wine-Searcher) - W. Blake Gray throws caution to the wind and taste-tests more than 20 wines that came out of a box.

Wine in a box was one of the great ideas of the 20th century, but it has taken into the 21st century – at least – to be fully appreciated.

Decades after the first boxes of wine appeared 50 years ago, they were still seen as irredeemably cheap by many snooty Americans, who didn't grow up with wine on the dinner table and thus didn't see it as a daily staple. A book co-written by New York Times columnist Gail Collins included wine in a box as one of the worst ideas of the millennium, along with flagellants, foot binding, trench warfare and French mime.

Unlike foot binding and French mime, wine in a box has finally found a US audience. The category has doubled its share of the US market since 2009, according to Nielsen, and now represents 17.5 percent of all US wine by volume.

"Our main business is boxes," says Gerald Stinner of New York-based Maison Cubi, which imports quality 3-liter boxes from France. "Month after month, every year it's growing, and faster in the higher price range."

The big change is that an increasing number of consumers aren't confusing the medium with the message. A box with a deflatable plastic bladder inside is a terrific vessel for wine intended to be drunk right away. When opened, the wine lasts much longer than in a bottle – up to a month (a theory I tested and proved true.) It's much lighter in weight than glass and thus better for the environment. It's not a vessel for aging wine; the bladder is more permeable than glass. But for wine intended to be drunk right away – as most wines are – there's no reason box wine can't be good. And increasingly they are.

"I'm very impressed at the quality of wine we can get," Stinner says. "I don't remember having French wine (in bottles) at these prices at that quality."

There have been some drunken missteps on the 50-year path to a world of quality wine boxes. The American public, many of whom still think a screwcap isn't ceremonious enough, is quick to confuse quality wine in 3-liter boxes with joke items like disposable wine purses. One environmentally minded company issued a wine two years ago in a bottle made of corrugated paper, but the wine was so terrible it probably set the concept back a decade.

While the line between US and "Old World" style wines in bottles may have blurred; there still a major divide when it comes to box wines.

I reviewed more than two dozen box wines (see my recommendations below) and it would have been easy to pick out the American brands in a blind tasting. With one exception, US-made box wines are sweeter and fruitier than box wines imported from Europe.

The exception to this US-Europe divide is a big one. Gallo, the world's largest winery, enters the 3-liter premium box-wine competition this month with its new Vin Vault brand. What struck me, other than their quality, was that neither Vin Vault Pinot Noir nor Chardonnay follows the typical US-brand box-wine style: they're not sweet nor fruit driven.