WTN: Industrial wine at 35,000 feet

[David M. Bueker]

Just some brief impressions:

2010 Chateau St. Jean Chardonnay Sonoma County
Tropical and predictably a bit oaky. Not too much butter though. Drinkable.

2009 Grant Burge Shiraz Benchmark (Barossa Valley)
Very sweet fruit, tannin hiding behind a lot of stuffing. Thankfully not hot on the finish. again drinkable, but too ripe/sweet.

2008 Cosentino Cabernet Sauvignon 'The Cab'
No there there. Astringent, lacking in any maningful fruit to balance its tannins. Two sips & back to the flight attendant.

The Charles Heidsick 'Blue Top' Champagne NV was decent., if completely unexciting.

[Jenise]

As ungreat as those sound compared to what I'm planning to enjoy at home tonight, they sound a lot better than the wines I had to choose between last weekend. And any of the local wines I drank in the place you're headed to.

Those aren't cattle-class wines, which I drink because they usually don't taste as bad as the water.

(I'm off on a 20+hour trip to Capetown on the 22nd. The trip itself won't be fun. What starts from Capetown will, I hope, make up for it.)

I fear that if I managed to take a bottle of wine I like a lot on board and tasted it at 35000 feet in the fug of an airplane cabin, it would taste no better than what they serve.

John

I spend a lot of time on airplanes and something about the cabin environment definitely mutes the taste of wine. Sweet wines, and really bold wines hold up a bit better than do more subtle wines, but the overall affect is to make all wines taste more bland than they do on terra firma. I no longer drink wine while airborne, unless a Port happens to be available.