Wine Review: Cathay Pacific First Class Frankfurt to Hong Kong

@Andrew M.

I think you will be forever banned from participating in One Mile at a Time again after those blasphemous comments about Krug.

But, great review. I also believe that French wines in the air don't translate into good flavours and those wines that taste like piss are the ones that do.

The more I read these the more I think you need to fly Swiss for these reviews since they use a set of Swiss wines which I think taste much better in the air than on the ground.

Thrilled the CDP was good in the air and the Rhone selection was good here. Sad the pinot wasn't good.

Agreed. For all the hoopla Cathay Pacific's first class products gets, it certainly has underwhelming wines.

The Krug review may be a little rough, but I was also not blown away by it. I flying Cathay, be sure to get your champagne fix with Piper Heidsieck at The Bridge lounge.

I just came back from LHR-LAX on American first class and I was actually looking forward to trying the Gosset Grande Reserve that American serves on their flagship flights. Boy was I disappointed when I found out that my flight was only stocked with Nicolas Feuillate. Is this a normal thing with American where they just swap out wines from their menu (fwiw, they didn't have the 2 red wines on their menu either)?

I had the same experience on JAL first. Wines that would be fantastic on the ground were sadly underwhelming in the air. However, they had some clever additions that played much better. A california bordeaux blend fared better than the Pauillac, and an alsatian white (rich perfumed gewurtztraminer) did much better than the premier cru burgundy white on offer. Seems like the alsatian and german whites really do well in the air, whereas champagne, burgundy and bordeaux suffer tremendously. Maybe we could arrange to skip them in the air and have a bottle when we land?

I took CX from ORD to HKG returning through LAX. Each way they had a Gigondas wine special on top of the regular wine list. Couldn't tell you how good the regular list was, but the Gigondases were excellent.

@Luis Hopefully was a miscater. To be clear, I don't think Gosset was the best champagne I've ever had, but I did think it was interesting.

@Dan Yeah my lesson from all of this is to be more experimental on planes and reach out and try interesting stuff.

@Dave D Agreed. Swiss and German wines have done really well for me one planes.

Though I have to restrict my comments to 1st Class, I believe the CX wine list in the air is second to none in their diversity but if you need the sundrenched and fruit driven New World style then QF takes some beating. There is however one enormous difference between them and that is the wine list in their hub lounges. The Qantas lounge (Syd) is good and the CX (HKG) is embarrassing and particularly in their new 'Champagne Bar' and I brought it to their attention. I asked why they served good wines such as Lynch Bages in the air whilst their lounge only offered supermarket wines. They denied this and said that Lynch Bages and other comparable wines were available in their HK lounge, but as passengers we had to ask for them. This BS came to light a couple of weeks later when I went into the Wing and asked. After three levels of 'Take me to your leader' someone asked me if I was MSR and when confirmed they whispered to me 'I have your wine and would I like some now?' Would you believe the bottle arrived under his coat with a scrap piece of office paper Sellotaped to it with my name on it.
The problem is that The Peninsula group get paid a per capita $ and they want their pound of flesh that doesn't include decent wines. The Champagne Bar selection is poor with nothing but the big factory fizz suppliers. There are no Grand Cru wines at all and no blanc de blancs. Same reason.
Everyone who goes through CX in HK owes it to the rest of us to ask for Lynch Bages to put The Peninsula on test to supply a wine that as a 5th growth is hardly the Dog's B's but substantially better that their other red wines which I would estimate cost them an average of US$8/bottle. A PS would be to complain about Moet & Chandon which is only suitable for cleaning the silverware. ....and no I'm not arrogant but I happen to have owned two wine companies for 25 years and who specialise in quality....I thought CX did too but maybe they or The Pen specialise in the fattest margin possible.

I think Airline can be serving the Best of the Best Champagne but if this happens it will definitely drop the Top position status of the Airline. I was on Cathay First from HK to JFK 9 days ago,during mid flight I asked for a glass of champagne and it was 'flat'.
I must say I have never experienced anything like this before. I told the flight attendant and it was quickly rectified but little touches like this certainly resulted in Cathay dropping from Best Airline in the World to 3rd Best!

Dear David,
The 'customer' doth protest too much, methinks (Hamlet-ish)
Airlines are not allowed to transfer opened bottles from one flight to another so we will assume the bottle was opened ex HKG. Some champagnes open with a bang, some a pop and some a whisper. A flat bottle could be a very old bottle which is unlikely but more likely a cork failure allowing the bubbles to escape so we must be very careful that a badly fitting cork made in rural Portugal doesn't bring an airline such as CX to its knees when put into a French wine.
If you want to find fault there might be an argument that the staff should have noticed that the bottle barely whispered when opened or that there appeared to be few bubbles in the glass but that also might be from a very clean glass so the final test might be that the staff should taste the first glass from each bottle to check the effervescence but they aren't allowed to do that.
I had a corked bottle on 1st Class EK and brought it to the attention of the, ....wait for it...on board sommellier (yeh ...right!) Can you smell the cork taint? No sir, it can't be corked as we have just opened it which isn't the right answer. Can you get me another bottle but don't take away this glass...Yes sir. The 2nd bottle was fine and I asked him to try them side by side. "I'm not allowed to do that Sir" No worries..."Can you smell the difference? Oh yes Sir. Thank you for pointing that out to me.
Cork taint is caused by a reaction in the cork with a chlorine compound that must be used on a natural product (the bark of a tree) to sterilize it. The resultant compound 2-4-6 Trichloroanisole or TCA for short will affect the good wine with a bad smell and taste from Day 1 and it can happen in as much as 10% of all wine.
I think it reasonable to expect a sommellier in a top restaurant to know this but I think it unfair to expect a CX hostie to do so. We need to educate ourselves as to what happened here and this was no ones fault so if I may be so bold, I would suggest the sequence should have gone
Excuse me but this wine appears to be flat
No problem Sir, I will open another bottle
In the unlikely event that the 2nd one is faulty then change wines and ask the hostie to take the problem to her leader.
There is another way to prevent the issue of using a piece of bark to close a bottle of wine and that would be to change to screw caps but the French refuse to do this on the grounds of tradition so the entire industry can be blamed for believing that the market that includes you and me don't want screw cap champagne. For me I would accept a screw cap than a moldy or flat bottle however infrequently it happens.
All said and done, you shouldn't blame CX here

Hi All Wine Legends,
Wine sommeliers in first class. You guys must get paid pretty well. Krug is one of the best Champagne
houses in France and Lynch Bages and Ponet Canet are some decent Vin Rouge at 35000 feet-even
with turbulence. I hope they keep having these amazing wines in long haul.