Meet Xavier Thurat, the Top Sommelier at Air France


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The next time you fly Air France, look a bit closer at the wine list. Far from banal, it’s curated by one of the world’s top sommeliers, Xavier Thuizat, an industry vet with years of Michelin-starred experience under his belt and who, this year, earned the Michelin Guide’s Grand Prix in Sommellerie. And you don’t need to be in First Class to reap the benefits of his powerful palate. As of September, Thuizat is the first Air France sommelier to build the wine list even for those flying Economy.
Thuizat has earned quite a few accolades for his skills, earning the titles of Meilleur Sommelier de France in 2022 and Meilleur Ouvrier de France in 2023. But even for this expert, choosing wines for an airline offers its own unique challenges, chief among them the sheer volume required. Each year, more than 8 million bottles of wine (and a million bottles of Champagne!) are served to Air France clients. Compounded with other criteria Thuizat considers essential, such as the quality, sustainability, and authenticity of the wine – and, above all, its reflection of local terroir – this narrows the field considerably, especially seeing as these other constraints are typically “antonymic” to the sheer quantity he needs, he says.

Bar Les Ambassadeurs, Hotel de Crillon. @Lauren Luxenberg
“You can’t get an AOC, organic wine from a winemaker – a small winemaker – and at the same time deliver 35,000 bottles to one client,” he says. “That doesn’t exist, or at least, it’s difficult. But at any rate, that’s my job.”
Luckily, he has years of experience. After working at such illustrious addresses as Bernard l’Oiseau and le Meurice, in 2017, the native Burgundian took the post of head sommelier at the Hôtel de Crillon, A Rosewood Hotel, whose cellar is one of France’s richest, with more than 2,500 references.
“My travels into France’s vineyards over the last 20 years are serving me a lot, now,” he says. “Because I’m still in contact with the winemakers.”
But sourcing the quantities he needs is only one part of the puzzle. After all, wines that sparkle in the Crillon’s dining room may be mere shadows of themselves at cruising altitude, where food and wine just don’t taste the same as they do with your feet firmly on the ground. Thuizat is quick to note that this discrepancy has nothing to do with the dish or bottle itself: “Wine doesn’t change,” he says. “We do.”

Jardin d’hiver at the Hotel de Crillon. Photo: Lauren Luxenberg
Indeed, wine’s molecular composition remains exactly the same whether on the ground or in the air, but the atmospheric pressure and increased oxygen of the cabin means that drinkers’ palates and noses are dryer, translating to a lower capacity to discern nuance and aromas. “To compensate for that, for this lack of humidity in the air, I said to myself: The only solution is to source wines that naturally have a lot of aromatic intensity,” he says.
But don’t think this means the answer is bold, highly-structured reds. Tannins, Thuizat explains, are your enemy in the air, given their propensity for sapping the palate of its moisture, something anyone who’s drunk a young Bordeaux or an over-steeped cup of black tea can attest to. Thuizat himself witnessed the moisture-wicking power of this polyphenol thanks to researchers at the University of Bordeaux.

Xavier Thuizat @Lauren Luxenberg
“They showed me a chemical reaction between a tannin molecule touching a water molecule,” he explains. “You won’t believe me, but it did exactly the same thing as a blotting paper. The tannin molecule absorbed the water molecule.”
When tannins come into contact with an already dry palate, he explains, they have the same effect on what little saliva is left. The result, he says, is “very aggressive.”
Instead, Thuizat spotlights wines whose intensity comes from glycerol, which you can see in the thicker “tears” running down your glass. “It’s the juicy quality in wine,” he says, “and it’s above all something that comes out during fermentation, and that makes you salivate.”

Glass of wine. Photo: Jeremy Atkinson/ Flickr
Thuizat was able to understand these nuances first-hand, not by boarding an aircraft, but instead by heading to Montpellier, where a special lab reproduces the conditions at altitude, essentially allowing him to taste wines as though he were airborne. “That’s where I started to understand,” he says, noting that the differences were particularly flagrant when it came to white wines, which “have a finer structure. The aromas are far more difficult to perceive.”
With many whites he tasted in Montpellier – wines he knew well and loved – “I tasted nothing,” he says. As a result, he devotes quite a bit of time and energy to selecting only whites with “more aromatic exuberance,” he says. “I need that aromatic intensity.”

Xavier Thuizat. @Lauren Luxenberg
The last constraint is one of geography: On Air France, you’ll never find wines from California, Spain, or Argentina. Each and every bottle or glass served must be French. “I can’t even do port,” he says. But while this constraint is indeed imposed from the higher-ups, it’s a conviction that Thuizat shares “100%,” seeking to highlight wines with “a sense of place, a terroir-driven identity.” It means that sometimes, he has to make some tough decisions.
“Is an effervescent natural wine a reflection of France?” he muses. “No, it’s the reflection of an artisan, but not the reflection of a country.” As a result, he says, “it’s not always my tastes, up there. My tastes count, but that’s not how I build the list,” he says. “It’s more… is this wine the reflection of a place?”

Air France plane. © b1-foto, Pixabay
This doesn’t mean he’s stuck in the past. On the contrary, he’s motivated by the changing tastes and trends on France’s winescape, spotlighting regions long overlooked like Jura, Savoie, and Alsace.
“These three regions are, for me, the incarnation of the panache and dynamism of young, talented people who never stop moving forward, and wines that surprise me at every turn,” he says.
He’s excited by these more novel offerings, but he also must remain aware of guests’ expectations, and specifically, he says, of the “60-year-old, American men” who make up 66 percent of Business Class customers. “You see who I mean?” he says, laughing. “You need Bordeaux.”

Pouring glasses of champagne. © Alexander Naglestad/ Unsplash
And of course, you need Champagne. The last “iconic” bottle, he says, that he brought on board was Laurent-Perrier’s Grand Siècle, a Chardonnay-dominant Champagne combining three different vintages and five grands crus. “It’s an incredible alchemy,” he says. “You’ve got no fewer than 15 wines in it.” The result, he says, is brilliant, clear, and pure, with lovely toasted notes and an incredible complexity born of 10 years of bottle-aging on the lees. “It expresses time,” he says.
Selecting such wines and conveying their flavors to airborne customers is a difficult job, and with his meticulous nature, gravitas, and passion, there’s perhaps no one better suited to the task than Thuizat.
“Each choice you make, people are going to put to their nose, to their lips, and they’re going to drink France. So what do I want to show them?” he says. “Each choice is terrible, for me, because I need to really be sure that I’m doing that, with this conviction of saying, ‘Yes. That’s France.’”

Xavier Thuizat at L’Ecrin, Hotel de Crillon. Photo: Victor Bellot
Lead photo credit : Xavier Thuizat @Victor Bellot
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