beer & wine

Last week Joe Stange blogged about The Mythology of Glassware. Perhaps that’s why Gourmet moved a very long story about Riedel glassware to the free section of its archives. It’s titled “Shattered Myths” so I don’t think I’m spoiling the punchline when I quote from the end:

Georg Riedel finally seemed to be vindicated when media around the world trumpeted the results of a study conducted at the University of Tennessee. “A U.S. study found that the shape of a glass can have a big influence on chemicals in wine,” the London-based Daily Telegraph glowed, in August 2002. “Wine really does taste different depending on the kind of glass it is drunk from, according to research.”

“Scientists prove the right glass matters,” declared Decanter magazine. “It’s official—wine really does taste better out of the right glass.” The findings were cited by everyone from New Scientist magazine to American radio legend Paul Harvey. Riedel himself must have been relieved. “It is great,” he told a reporter, “that independent scientific research supports our philosophy.”

But when I tracked down the researcher who did the study, she groaned. Then she started laughing. “I can’t believe how reporters ran away with this thing,” says Kari Russell. “That’s because so many people want to believe” that glasses make a difference. First of all, Russell is bemused that nobody seemed to realize that she wasn’t a renowned scientist, but a mere college senior (she’s now working on a Ph.D.). And she didn’t do some big, rigorous study: She rounded up just a dozen subjects.

And what she finds even more bizarre, she says, is that Riedel wouldn’t have liked her findings if anybody had reported them correctly, because they don’t support his claims at all. “Glass shape does not affect the perceptions of the average consumer,” Russell told me. “That’s my conclusion.” To put it bluntly, her subjects couldn’t tell the difference between Merlot in Champagne, red-wine, or Martini glasses.

Now to terroir. This just in from the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America:

When it comes to theories about terroir (how soil, weather conditions, landforms and other local circumstances define the character of wine), scientists believe we know less than we think. They now say the belief that minerals could influence the flavor of wine is flawed, considering that the quantity of minerals in wine is so small that it can’t be detected through human taste and smell. On the other hand, geologists said the soil’s water holding capacity can have an influence on the wine taste, but this notion has barely been researched.

Perhaps not quite myth busting, given that terroirists argue there’s much more to expressing place than the mineral flavors in wine, but that’s the dirt on dirt.

For the record, we like wine in our house and we like our glassware (for beer and wine). I might have mentioned that anyway, but this post by Eric Asimov sealed the deal:

The irony is that great beer and great wine are on the same team. The enemy of beer is not wine and the enemy of wine is not beer, just as the enemy of bread is not fruit and vice versa. But the enemy of good beer and good wine, and good food in general, is bad beer, bad wine and, yes, bad food.

What unites this team is the striving for real wine, real beer, and real food, as opposed to cynical product. That is the problem, and I think most people realize this no matter what they say or do. Craft beer’s battle is not against wine but against decades of cynical marketing from the giant breweries, which have done everything possible to portray beer drinkers as asinine fools. The enemy of good wine is the atrocious marketing that makes wine an aspirational commodity, just another luxury good to purchase for its status value. That has to offend the reverse snob in all of us.

Fellow wine lovers, fellow beer lovers, unite! We shall not permit ourselves to be pitted against one another. Do not be fooled by false choices. You do not have to choose beer or wine. Just good or bad.

Somebody writing for the New York Times doesn’t need a link from here, but I feel a need to add the obvious: we don’t need to see beer following wine down the aspirational path.

Now that I have your attention. . . .

The folks at Chow.com seem to feel compelled to email me every time they post a story about beer. I find that strange because presumably what makes them different is they are discussing beer in an intelligent manner with an audience — folks who might be generally think about food and wine more than beer — that knows less about beer than the people who hang out here. So excuse me if I look at their stories and think “not enough new here to point to.”

The latest email is about a video in their “The perfect” series. We’ve had the perfect fried chicken, the perfect chocolate chip cookie. By god, let’s find the perfect beer.

The choice is Russian River Supplication. Maybe it is perfect, but I like Temptation better. So where is the the in the?

I should also point out that for a year I owned the domain name “myperfectbeer.com.” I let it go and as far as I can tell nobody claimed it. Does that mean there is no perfect beer? Certainly if there is one there must be two and if there are two . . . you can see where I am going.

