Originally Posted by
Robert Leach
Hard to believe how much the wine service/quality/offering has fallen since the 90's. Still remember to this day a 1969 Barolo in International F to/from Europe in the 1993-94 time frame. Or the Inniskillin Ice Wine with dessert. (A wine that I buy to this day because I was introduced to it on Delta).
And as the poster above mentioned, for LAX-SYD in particular, it is not that hard to find very good Aussie wines that are not crazy expensive or limited in quantity.
Really sad.
Agreed. Even if you stick with basic wines in general, one can easily find a pretty solid, large-scale production wine from Bordeaux, Chianti Classico, Australia, etc. for under $20 at countless retailers. If they don't want to pour everyone in the premium cabin a glass of Champagne as a PDB, you could get many respectable cavas, cremants (Alsace, Loire, etc.), or better Italian sparkling wines that would be more enjoyable than Mionetto. The fact that they greet you with a frizzante that has a screwtop is a bad sign (no beef with screwtop wines in general, but you can't have a screwtop and approach traditional methods for sparkling winemaking).
Anything that's available at every major wine retailer in the country at all times is almost certainly a large enough production to be viable for an airline, and plenty of those wines would be a giant step up from what is on board today. Nobody is expecting Sassicaia on their Delta flight, but something appreciably better than Yellowtail would be great.