Frequent travellers, especially on expense accounts, know from experience that the wine selection in business and first class no longer plays second fiddle to the service. You can choose classed growths and fine burgundies from a wine list carefully selected by Masters of Wine while the flight attendant is preparing your truffled chateaubriand*. And champagne has become as much an obligatory part of the 'welcome on board' ritual as the peppermint basket doing the rounds in the earlier days of civil aviation.
All well and good, but the rest of us in the back have long been treated much less...