Sipping a glass or two in club class will lift you up where you belong

Wine, for me, has the character of a reward. I turn to it at the end of the day, and it rushes to meet me like a bride. Most delightful are the times when, after a prolonged period of work, I rise above the scene of my labour and take stock, counting my blessings and making half-serious plans for the future, with a glass before me and a warm glow within. The best place for these moments of moral recuperation is an aeroplane, which removes you from routine and lifts you high above the clouds, in a dream-world painted by Tiepolo. Your thoughts are borne aloft with your body, and the distance between the brain above and the ground below is amplified by the genie in the glass.

The health fascists tell us that we should not drink alcohol when flying, that only a constant intake of water will counteract the dehydrating effects of a pressurised cabin. They threaten us with headaches, cramps, sleep disorders and thrombosis; and they seriously believe that the slight risk of these things so outweighs the enormous likelihood that we will actually enjoy the flight and be granted celestial visions as to tip the balance decisively in favour of abstinence. Rational beings, however, who know that health is only one good among many, and worthless without the gift of thinking and feeling, have learned to disregard this stunted reasoning and to see life as it is. And when seen at the bottom of a wine glass, life appears as it truly is.

This is the best reason to travel club class, which enables you to taste the kind of wine that does justice to the cloudscape. Only when others pay for it can I afford the luxury, but as I have just enjoyed a subsidised club-class flight across the Atlantic, I hope readers will forgive my desire to describe, if not the thoughts that occurred to me while flying, at least the wine that inspired them. This was - you will have guessed - a white Burgundy, a premier cru Beaune from Bouchard Pere et Fils, served as part of an otherwise fairly mediocre selection by United Airlines.

The glass stood by my seat, constantly replenished, always alluring, and with many a surprising thought of its own. Without the depth of the Montrachet Villages, or the almond allure of Meursault, the whites of Beaune nevertheless have a freshness and clarity that lend themselves to quiet rejoicing. The list of blessings sped unceasingly from the glass - children divested of their cloak of entropy, wife restored to her pedestal, literary works purged of their howlers and their faults of style, and the modern world weighted with its own absurdity and dropped like a stone into the sea. Try it just once, and ask, if the airline has it, for a glass of white Beaune.

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