One of the great practical problems for wine lovers and wine professionals is how to travel between wine centres. For the good of the planet we all ought to be letting the train take the strain but this can be extremely time-consuming – particularly if, say, you want to travel between Vinitaly in Verona and Bordeaux. The Bordeaux primeurs tastings and Vinitaly routinely overlap in early April, and arriving in Bordeaux even half a day late, because of having to change trains in Paris for example, can have a severe impact on the number and range of wines tasted.
Imagine my delight then when I discovered a perfectly timed flight from Milan/Bergamo to Bordeaux early on the morning of Sunday April 1, thanks to the exceptionally useful www.dohop.com which will find you flights between any pair of airports anywhere including, unlike the Expedias of this world, budget airlines. This was a cheap flight with an airline I’d never heard of, www.myair.com and proved, of course, to be too perfect to be true. Perhaps I should have been more suspicious in view of the date. A few weeks after making this magic booking, delivering me to Bordeaux at the ideal time, I got an email telling me my flight had been changed from Sunday morning to Monday afternoon. Hmm. No good at all, and in the end I had to fly from Bergamo to Bordeaux via a split second connection in London/Luton, thereby polluting the atmosphere even more than I had intended. (Surely the days of budget airlines are numbered...?)
However, the point of this is to alert you that, in theory anyway, there is a company that offers flights between Bordeaux and Milan/Bergamo, Venice and Bologna. And Myair does actually exist. I saw the Myair plane that was meant to have flown me to Bordeaux sitting smugly on the tarmac, resting until the next day obviously – and saw posters for the company in Bordeaux. Myair also claims to offer flights between Italy and Spain, another useful route for inexpensive fares. Check out dohop.