Drinking Wine on an Airplane
There's plenty of stress involved in flying - between the crowds, traffic and delays. Bring some peace and calm into your small seat by learning how to enjoy a wine on your flight.
First off, set aside 10 minutes to relax. Shrug your shoulders. Roll your head around. Listen to the most peaceful music the headset has to offer. Take deep breaths. At least for your flight time, there are no crowds, no racing, nothing to do. This is your time to regroup.
You're probably dehydrated right now. The human body needs 8+ glasses of water a day to stay healthy and you probably haven't had that. So either carry a bottle of water with you, or get some from the stewardess. Air travel can make you ill as it is, with the cramped quarters and stress. You have to keep your body as healthy as possible to fight that off.
The dehydration can cause you to lose up to 30% of your sense of smell, which is most of what you "taste" in a wine or any other food. That would make even the best wines taste bad. So keep yourself watered, to appreciate your wine better.
You're probably not going to find high end Champagne on your flight, for the main reason that they can only carry X bottles of wine on a flight, that they have to please most of the people, and they have to buy in massive quantities to be able to have the same wines on all of their planes.
Note that first class passengers do get a better selection of wines made available to them. Why not offer those same wines to the coach passengers? Apparently the airlines feel that those in coach wouldn't appreciate the wine choices - and also the airlines would then have to buy even more wines to keep the selections available, taking up space they simply don't have.
Those little plastic cups you get to sip your wine out of don't help much, either. They do little to help you enjoy the natural bouquet of the wine you end up with.
Heck, make a game out of this. Pay attention to the wine that you order and take notes about how it tastes to you. And then find that SAME wine when you land and try it on the ground. See just how different it is in the two different situations. It'll add yet another dimension of interest to your high-air tastings!
Are there solutions to your high altitute problems? There are many plastic wine glasses on the market nowadays - you can carry your own so that any wine you try is the best it could be in the situation. You can bring along water to keep yourself hydrated, which is important not only for wine flavor but also for your general health. You can take the time to de-stress so that you are enjoying the wine and the flight instead of being wrapped up into a tiny stress-ball. And finally, you can find a way to get yourself bumped up to first class to get the very best the plane has to offer.
And best of all, you can choose a flight on a carrier that is known to carry great wines in their planes. The top rated carrier for wine is FinnAir, but Delta and Continental also get good marks for their wine selection.
So whereever your travel plans make take you, enjoy the wine along the way!
All content on the WineIntro website is personally written by author and wine enthusiast Lisa Shea. WineIntro explores the delicious variety and beautiful history which makes up our world of wine! Lisa loves supporting local wineries and encouraging people to drink whatever they like. We all have different taste buds, and that makes our world wonderful. Always drink responsibly.