[question] Question submitted by Jude Bunn, Australia. I live in Perth, and I often go wine shopping in Margaret River. I have good friends in Melbourne, and fly over quite a bit. I always bring 3 or 4 fine Cabernets from Margaret River with me. But, they never taste as good as they do in Perth. Do the flying conditions in big planes effect the wine? Jude [/question] [answer] Tricky one, this! When people like Dennis Carstairs first introduced wines from Moss Wood, Vasse Felix and Cullen into Melbourne back in the 1980s, his advice was always to wait for the bottles to overcome the travel shock experience. I continued to follow this approach myself – even up until a few years ago. Religiously, I would wait for a few weeks for the wines to settle after their trans-Nullarbor trip prior to tasting them as part of my journalism. And then one day I didn’t. Furthermore, when tasting the same wine several weeks later, I could tell no difference. So I’m potentially about as confused as you are. Furthermore, I regularly take bottles of Australian wine with me when travelling around the planet. I open them straight after fourteen hours or so on the plane and most are perfectly ok. Some, however, are clearly not. Do I know why some travel better than others? No. Can I predict which will travel well, and which travel poorly? Again, no! We still have so much to learn… [/answer]
