Wine matters in premium cabins, mostly in my opinion for branding reasons. Qantas is the third largest buyer of Australian wine. Emirates is said to have spent $500 million acquiring wine for its flights.
Wine certainly can taste very different in the air than on the ground. Champagne often works well onboard, and I tend to favor it over even better old world wines.
Most people don’t know very much about wine (I suspect that the average premium cabin customer is like my seatmate who brought her own wine in a coffee cup onboard), though they think of it as a luxury good. Delta’s wine program recognizes this specifically avoiding bottles that are priced too inexpensively at retail (lest people think they’re low quality, regardless of taste) and that have too unsophisticated a label.
