An article from the Aust Financial Review.
Personally , I know that most food tastes pretty bland at altitude so it MUST effect my perception of the wine and champagne .

Thks Elizabeth for passsing it on.

HIGH DRINKING: Tastes all up in the air Author: Tim White
Date: 21/09/2002
Publication: Australian Financial Review Section: After Hours
Page69 Low humidity and air pressure combine to make wines taste different in the air than they do at ground level. A few years back I was involved in the blending of the 1997 Eileen Hardy
Shiraz at Hardys Tintara winery in McLaren Vale. Some very odd things happened while Hardys' group red winemaker Steve Pannell, Rockford's Chris Ringland and myself fiddled around with varying percentiles of Padthaway and McLaren Vale shiraz while putting the wine together.
The Padthaway component was strongly minty in character, in the manner of much red wine from this South Australian region, while the McLaren Vale wine was spicier, richer, more luscious. As you might expect the minty menthol component of the Padthaway gear had to be handled very carefully so that it contributed to, but didn't dominate, the aroma of the final blend.
We eventually, and independently, agreed upon a 12 per cent Padthaway 88 per cent McLaren Vale blend, but along the way observed, and this was the strange thing, that the more Padthaway material was added to the mix the less the minty character was apparent. I asked Steve Pannell why this
might be so and his response was: ``I can't explain why it happens: it just does." Whatever happened, it clearly worked: the wine has just picked up the Best Syrah/Shiraz Trophy at the International Wine Challenge in London. Wine certainly is weird stuff and sometimes it just doesn't behave itself. This is especially so on board aircrafts where low humidity and low air pressure conspire to make wines taste quite different to how they appear on the ground.
While there's understandably loads of literature on the health effects of flying and the problems associated with,dehydration and other issues affecting the short and long haul traveller, there's not much out there on the aircraft cabin environment's effect on diminished sensory acuity or,
indeed, as to how the volatile compounds found in wine and food are affected by humidity and pressure. Anyhow in the absence of any hard data, I'll just have to, ahem, wing it. This issue might appear inconsequential, but think about it. We smell and taste better in more humid environments: at any time of the year there can be a difference in relative humidity between Sydney and Adelaide (for example) of easily 50 per cent; the same wine tasted in both cities would smell quite different.
But this is nothing as extreme as the sensory shock we encounter on planes. At cruising altitude the air pressure in the cabin decreases
substantially for most sea level, or thereabouts, dwellers. The World Health Organisation puts cabin pressure of aircraft at the equivalent to
an altitude of 1,500-2,500 metres. So the air is thinner and the gases in our bodies expand unless you're a resident of Mexico City, who'd feel quite at home. Then there's the humidity which is so low, less than 20 per cent, usually
in the range of 8-15 per cent, that unless you drink double or triple the water intake you normally do, you'll dry out. Have you ever drunk orange juice after a few hours sleep on a long-haul flight? I guarantee you'll almost be unable to smell it when you wake because your olfactory mucosa has almost dried out; while in the mouth your tongue will feel like it's sucking up the juice with a sponge. That's how dehydrated you can get.
Little wonder then that food and wine always tastes less than exciting on the plane no matter where you fly.
Which makes me wonder why any airline selects low fruit impact, highly phenolic (grippy/firm) wines, such as big, chewy reds and barrel-fermented
whites, for consumption in the sky. On two business class return flights recently on Qantas this is exactly
the style of wines they were serving. On one trip (to Perth) it was Lindemans Winemakers Reserve Chardonnay from Padthaway, a wine which smells and tastes nutty and restrained on the ground a modern, understated premium Aussie chardonnay in fact but was only spiky and oaky at the
pointy end of the plane. The red poured was a 1999 Saddlers Creek Equus shiraz which was so charry
and smoky that I was amazed that there wasn't panic down the back from passengers thinking there was a fire on board. The first bottle of this
wine was actually recalled by the senior cabin officer attending to business class in the belief it was corked. It wasn't though, I can assure you, and the second bottle also smelt like last summer's bushfires. While this wine is still oaky tasting on the ground its fruit impact was
diminished as a result of low humidity and low air pressure combining to affect the way the wine opened up (how the aroma and flavour compounds
volatilised) and how it was perceived. It was the same story on a Adelaide-Sydney return with the 2000 De Bortoli
Yarra Valley chardonnay, a very classy restrained wine indeed at sea level. But up in the air all the artefacts oak, lees, malolactic fermentation stood out above the fruit, and I tasted this wine from three different bottles.
The quality independent retailers I spoke to East End Cellars in Adelaide, The Ultimo Wine Centre in Sydney, The Prince in Melbourne the type of stores you'd expect to have the business class end of town as their customers, reported a flattening of interest in the $20-30 price bracket of chardonnay (like those I mention above), but increased appreciation, and purchasing, of wines such as riesling, viognier, gewurztraminer, pinot
gris/grigio the type of wines ideally suited to in-flight recreation.