Joy of Travel

I’ve flown United Airlines since it merged with the formerly excellent Continental Airlines, so I know something about depressed and uncaring airline employees, horrible flights and crap operations.  But on my flight back to Austin yesterday (which United managed to not screw up too badly this time), I read a story in La Provence about a group of French tourists in the Canary Islands who win this week’s award for worst flight. 

163 passengers including eight children and a small baby, spent the last day of their August vacation inside a Boeing 734 sitting on a runway baking in the Spanish sun.   They waited throughout the afternoon and evening, presumably without a meal or anything much to drink in keeping with new industry practices, until they were ultimately told at 11 p.m. that they’d need to disembark because Arrecite's Lazarote Airport was closing for the night.

Lazarote Airport, a notoriously hellish place

The official, no-frills explanation provided by the tour operator was: “The plane arrived late and couldn’t leave.”  O Voyages (henceforth, Oy Voyages) added:  “Lazarote is an airport that closes at 11 p.m. and since the crew arrived late, the Canariens closed.  They don’t accept tardiness.”  The Canariens may be the last in the air travel industry with some standards. 

Meanwhile, the customers of Oy Voyage had a very different story. 

“When the pilot came on to announce we were going to take off everyone agreed immediately that he was totally drunk,” 37-year-old passenger Delfim Paiva told the paper.  “Then we saw some bizarre movement by the hostesses who didn't want to go on the flight.  Passengers panicked and people started trying to break down the door to get off the plane,” he said, adding that eventually the Spanish Guardia Civil intervened to evacuate the plane. 

"They later told us the pilot was just tired," Mr. Paiva added. 

The tour operator Oy Voyage had sold the trip through the French website Voyageprive.com, a sort of Groupon-clone for French discount travel.  Mr. Paiva said Voyageprive "confirmed that the hostesses refused to take the flight because the pilot was inebriated."

“Au contraire,” countered Alain Nizard, representing Polish airline Enter Air (marketing slogan: "Colorful holidays") which provided the charter aircraft to Oy Voyage. Monsieur Nizard, a graduate of United Airlines’ school of customer service, blamed the passengers. 

They “were drinking on board to such a point that the pilot and crew had to be protected in exiting the plane. They were delirious, throwing bottles at the hostesses,” he said by way of explaining how the Spanish cops got involved.  

Passengers in Madrid Airport last year

Mr. Paiva said about 60 exhausted passengers were put up in a hotel overnight. The other 103 unfortunates – along with some of their kids – slept on the airport floor.  This being 2012 and all, there are apparently plenty of photos and videos of this tour from hell.  

The plane finally took off the following evening but instead of going straight to Paris as it was supposed to do, it stopped first in nearby Fuerteventura for fuel.  

“People on the plane were crying,” another passenger reported.

Anyone who flies these days knows exactly how they felt.

Un petit poison, well chilled

The taste of summer in Provence: tomatoes and tapenade, cherries and Cavaillon melon, pastis and chilled rose.

Naturally, when I arrived home on a warm afternoon at the beginning of July, I quickly opened a cool, pink Tavel 2011 to drink while I unpacked.  Two sips later, I had a sudden headache so massive the word "stroke" bubbled up from my hypochondriac soul. I recorked the bottle, tried not to panic and went straight to bed. The headache lasted three days. 

I did not immediately attribute the headache to the wine.  I figured it was fatigue, some poisonous pollen generating an allergic reaction or just the routine migraine that strikes from time to time. But I have to admit,   that lovely, ruby-red liquid with a sketch of a Provencal Mas on the label, suddenly did not look so rosy.

After a few days it was time to pour it out.  As I dumped three-quarters of the bottle down the drain, the fumes rose from the sink and I inhaled. Once again, I was struck with a sudden, massive headache. Again, the headache lasted nearly three days.  Suddenly, that seductive bottle of wine looked malicious.  I didn't mention this to anyone, but I quietly switched to whites, reds, water and the periodic cold Coke Light for the rest of the month.

Last weekend, the August 4-5 edition of the International Herald Tribune carried a story on wine additives, the international debate over the terms "organic" and "natural" and new European Union rules on wine labels. Halfway through Eric Pfanner's fine piece, "The lack of veritas in vino," I ran across this:

"The new labeling comes with stricter rules, including a reduction in the permitted levels of sulfur dioxide, which can cause allergic reactions in asthma sufferers. (Some critics say sulfur dioxide, low levels of which are naturally present in many wines, also causes headaches, though I have yet to see conclusive evidence of this.)"

There may be an absence of randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical studies, but I gathered the only evidence I need standing over my kitchen sink.  Whatever was in that wine -- sulfur dioxide or some noxious combination of other ingredients -- made me very sick. Twice.

I'm going to choose more carefully. I'm going to read labels.  But here's the problem: unlike most foods and beverages sold in France and the United States, wine is not required to list ingredients on the label. And, as it turns out, there are a lot of potential ingredients to list. In fact, the EU permits 59 things to be added to wine.  Even wine labeled as "organic" in the States just means the grapes were farmed without using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides but it does not indicate what other mysterious additives may have been used.

On the label of my toxic rose was quite a bit of info, including a little map of Tavel, the eight grape varieties blended to make the wine, a list of the foods most suitable to the wine and a description of the wine's flavor, "raspberries and white flowers."  I'd describe it now as "slightly sulfurous with just a hint of Bhopal."

Happily, in the United States, sulfur dioxide is one of the additives that must be disclosed with the nearly ubiquitous footnote, "contains sulfites." I'm going to be quite careful about searching for "cleaner" wines. And I'll also be monitoring closely the discussions between Europe and the United States over wine labeling which are continuing this fall.   

Cheers.