Lufthansa business class wine list wine selection

Each year we issue 30-35 invitations to tender. We receive suggestions for the tenders from specialist magazines and online, via trade fairs, wine tastings, talks to specialist groups and recommendations. Our criteria for selecting the wine correspond to our customers’ wishes and market trends. The selection is not made on the basis of the label or the name, but purely on the basis of the quality of the wine: at 10 – 12 meetings a year a committee of external and internal wine experts, together with Markus Del Monego, evaluate the wines in a blind tasting using an international 20-point system. During the wine tastings we make sure that the wines have the right character and that they fulfil the requirements to be served on board our flights:
We give preference to wines with reduced acidity or wines containing less tannin. We use wines with somewhat more residual sugar and/or a higher level of alcohol, as residual sugar and alcohol appear weaker at altitude. Ambassador for Germany’s top winesEvery year on long-haul flights alone, Lufthansa offers around 30 types of wine from more than 25 German vineyards. During 2007 we served almost a million litres of wine from top German estates in all travel classes.

By the way: in order to add a wine to its on-board wine list, Lufthansa requires around 8,000 bottles of a variety every two months for serving in First Class. In Business Class it needs an amount of some 40,000 bottles and in Economy Class at least 200,000 litres of wine per variety is required