The sweet smell of success for wine judge Roy Moorfield

WINE judge Roy Moorfield will this year complete a major milestone as he hands out lucrative contracts to Australia's already hard-pressed wine producers.

The Melbourne based judge will complete his 21st annual Australian wine tasting for Cathay Pacific Airlines, signing off a wine destined to become the two millionth bottle served on the airline's Australia-Hong Kong-London service.

In 21 years since he began taste-testing Australian and French varieties for Cathay, the airline's demand for the Australian drop has grown from just 2500 cases -- 30,000 bottles in 1988 -- to a whopping order last year of more than 160,000 cases, more than 240,000 bottles.

"This year the figure could well exceed 250,000 bottles with the numbers of passengers the airline is attracting to its economy and business services," Mr Moorfield said.

Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
Next month Mr Moorfield, with another judge who will fly in from Hong Kong, will sit down at Melbourne's new Convention Centre and begin the annual taste test.

The job will be to select the wines the airline will order from Australian vignerons to serve to its first, business and economy class passengers next year.

"We will do blind tastings of up to 600 Australian wines and then reduce that number to a few that we will then send up to Hong Kong for final selection. What we are looking for are wines that are both soft and fresh and ones that stand the test of travel.

"The vibration of the plane can upset some wines, so we look for wines that don't have a lot of strong tannins or high acids.

"Vibration tends to dampen the fruit flavour which is needed in wines served at 36,000 ft where the cabin atmosphere is 40 per cent drier than what people encounter when drinking wine in a restaurant."

The varieties that Mr Moorfield and his fellow judge will reject include those that show signs of volatility or smell, even faintly, of hydrogen sulphide.

"We don't want funky wine," he says. We want nice clean wines that have been well made and which present with a strong fruit character because when you are in the air, the mucus in your nose dries and you don't get to smell the wine as you would elsewhere," he said, adding that his aim was to help that process along by choosing wines that are clean and have nice fruit characters.