HIDDY

The airline industry has changed a lot since 2010 though.
Hopefully when they reduce the number of seats in the F cabin the overall quality of the F product will improve....including the wine.

Schwann

Globaliser

Cranberry?

Cranberry Juice on longhaul from 16th Feb

Spadge55

Read her article Hiddy and see the quotes from Charles Metcalfe - it's not what you spend but how you spend it in this case (ME 3 excepted of course )
BA used to have some of the best wines in the air - now they have some of the worst. Wine is a transparent product in terms of pricing so customers can clearly see budget etc and BA as per the JR article are rock bottom at present.

DYKWIA

Has it really though? Other airlines still manage to get some great wines in their premium cabins.

RB211

Not holding my breath!

rb211.

gms

Pretty eye-opening stuff, but as others say, regular travellers have seen the trend for the last few years.

Three years ago I would have probably been classed as a 'BA apologist' on here. These days I struggle to think of anything positive to say about BA when colleagues ask me for advice on flights. I usually suggest they take their money elsewhere unless schedules demand BA. I do feel sorry for loyal BA employees. Many of them work hard and try to deliver good service, but it's the direction the business is pushing them that is the problem.

Tobias-UK

Really? You'd best tell Business Traveller and The Cellars in the Sky Awards, just this Monday they gave British Airways the Gold Medal for Best Business Class Cellar - it can't all be bad! Oh, and Qatar were awarded the Silver Medal in the same category. These were blind tastings, so the judges weren't swayed by fancy labels, it was all down purely to taste and enjoyment - much more important than price, don't you think?

krispy84

Soupdragon62

I wouldn't drink a bottle of wine that cost me 15 quid at home, let alone expect to when flying first class. But when needs must I'll take one for the team.

I am a bit of a wine snob though.

lost_in_translation

That's interesting. I also note that BA won zero awards for the First wine list, not even a bronze medal for any of the individual wines.

Given the blind tastings for these awards take place on the ground, I think you could argue it's debatable how relevant they are for an airline wine list if you were being hyper critical.

V10

The flip side of that being that if the taste sense is affected by altitude, is it really worth spending lots on a cellar full of Chateau Haute-Ponce anyway?

At least we can all be grateful that they're not serving the chemistry set by-product that used to(?) be served in short haul economy.

orbitmic

I think your ratio might be a bit generous. €6 is about £5, wine duty is £2.60 per bottle including VAT (and of course BA won't pay it) and these days, distribution margins on wine have gone down dramatically. Basically, the cheaper the wine the higher the multiplier from cellar door to retail price, but for a £5 cellar door bottle, I'd personally expect £12-15 retail to be about right and of course, BA would pay nowhere near that. At any rate, note that this is the exclusion price, not the average so it means it is the price above which a bottle is not even considered, suggesting that the average could be quite a bit lower. It seems to confirm a recent trend, that BA are keeping the Champagne levels but have tightened things quite spectacularly when it comes to the wine budget otherwise.

Sadly, the quality of the orange juice is also poor compared to competitors from the same outstations which I find hard to understand.

Still, looking forward to the improved menus which do look nicer than the current ones.

Betteronacamel

This is all a bit counter intuitive as you'd think that food and beverage would be areas that BA could 'tune it up' to compensate for weaknesses in other areas of the 'F' product. In other words, given that they're not going to up their game on the hard product any time soon and there's little or no sign of any meaningful development on the landside/airside service (particularly outside of LHR/JFK) you would think that they would strive to improve the soft product on board. Or are we just resigned to what started as a bit of a joke of BA F = J+ being the reality of what Alex has in mind. When he was at AA was when AA F was basically business class with a better seat; food was more or less the same as J with the addition of soup, and the wine was basically cr@p. Everything else was cr@p too. Hope I'm wrong, but it does look increasingly as if the current management has absolutely no idea when it comes to delivering a (truly) premium product. Lots of turd polishing but nothing materially improved.

corporate-wage-slave

No, having double checked with an expert, I'm sticking to my figures. The point I was trying to make was 6€ at mass procurement level is somewhat different to what a consumer will pay, 6€ is misleading set on its own, and in Scotland it would be very difficult to get any bottle of wine at that price. On a £20 bottle of wine, whether sold by Majestic or Aldi, the VAT and duty is £5.56, since it is charged at PoS rates. The retailer margin is around £7, Logistics, storage,taxation costs, palleting and wastage are indeed very low and is around £1. The cellar will see less that £7 of that £20. On a big bulk deal negotiated by IAG Procurement then I suspect we will be close to the £5.