Originally Posted by
fin 645
https://www.goodfood.com.au/drinks/w...0180815-h140r5
Two theories - one is obvious (drier air affecting your smell and hence taste) but the other theory gets back to an old theory about how a wine "travels".
"We give the wine samples a good eight to nine hours on a plane, and then we can assess how they've stood up to the trip."
I am not sure how sound that theory is, but it raises the question of how AC samples its wines - with or without being flight tested.
I am sure the story is true. However sitting for eight hours on a plane is not going to make a bad wine any better.
Coming back to AC's wine, however, my impression is that they have improved somewhat. May be because the current sommelier favors the stly we like more than the previous guy, who was Australian-trained and surely preferred young heavy fruity wines. That is given that cheap heavy fruity wines are invariably poor, given that the technique to obtain that result on the cheap is just to delay picking up the grapes so sugar and fruit increase, at the cost of off flavors also increasing.
But it may also be the case that her budget has gone up a bit. Anyway, on domestic routes they currently have an Australian cabernet sauvignon that's OK. Even though admittedly I am not a great fan of low end Australian stuff. (As they say, Australian wine businesses, which are in the hands of very few large outfits, have good chemists... And they know how to price things.)
Likewise the Tuscan red served on overseas routes is reasonably OK.
Still they have better stuff in the EVA lounge at TPE.
