Every year Qantas customers drink their way through nearly 30 million glasses of Australian wine. That’s a lot of wine, and it helps to make Qantas one of the worlds largest purchasers of Australian wine.
Have you ever wondered how they choose just which wines they are going to serve onboard? Well, it turns out they basically run their own wine tasting competition. And this year, that wine-tasting competition is running this week.
Wine Tasting Program
This week a team of ten Qantas Sommeliers will taste test 1,500 bottles of wine. These wines have been submitted from wine producers around the country.
In order to do this, they use what they say are traditional wine tasting techniques. In addition, they give consideration to the way the wine will taste in-flight and as part of the on-board dining experience.
So basically, this week they will be tasting their way through the wines, and they basically conduct it as a wine competition.
During the taste testing, the wines broken up into different categories. These categories could include specific grape varieties and regions. The taste-testing is an effort to find the best examples of those varieties from certain regions around the country.
From the 1,500 wines, Qantas will select around 200 which will be rolled out across the Qantas Domestic, Interational and Lounge network later this year.
According to Neil Perry, Creative Qantas Director of Food,, Beverage and Service
Wine week is a rigorous process, tasting hundreds of wines and selecting the best for our customers.
It’s fantastic to not only profile much loved classics, but up and coming growers too, and present the best of the Australian wine industry to a global stage.
What’s popular
Interestingly, there is some variation between what is popular on the ground and what is popular in the sky. The most popular wines in the lounges are Champagne, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. However, in the sky, the most popular choices are Shiraz and Chardonnay.