Australia's Hardy Wine Company, instrumental in popularizing boxed wine, is test marketing a concept aimed at making wine even more accessible to the masses - single-serve plastic bottles sealed with a cap that doubles as a drinking cup.

When the containers, called "the Shuttle," were tried out during performances of Cirque de Soleil as it toured Australia, wine sales jumped 160 percent over the troupe's previous tour, reports The West Australian.

The invention sounds great for wine sales, but for wine appreciation? Only if you cling to the belief that wine is best savored and deliberated during a dinner that doesn't involve clowns.

Half the globe away, meanwhile, the United Kingdom supermarket chain Sainsbury's has come up with its own clever scheme to enhance the appeal of wine, at least to mice. Prompted by a recent Harvard Medical School study that found that the polyphenol resveratrol in red wine helped obese middle-aged male mice live better and longer, Sainsbury's is introducing a red wine with 32 percent more resveratrol than commonly found in red wines, reports Beverage Daily. A blend of caberent sauvignon and petit verdot, the wine is named "Red Heart." Given humans' perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, the wine likely will sell well, although even a nearly one-third increase in resveratrol in wine still adds up to a very small fraction of the doses given the mice in the study. Resveratrol in wine typically can range from .2 milligrams per litre to 5.8 milligrams per litre.