TOP-FLIGHT VINTAGES
Who serves the best onboard wine, and which bottles should you choose?
We reveal the worthy winners of our annual Cellars in the Sky airline wine awards
Over two busy days at the end of November, some of the world’s finest wine experts assembled to select the best bottles served by airlines in business and first class in 2019. Our judges – masters of wine Sarah Abbott, Tim Atkin and Peter McCombie, journalist and wine writer Kathryn McWhirter and head judge Charles Metcalfe, co-chairman of the International Wine Challenge – took up residence at London’s Amba Hotel Grosvenor in Victoria to conduct extensive tastings.
Business Traveller’s Cellars in the Sky awards has been running since 1985. This year, 35 airlines entered, with judges sampling more than 250 bottles to find the winners. The competition is open to any carrier that serves wine in business or first class on mid- or long-haul routes, with each airline invited to enter two reds, two whites, a rosé (a new category), a sparkling, and a fortified or dessert wine from both cabins. Although they can compete in as many categories as they like, to be eligible for the overall award of Best Cellar they had to enter at least one red, white and sparkling wine.
All of the tasting is done blind, meaning the judges are not aware of the wine make or the airline that entered it. Given their extensive knowledge, “blind tasting is the only way to do it properly”, Metcalfe said.
To ensure their anonymity, bottles were encased in black plastic bags labelled simply with a letter and two numbers. I watched, for example, as the judges silently filled their glasses with the first flight of first class white wines – or, as they had come to be known, FC1 (followed by an additional number to differentiate each entry).
Perhaps silence is misleading. The swirling, smelling and swishing of the contents did create a rather amusing chorus of sounds, interjected by a few remarks as the experts jotted down notes on their trusty clipboards. Other senses were called upon, too, with the judges holding their glasses up to the light to examine the appearance of the wines.
To avoid lingering headaches, spittoons were arranged around the room – although these tended to lose their purpose during the final flight of first class sparkling wine, which, as McCombie chuckled, was “basically a pleasure”. A plate of crackers provided a much-needed palate cleanser between flights.
HOW THE WINES ARE ASSESSED
The judges paired up and tasted half of the entries for each flight. Once they had tasted them independently, they convened in their pairs and compared findings, scoring the wines out of 100. I watched as they discussed their remarkably close scores, which were averaged to get a fair mark. Team A then picked their favourite wines of the flight and put them up against Team B’s selection, with the quartet then re-tasting the final selection and awarding Gold, Silver, Bronze and sometimes Highly Commended. “By the time we get to the final top winners, they’re bloody good wines and they’ve been through the mill to get there,” Metcalfe said.
Broadly speaking, the judges tended to agree, but disagreements were always welcomed as they were “a way to get deeper into the wine”, Abbott said. “We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” Metcalfe added, although Atkin quickly tweaked this to “our likes and dislikes”.
To be eligible for the Best Overall Cellar, airlines had to enter at least one red, white and sparkling wine
UP IN THE AIR
While our judges have their feet on solid ground, they are well versed in the quality of wines at 35,000 feet. Experts in the field – or air, should we say – they look for balance and structure. White wines, I was repeatedly told, perform better than reds as the latter are high in tannins, which are more pronounced in the air and thus more intrusive. “What you tend to find is wines that have a kind of juiciness, a succulence about them, and have aromatic generosity, can work really well in the air,” Abbott said. “You don’t want anything too lean or austere.” Mature wines are preferred, but it can be hard to find these in the large quantities needed.
Red Bordeaux wines are often served on board as the estates, by and large, produce enormous quantities, but these don’t tend to fare well at a high altitude. That said, this time the competition saw some well-chosen Bordeaux, with great fruity vintages that had had time to age. “When you do find something like a posh red Bordeaux which is smooth, nicely mature and doesn’t have too frightening tannins, that’s a really significant achievement,” Metcalfe said.
Carriers also have to bear in mind that first and business class passengers have forked out a lot of money for the fares, and so expect an ultra fine-dining experience. “Just imagine knocking that back, falling asleep on your first class bed and waking up in Tokyo,” Abbott remarked enthusiastically. Meeting such elevated expectations is no easy feat, but Abbott congratulated the carriers: “Overall, they overcome these challenges brilliantly.”
So how do airlines go about grabbing a coveted Gold medal? According to Abbott, it’s all about “good, sensitive buying”. “The airlines that maybe don’t do so well are perhaps buying on label or prestige,” she said. McCombie added: “Sometimes those wines don’t shine in the air.” Still, I was assured that some luxury names had been very well chosen.
A TASTE OF TOMORROW
So what does the future hold for in-flight wine? The aviation industry is constantly evolving, and new aircraft types with higher cabin pressures create a different environments for how passengers taste them.
“[The wines] should be more forgiving because low pressure and low humidity are definitely not favourable to enjoying wine,” McCombie explained. Metcalfe agreed: “It dries you out as a person and therefore dries out the inside of your mouth. That’s part of the reason you feel the tannins more.”
Abbott added: “I think those new cabins are trying to replicate more closely the conditions when you’re not in the sky. So I suppose the effect they would have for wine is that they would bring it closer to a natural environment on the ground.”
Then there’s the fact that Asia is a fast-growing airline market, and countries in this region are also starting to produce wines. For the moment, the airlines’ selections often remain traditional and conservative – French-focused old world wines still being a favourite – reflecting the expectations of passengers. Atkin commented: “The airlines are, in some senses, ten years behind the curve.”
The consensus is that European wines will perform better than Asian wines in the current climate, although the arrival of wines from China “might not be too far away”, Atkin suggested. In the meantime, here are the bottles that came out on top this year. Our congratulations to all of the winners.
‘Wines that have juiciness and aromatic generosity can work really well in the air’