hockeyinsider

Well, if you associate the cost of wine with quality or value then, well, it's not good for Delta. The Wall Street Journal reports:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-a...ine-1524059947

SJC ORD LDR

1) If you're going to spend $9/bottle on wine, why do they need a sommelier?
2) Since you are flying in a plane, you're taste buds aren't really great at noticing subtle flavors, so why bother with something subtle when you can buy some two buck chuck and very few will even notice?

LoganFlyer

I'd say we should put this in the "least substantial thing to complain about" thread, but this would be an insult to that thread.

FlytheTail

Thanks for the link -- an interesting read considering I fly a lot on AA and UA too.

AANYC1981

Well there is evidence of them serving Andre as PDB bubbles as a "mis-cater - oops our bad" as reported by a well known travel blogger

just saw this was already called out above - my bad!

ACCDraw

Long ago switched to Bloody Mary’s.

Delta’s two-buck-up-chuck is “plonk de merde’.”
(technical term from “Adventures on the Wine Route . . . “ by Kermit Lynch

hockeyinsider

Well, they've been doing that with $4 Andre sparkling wine.

And I'm pretty sure Delta pays no taxes on alcohol served on the ground in the United States.

BenA

FWIW, I think DL was mostly hurt by that affordable California chardonnay in this particular survey; usually, they hover closer to $15-22 for the normal wines, and much higher for Champagne. (PDB excepted. Ignore the PDB sparkling, it's a trap. Order your champagne in the air.)

I did my own analysis almost exactly a year ago on a set of menus from DL, KL and AF (inspired by a flight with incredibly bad wine from KLM). As of April 2017, here was the data:

AANYC1981

DL has gotten better wine wise at least domestically....remember when DL 1 transcon only had one white on offer and it was the most basic option of chardonnay? I don't get why they are paying Andrea Robinson to suggest such basic wines.....sauv blanc and pinot grigio/gris are much more interesting options IMO

HWGeeks

I remember reading a study where wine experts couldn't tell the difference between a 2 dollar wine and a 100 dollar wine.

SJC ORD LDR

1) If you're going to spend $9/bottle on wine, why do they need a sommelier?
2) Since you are flying in a plane, you're taste buds aren't really great at noticing subtle flavors, so why bother with something subtle when you can buy some two buck chuck and very few will even notice?

rucksack

It’s definitely interesting information to see, but like others, I question the actual impact on the customer experience. As some others have pointed out:

1. Your taste buds are dulled at altitude and you might not be able to appreciate the differences between “good” and “bad” wines.
2. In blind tests, there’s no correlation between price and taste. Experts have difficulty identifying cheap vs. expensive wine and 50% of people can’t even tell the difference between a red and a white by taste!

Aero137

At a recent dinner with some friends, we tried to replicate this with the average consumer. Blind taste test with some experienced drinkers, and some inexperienced. The results were wildly varied. 'Twas a fun experiment though. Learned that much of it is personal preference.

wlau

I am not a snob by any means, but Delta has done well in the wine department.....I make a point to try all the options when I am in D1 and they are all quite good. Heck, even when I am in main cabin, the red they serve out of giant plastic bottle is quite drinkable.

BenA

To be fair, one goal of several of those studies was to point out that competitions where people taste upwards of 50 wines back to back to award medals can be ineffective and inconsistent. Anyone who's done a wine tasting tour can attest that your palate starts to blur together after only a few wines...

There's a lot bound up in the price of wine. There are some elements that are actual drivers of production costs - the density of grape vines planted per acre, the amount of time the wine spends in storage, the type of barrel the wine is matured in, the yields of the types of grape necessary for the specific style, etc. And then there's a bunch of feel-good marketing markup, too - at the end of the day, the price of the bottle is whatever the heck the winery decides to charge (and can sometimes be increased if a cheap wine finds a loyal audience and gets a good reputation.) There's a great thread in DiningBuzz about Grocery Outlet wines that are a great demonstration of how price doesn't always correlate with quality - some of them are absolutely terrible, but others are surplus production from really high end California wineries that can be surprisingly great values.

I don't even remotely know everything about wine and certainly can't call myself any sort of expert, but I do enjoy learning. I've loved both $5 and $50 bottles from time to time! One thing I have found, though, is that wines with curious and unique taste profiles tend to be at the mid to higher tier of the price spectrum. This makes sense - if you're going to make a huge batch of production, you want it to be a well recognized, standard style. But if you're making a small batch of wine or planting a small vineyard, you can go out on a limb a little bit and create some surprising flavors that can make for a fun change of pace. Are these wines better? Not necessarily - sometimes different isn't tasty, by any means. But the nature of producing them does justify some of the price differential. (Of course, precision consistency can also be a justification for a high price - particularly in a well known appellation like Pomerol or Saint-Emilion.)

On a recent trip, I spent a surprisingly large amount of money on a bottle of wine that's from a tiny showcase vineyard at a winery we visited. It's the most expensive bottle of wine I've bought. Is it the best I've tasted? No, actually not - other, cheaper bottles are more to my personal taste. But the distinctive taste of that wine someday in the future is going to bring my wife and I back to a particular time and place on a given vacation, and that's a luxury I think justifies what I paid for it.

And that point brings us full circle, because I'm not necessarily looking for an expensive wine - but what I am looking for on an international flight is to be introduced to something new and different as a form of in flight entertainment. I'm not looking to get drunk on gobs of something familiar - bourbon would be a much more effective way to do that. I want to try new flavors and possibly even be introduced to a new style, varietal or winery. VS divides their wine menus into "Classic", "Familiar" and "Discovery", rather than bucketing them by light/medium/full, and I actually really appreciate that approach - it helps ensure there's always something curious and unusual on their wine list to try. Another approach is to simply go for well known luxury and let the label create an experience - that bottle of Dom Perignon goes a long way to creating feelings of luxury that justify the five figure price of a trip in Emirates F, even if other sparkling wines might taste just as good.

Long story short - no, people don't enjoy Two Buck Chuck the same way they enjoy a $100 bottle of Bordeaux, and it's not all just smoke and mirrors. At the very low end, there are legitimate process differences that produce a lower quality product. But once you clear that bar, each wine has a unique flavor profile to offer that's a product of a number of different variables (some of which legitimately affect price). Some people may actually prefer more affordable wines, and that's totally fine! That doesn't mean high end wine is a scam, though - it just means that it's a different product that isn't everyone's cup of tea.