Gone are the days when us wine lvrs could carry on good juice (some attendants would even gratiously serve it discretely as not to offend fellow travellers) into the cabin because of a bunch of fanatic ç%"**ç morons Hate them. Hope that I don't have to keep on flying commercial my entire life :p

That said, no meal is worth having without wine! (ex breakfast) on the ground or in the air ^

As with beauty being in the eye of the beholder, what one finds as a great red another may say it is swill. Knowing what you like and similar varietals will aid in identifying from which bottle to choose.

Couldn't agree more. But why discriminate against breakfast? ;)

Some might even advocate wine with breakfast.

It's true - my partner thinks I'm becoming "a bit of a lush" since I have wine almost every night with dinner. I tell him, in the words of Julia Child, that I love to cook with wine, and sometimes I even put it in the food. :)

Not even first rate bargains
 

From my experience US carriers don't buy decent wines for domestic F, although United has improved drastically in the last few months.

Internationally, they do not compare with the serious Asian and European players, let alone Qantas or NZ.

On a different aspect of this, the lounge wine offerings need to be upgraded as well. Qantas lounges show what can be done

The good old days
 

"The finest airline wines were in the BA Concorde cellar (about 100 different wines, rotated 4 at a time onto Concorde flights by BA), including wines now costing $1000 per bottle (at the time they were about $300/bottle but average was maybe $100 per). 2nd best were AF Concorde. And the 3rd best was quite surprisingly the DL F wines served in the 80s (when DL had an international F and tried to make it special). Some superb Barolos were served on DL (how strange for an ATL based airline, the home of Coca Cola)."

Ah yes, I remember it well. DL had a charmes-chambertin, and not from a negociant. :)