I am a wine lover and wines are as important as food for my dinner.
I just flew to/from HND in J and the ticket cost is around HK30,000. A very expensive ticket for a 4 hours flight. But great to have the longhaul 77W.
We all know how bad the wines have become on CX J. The two French wines (Vire-Clesse white and Graves de Vayres red) are from minor French wine region and bordering the undrinkable. I would never buy such mediocre wines for my daily family dinner.

But I was extremely happy to see the Chateau de Rayne Vigneau 2009, !er Grand Cru Classe de Sauternes on the menu as dessert wine. This is a great wine (and expensive) that I also like to have as aperitif. It has been mentioned in the thread about new longhaul catering in J, but I was happy that it was also available on this expensive flight-with-F regional route.

But they had not loaded it, only port was available. The purser came to apologize and she recognized me from a flight a couple of weeks before. She mentioned that this was not the first time that it did not get loaded. When it is, it seems that they only load one bottle for F and J pax.

My post is not to arguing about the general wine quality currently served on CX. But having an excellent wine on the printed menu but not available seems to be a common occurence and not a trick that I would have been expecting from CX. It is just like when they list some excellent wines on their "wines of the month", but only have the cheapest (and mediocre) wine on the list offered on most flights.

that is a huge bummer to hear. No other way to put it.

However....what are you doing paying 30k HKD to/from HND!? You can buy that ticket for 35k in F! An extra 5k isn't that much if 30k is the base.

experience like this wont deter you from spending su outrageous fare again on CX in next few weeks would you? probably not

you complain about this but you will continue to drop that sort of money for cx.. so why shud they step up their game?

apology yeah whatever. i will apologize all you like for yoir 30k... next time fly on proper airline serving proper wine....

My company is paying and 29K plus taxes is the standard CX fares to HND. And they fill their planes at that price. I understand that adding a mere 5K would put me into F, but company would not allow it.
I am not complaining about price, and the downgrades of wines has been extensively discussed before, so not my point. My post is about the recent publicized CX effort to improve catering in J, but its failure to deliver in that case. I am not overly surprised when some second-class airline TG or MH fail to deliver on their promise, but am when a top airline like CX does. I still have high regards for CX, just wished a share an experience in light of the extensive discussion on catering improvement on longhaul.

Brunos, for the record I could not agree with you more about CX wine. I have a fair amount of wine. I do a fair amount of wine drinking. CX is just bad. It's not "borderline undrinkable".... a lot of it is indeed undrinkable. It is the bargain I think fakecd is somewhat crudely alluding to, but he has a point. I know CX wine sucks. It really sucks. But I still pay for CX.

I do wish something would change.

My recommendation to CX, who is clearly cost conscious here, is buy futures or speculate on down and out regions and currencies. Right now, buy Australia. Yields are down and the currency is crushed. Great value there at the moment. Stay the hell away from Burgundy with a 10 foot pole. Bordeaux is coming back to its senses but probably has more to fall. These things are cyclical and CX, earning primarily in USD or equivalent, could use fx weakness elsewhere to stock up for future years.

They instead have those silly wine consultants who run around and don't do much of anything as far as I can tell. If they want to improve the wine selection at a reasonable cost, buy quality wines now with the willingness to wait 3-5 years before serving. It wouldn't take that much balance sheet, but admittedly it would still cost more than the nonsense that fills their current J and F lists.

At the end of the day, I love wine. I do understand how many see it as a frivolous hobby, and I'm not sure how many people care as much. Especially since wine changes so much at attitude and a lot of people don't seem to mind anyway. But the nonsense CX serves for a lot of their J wine in particular, they may as well just say "French red" and "white", because that's all they're really going for. The rest is just misleading marketing inuendo.

Or, go Kiwi

I am in the business of importing from NZ & have basically been doing what QRC outlined above. The currency might go down further, but I'm very happy locking in inventories at current price levels.

Well said, and in full agreement.

I fully concur.

In fact, many people based in HK are wine lovers and I think that the wine list could be a point of competitive advantage. On some regional flights these days, all other things being equal, wine is one of the things I will use to decide whether or not to fly CX - basically not, as what happens is I remember how underwhelmed I have been with their wine list. The wines are not good, and getting worse, and also often there is an availability problem.

A "wine forward" approach is long overdue. QF, for example, although their New World focus is not my style, comes across as much more serious and thoughtful about wine. CX, as well as having a proper French wine list and the stock on that list, could also consider e.g. some Asian wine (I don't think they're great myself, but why not the occasional Japanese and Thai wine for some regional flavour).