beer & wine

Blurring the line between beer and wine

My first thought on seeing the headline “Craft Beer Steps Into Wine Country” was that wine country (Northern California) was one of the early beachheads for craft beer.

In fact, the story in Advertising Age (warning, sometimes you can link here and later the story will be listed as paid content) the story notes that small-batch brewers are “increasingly cribbing vintners’ marketing techniques in an effort to keep volume and prices buzzing.”

Methods long synonymous with high-end wine marketing, such as reserve bottlings, vintage dating, future-allocation programs and even vertical tastings (in which drinkers compare multiple vintages of the same beverage) are becoming increasingly commonplace among craft brewers.

The story looks into pricing, reporting how Grand Teton in Wyoming is able to charge twice as much for a single one-liter “reserve” bottle than it does for a regular six-pack Of course there is the success of Stone Brewing’s Vertical Epic Ales.

Stone Brewing CEO Greg Koch says the brewery’s emphasis on vintages has created a demand for older bottles. A 2002 bottle, which cost $4.99 upon release, fetched $400 on eBay last November. Mr. Koch says that degree of consumer enthusiasm has driven production from 300 bottles in 2002, the inaugural bottling, to 7,500 bottles this year, which is on pace to sell out.

“It really is a lot like selling fine wine, very boutique-ish,” Fred Rosen of Sam’s Wine and Spirits in Chicago told the reporter. “The beer and wine sections are looking more alike all the time.”

Wine should be so lucky.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer

More about tradition . . .

The headline is a quote from W. Somerset Maugham and the following paragraph from winemaker Annette Hoff:

. . . a philosophical struggle I have been dealing with the last few years, and that is the idea that can a wine be made traditionally in modern times? How could it truly be traditionalâ when made with modern equipment, commercial yeast, in stainless steel or plastic bins, with modern manipulation, technological know-how, bottling lines, etc. etc.? A “traditional” wine, in my mind at least, would seem to have been made by folks who are more in touch with nature, the soil and the seasons, than most folks are today. But, in spite of all of this, I truly believe I’m making a traditional product, but my problem was that I haven’t had a whole lot of evidence to back this idea up, even to myself.

Just substitute the word beer for wine and give it a little thought.

Caracole

Worth considering whether you are arguing about lambic or considering an American (Imperial-Double-India) pale ale with more hop flavor than any other beer in history.

Promoting beer knowledge vs. snobbery

Now the New York Times has written about the city’s first beer sommelier, a already discussed here a couple of months ago.

This will lead to a whole ‘nother round of posts in various blogs, and probably touch upon some more interesting ideas (including still more discussion if sommelier is a wine specific word). I promise not to beat you over the head with too many pointers, but here is an interesting thought from Roger Baylor:

This is the part that I’m having a problem embracing:

“We don’t aim towards pub people,” he said. “We’re about the beer geeks, people who want to try a new experience.”

Whether or not there is a word that accurately describes the function of ordering and recommending beer — a beer sommelier — how can it be so blithely divorced from the consciousness of pub people?”

In my experience, that’s where the “geeks” came from in the first place.

Beer knowledge is important, and to disseminate it through the experience and wisdom of a “beer sommelier” is something worthy of praise, but to imbue it with pretentiousness is both unnecessary and potentially self-defeating.

It’s hard enough going out there every day and having to un-do the incessant dumbing down of beer perpetuated by a half-century of megabrewing theory and practice without mimicking the excesses of wine snobbery.

Feel free to discuss.

Machine vs. wine tasters

What happens when university students use a machine to compete against a panel of wine experts in predicting the price level, region and quality for a number of wines?

Chemie.DE News-Center reports they came quite close to the experts’ judgment, especially when predicting region and quality level for wine at lower prices. Both the panel and the wine analysers had problems when predicting the price of the more expensive wines, but the expert’s ability to judge the finer points of the wines allowed them to get closer to the actual price.

However, the students and their machine easily won when it came to delivering speedy results.

I’m not sure that a beer tasting contraption could do as well.

But are they describing the flavor?

Relative to the ongoing discussion about the need for better vocabulary when tasting beer, an amusing comment from a wine blog. In this case, Mark Fisher asked, “What do you think the best Wine 101 class would include?”

The first reply was this:

I’d like to know if wine critics can really taste “a hint of raspberry dipped in chocolate and wiped away with old socks.” I think a wine should be judged on smoothness and depth. Cheaper wines can be smooth but better wines also have depth. I think wine reviewers make up all the descriptive language because they’ve got to fill the space with something.

Could it really be that simple?