Watching the video I had one other thought. There are different cherries in some of those barrels. So if Vinnie Cilurzo is still experimenting how could what is already in there be perfect?

Perhaps I’m just being crusty. But why would Lessley Anderson complain? She wrangled a link out of me.

In commenting on the demise of the British-based magazine Beers of the World writer Adrian Tierney-Jones has written such a lovely headline that I have to find an excuse to repeat it: “Beers Of The World finito: the end of beerwriting as we know it?”

If you live in the U.S. you likely never read this magazine, which could be found occasionally at the random Barnes & Noble. I think I last saw it in Prague last November because Evan Rail brought a few copies along when we met for dinner.

Just two things before I get back to “long form” writing (“Brewing With Wheat” and today I’m writing about the epic battles between bakers and brewers for control of wheat production — OK, it’s not really that sexy):

– Adrian concludes that magazines devoted to beer have no future in the U.K. and that “makes me think that maybe this is the end of beer-writing as we have known it since the 1970s. We are all beer bloggers now.”

– Therefore it seems like a good time to point to a post from Alice Feiring, a wonderful writer who happens to specialize in wine.

He wrote, “As I’ve been saying for a while now: blogs didn’t kill journalism. blogs killed writing. The art of writing is now essentially fully devalued. It’s a hobby.”

Think of it before you jump all over us. The popularity of the blog has reduced writing to a 500-word postage stamp norm, and usually given away for free. For free. Free, the industry standard. While a digest of words can be a fun exercise in craft, the indulgence the 2000- to 5000 word article was nirvana.

and (edited for length) . . .

Oh, to once again be paid to fret and angst over the specific word and nuance. To work with an editor, to banter back and forth and develop and like a dancer stretch for that point on the stage with utter conviction.

I long for the days when there was craft, there was grammar and there was poetry . . .

And so bloggers who have jobs that pay the bills other than writing, please take no offense. No offense is meant. But this is a lament, from those of us who have bet our lives on the written word, for those of us who have no fall back plan (actually, journalism is my fall back for fiction) whether the subject is art, music, politics, literature or wine, our lives are changing. No one goes into writing to make pots of dough.

At a time when American beer commands more respect than it has in its history there are, thankfully, a growing number of publications focused on beer. And we’ve got cleverly written blogs rich with beer citizen journalism.

Sure the grammar could get better (and we won’t even start on the poetry . . .) But I’d like to think we’re at the beginning of beer writing as we will know it, and I’m not even sure what form that might take.

You may have seen mention in various blogs about an upcoming book, called “1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die.” To the best of my knowledge (based on the fact I’ve written the profiles on a few of the beer included) each beer will get its own page. That makes for a fat book.

But nothing like the upcoming the 66-pound, $1 million wine guide Decanter reports will be published next year. The Wine Opus will list the world’s top 100 wineries. That’s not a typo: $1 million. Because . . . every purchaser of the book will also receive a six-bottle case of wine from every one of the 100 wineries listed.

So that’s 600 bottles of wine for $1 million, less whatever value you put on the book itself. But still about $1,667 a bottle. I’m pretty sure you could acquire every one of the choices in “1001 Beers” for less than $1 million, given that would be an average of $999 a bottle.

Guess I should have thought of this before we started our adventure.

I could have packed a bottle of locally produced India Pale Ale and hauled it around for 14 months, in the RV, on the plane to and from Europe, in our leased car. More than 60,000 miles, lots of bumping about, plenty of temperature changes. Then in August I would have opened that bottle and compared it to a fresh one from the same brewery. Not as epic has Pete Brown’s journey, but probably worth a blog post.

Just two problems. I only just thought of this. Bigger still, when we left on our trip no local brewery packaged an IPA. That changed when the Marble Brewery in Albuquerque started bottling.

I did bring a Marble hat with me. So it’s been to 49 states, 9 Canadian provinces and territories, and 17 countries. It traveled on my head at the outset — those who know me well understand I am legally obligated to wear a cap because of damage the glare might otherwise cause — but as the trip wore on the hat started to look a little weary. When Sabine Weyermann of Weyermann Malting in Bamberg, Germany, got a look at it she quickly outfitted me with a new Weyermann cap.

To tell the truth, that one is also starting to show some wear and tear. Maybe I’ll let the Marble one out of the back of the RV for the triumphant ride back into New Mexico.