Dallas - In coach class, wine comes from little screw-top bottles.
But for those holding premium tickets on American Airlines, in-flight wine service is intended to inspire.
The Texas-based carrier maintains 15 wine lists - specially selected for various routes - for passengers in first and business classes. At any given time, "we have more than 60 wines in service and another 60 queued," said Richard Vine, who has spent the last 20 years as American's wine consultant.
Vine, a retired Purdue University professor of enology, scours the world's leading wine-producing regions several times a year in search of the best vintages. American Airlines changes its wine list monthly, posting a 38-page pamphlet online that describes each route's selections in detail. Each wine list has two reds, two whites, champagne and a dessert wine. Flights to Asia offer a pair of sake selections.
The carefully researched service hasn't gone unnoticed by fliers. "We have customers ask where they can buy the wine themselves," said Mary McKee, American's managing director of in-flight products.
Indeed, premium-class passengers who pay between $3,000 and $10,000 for their seats regularly examine wine labels and quiz flight stewards about the vintages, said travel expert Terry Trippler of Cheapseats.com. "If you're paying that kind of money, you expect fine food and wine."
The attention to detail is in response to the growing awareness about wine among American consumers. Wine surpassed beer for the first time in 2005 as America's favorite alcoholic drink, according to a Gallup poll.
And U.S. consumers are expected to account for 25 percent of all global wine consumption by 2008, according to the French trade group VinExpo.
Vine, 68, never set out to be an airline wine consultant.
After a turn in the Navy, he got his start in the industry "dumping 40 pounds of grapes at a time" while working as a cellar worker in New York during the early 1960s.
He earned a doctoral degree from Mississippi State University, which is where American found him in 1985.
Not long after Vine began as American's wine consultant, the carrier committed to becoming the industry leader with its premium cabin service.
Under Vine's hand, American's wine service won top honors in 1995 in Business Traveller magazine's Cellars in the Sky competition. It was the first U.S. airline to earn that distinction.
American has won numerous other awards from the magazine since then.