beer & wine

We all know that the best beers in the world cost less than the best wines. However you can buy a quality wine for less than a quality beer.

Why?

I didn’t really get an answer following a presentation by Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione and wine maven Marnie Old at the Great American Beer Festival, but maybe you can connect the dots.

In all fairness that wasn’t what they were there for during a presentation for GABF attendees on Thursday and the press on Friday. Calagione and Old certainly make a meal entertaining — combining humor, he vs. she, and beer vs. wine — and I’m sure their upcoming book, He Said Beer, She Said Wine, will be a delight.

When they were done I put this question to Old: Why can I buy a bottle of Charles Shaw wine (also known at Two Buck Chuck) at Trader Joe’s for $2.99 and a six-pack of Mission Street Pale Ale costs $5.99?

(I had hoped to have the speakers taste the two blind — maybe straight from brown paper bags — and comment, but this wasn’t the time or place.)

Old would argue about the quality of Two Buck Chuck, but the 2004 Chardonnay won double gold in the California State Fair. Firestone Walker crafts Mission Street. It is the “base” beer for the award-winning Firestone Pale Ale, the difference being that it doesn’t contain a portion (the Firestone Pale Ale has about 3%) of beer that ferments in wood barrels.

“Quantity and quality don’t go together,” Old said, making it clear what she thinks of Two Buck Chuck, which one wine writer at the press luncheon referred to as “a box wine in a 750ml bottle.”

Old is not anti-beer. She talked openly about wine’s image (“snobbishness”) problem. “It’s obvious to me wine and beer are more alike than they are different,” she said, contrasting them as fermented beverages to distilled spirits. Saturday the Brewers Association gave her one of its Beer Journalism awards for “Beer Takes the High Road” published in Sante magazine.

But my question seemed to leave her a little defensive, perhaps because she clearly does not want Two Buck Chuck carrying the banner for “fine wine.”

She repeated a point she made during her talk that the quality of less expensive wine has been improving for 50 years, and the quality of beer (less expensive than most wines to begin with) has been improving for more than 30. A way to compare the two is to consider the cost of a single serving.

In a restaurant that is as simple as looking at the menu. At home figure that a bottle of wine yields six servings and a 12-ounce bottle of beer one. This doesn’t suit higher-alcohol, labor-intensive beers, but works just fine for our Trader Joe’s comparison.

Thus a serving of Two Chuck Buck Chardonnay costs 50 cents and one of Mission Street Pale Ale costs $1.

This would suggest that it is more expensive to reach some minimum standard of excellence in beer than it is wine.

And before you start blasting with both barrels I recognize all the “ifs” here. Does Two Buck Chuck really qualify as quality? How can Mission Street Pale Ale be on (or beyond) the verge of world class and also some sort of “new minimum?”

This is not intended to pit beer versus wine. To have winemakers argue that they can offer more of a “deal” or beermakers that drinking beer isn’t always choosing the “cheap” product.

I’m just noting that at Trader Joe’s a wine that’s always a deal and wins awards is $2.99, and a beer that’s always a deal and wins awards if $5.99.

An observation.

Diageo and Zagat have joined forces to launched an online guide — called drinkwell — labeled “the world’s first online resource guide to restaurants that are dedicated to serving the highest quality drinks and drink service.”

The guide currently list 15 cities, and will be nationwide by the end of the year.

The good news is it free. The bad news is there’s dang little beer.

What you do get: “Access to the ratings that Zagat surveyors have given to the hundreds of drinkwell establishments across the country, based on the quality of drinks, service, atmosphere and cost. Partnering with several world-renowned beverage experts including Dale DeGroff, Steve Olson, Paul Pacult, Dave Wondrich and Doug Frost, to develop the drinkwell Academy Staff Training Program for participating establishments, drinkwell-accredited establishments will be identified by a special black and brushed metal plaque.”

I only gave the listings a quick look — but aren’t blogs a shoot-first-and-ask-question later endeavor? — and it looks as if you go to Chicago you won’t find a lovely special black and brushed medal plaque at the Map Room, the Hopleaf or the Village Tap.

But you will find quality beer (pretty good service and atmosphere too).

Yesterday’s beer word of the day was lactobacillus (as in those gross beer lines in Milwaukee).

Today’s is Cicerone.

And the two are related. I was going to wait a few weeks before writing about the Cicerone Certification Program Ray Daniels is launching. But in the wake of the Milwaukee story, and comments that followed about properly cleaned glassware as well as lines now seems like a good time.

First the disclaimer. Ray is a friend of mine. That doesn’t make the program any less or any more worth writing about. I think it will be interesting to discuss it with him after he’s had a chance to introduce the idea at the National Beer Wholesalers Convention in a few weeks and later at the Great American Beer Festival. I will and I will report back.

Returning to the beer word of the day. Until it gets more traction in the beer community most people are going to find it easiest to consider Cicerone a synonym for “beer sommelier.”

That would miss the point, which is addressed right at the freshly minted website.

How is a Cicerone different from a Beer Sommelier?
A Cicerone is a tested and proven expert in beer while beer sommelier is a self-designation that can be adopted by anyone. Because there are no criteria for the title of beer sommelier and because those who use the title have not subjected their knowledge and skills to an independent examination, consumers and employers can’t be sure just what a non-certified beer server knows or how they treat and serve the beer.

And even though certified sommeliers do undergo rigorous testing – astonishingly demanding at the highest levels – and are supposed to be expert in “wine, spirits and other alcoholic beverages” there’s just a bunch of stuff in the Cicerone syllabus they’ve never seen.

Back, one more time, to the word itself. Ray has bent the meaning of a word not often associated with beer so that it has – or will have – a beer meaning. That’s a good thing. We’ve struggled here before with the term beer sommelier so let’s go with something entirely different.

This isn’t a matter of beer following wine, but of the beer taking a step forward.