Several months ago, Air New Zealand announced that it would undertake a cute initiative, whereby it would launch its own wine label. There’s now an update, as this is now available.
Continue reading: Air New Zealand Launches Wine Label, Thirteen Forty Five
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
@ Anonymous -- I appreciate it! I covered this a few days ago:
https://onemileatatime.com/news/qatar-airways-invest-virgin-australia/
🙂
Love your content, but the regurgitated press releases that are becoming a near-daily OMAAT affair smack of TPG hawking paid low-quality airline developments. They’re not even interesting. Does this wine taste good? (Get them to send you a sample!) How does it compare to other airline beverage offerings? Anything but the press release talk, doing the airline’s bidding for them.
Fun story, but I suppose most people realize that it's about as hard to make a wine label as finding some marketing/communications grad hoping to launch his own brand to buy a couple of tons of surplus grapes and slap some fancy language label on it with a press release. I don't buy into the wine snobbery and false airs to begin with, but this is ahem, bottom of the barrel. I would be surprised if anyone put more than 1 collective week of interest in how this was sourced.
Villa Maria is a crap wine producer. Why am I not surprised, given how crummy Air New Zealand is.
Not all their wines are crap. The "Attorney" Pinot Noir is excellent. One must remember that these wines for NZ will be produced to a budget, not a standard, and in sufficient volume to keep up with demand. Unless I'm traveling in international first class I never expect an airline to offer wines of truly exceptional quality.
No matter how they brand it, this is basically "the house wine" which is usually the lowest quality acceptable wine in a restaurant. In a restaurant where you pay for what you get this is acceptable but for a bundled fare like airline ticket this is just margin grubbing.
I suppose this allows them to "craft" the wines to have the "optimal" quality (i.e. be the cheapest acceptable quality). You may also imagine that the largest quantity of those wines would not be bottled but bagged. If they don't serve it at the seat how would you know ?
I think there is more behind the curtain about margin optimisation than actual quality improvement. Good on them to spin it positively but don't color me excited.
How about ANZ launches a proper business class seat instead of their terrible herringbone seats in 2025.
