Natural Selection

Telegraph writer Jonathan Ray discovers the art of high-altitude wine tasting with Air New Zealand’s team of wine buyers: Jim Harré, John Belsham and Kate Radburnd. Air NZ is the single largest purchaser of NZ wine and goes through 850,000 bottles of it a year. “Sixty per cent of our passengers get their first taste of New Zealand wine on board our planes,” says Belsham. “Our policy of only serving native wine works for us, but probably wouldn’t for anyone else. If, say, Qantas had a policy of serving only Australian wine, it would be swamped by the corporates. This year we had 590 submissions from New Zealand’s 550 wineries, many of them family-owned boutiques.”