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Ryst Helmut
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
Location: In search of the elusive signature...
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 Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:11 am Post subject: Americans: Wine over Beer! |
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Sacrilege! Say it ain't so, Jo?
http://www.slate.com/id/2167292?GT1=10034
| Some writer from the WP wrote: |
drink: Wine, beer, and other potent potables.
Beer in the Headlights
Sales are flat. Wine is ascendant. How did this happen?
By Field Maloney
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007, at 6:19 PM ET
Chat with this story's author on Washingtonpost.com.
Last year, a grainy video appeared on YouTube. In the clip, three scraggly-looking men in a scraggly yard shoot full cans of Milwaukee's Best Light beer out of a homemade cannon. They shoot at a bottle of what they call "fancy-pants wine," which they've placed at the bull's-eye of a giant white target. On their first shot, they miss. The second shot sends green glass and red wine flying, in the kind of glorious mess that would please Jackson Pollock. The men hoot.
As it happens, the video was made by a beer company�SABMiller, which owns Milwaukee's Best�and while it plays class warfare for laughs, it also represents the ultimate fantasy of American beer executives, who have been jittery for years. For one thing, wine consumption in this country has nearly doubled in the last decade, while beer sales have been pretty much stagnant, growing less than 1 percent since 2000. Even more galling, in 2005 a Gallup poll revealed that, for the first time ever, Americans preferred wine to beer. This was an astonishing development, akin to Americans jilting baseball for bocce.
Soon after, Lew Bryson, a columnist for a beer-industry trade magazine called Cheers, lamented that beer had "lost its way." Bryson summed up beer's predicament: "Wine overcame beer's lead in the hearts and minds of American drinkers," he wrote. "Forty years ago, wine was mired in a swamp of low-margin jug sales. Drunks were called 'winos.' Now wine has cleaned itself up, with a freshly shaved face and a fashionable suit of casual clothes, and is headed uptown."
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How, exactly, did wine become so dominant? The shape of American aspiration�our sense of connoisseurship and the good life, the character of our nostalgias, even the thirst imperatives of a nation of office clerks rather than line workers�has changed radically over the last few decades in ways that have helped wine and hurt beer.
Of course, the rise of the American fine-wine industry has spurred the broader acceptance of wine here. But who'd have guessed wine would join beer at the football game? Watching last winter's Giants-Eagles NFL playoff, I saw an ad for a cell-phone plan featuring a graying, rugged-looking man strolling through his vineyard and examining dusty bottles of older vintages in his cellar. Winning over football fans with wine! It was as if the "But of course!" Grey Poupon man of the '80s TV ads had become an unironic icon for the WWE. Somehow, wine had become manly.
Part of beer's populist appeal�and its edge in the beer vs. wine war�has always been its absence of cant about its main point: to provide a little (or a lot) of happy intoxication. You can appreciate wine, but you drink beer, the saying goes. Wine's cult of connoisseurship has always had a specious edge. Like the Victorian obsession with the "grace" of the nude female form, the high-flown language and ceremony of wine-drinking can seem like a fig leaf of sorts, a cover for fancy-pantses who like to get buzzed.
Wine connoisseurship became more palatable to Americans, though, when wine talk changed. As Sean Shesgreen pointed out in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), the old vocabulary of wine, passed down to us from the English squirearchy, graded wines in class terms, privileging pedigree and refinement. The ultimate parody of this kind of wine talk is James Thurber's cartoon line: "It's merely a naive domestic Burgundy, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption." The new wine grammar, popularized foremost by the American critic Robert Parker, sounds like a really weird grocery list, privileging flavor over domain: notes of blackcurrant, eucalyptus, tobacco. As annoying as this new pastoral language of wine can be, it's certainly more democratic-sounding, less forbidding. It trades one set of referents that Americans view suspiciously and uneasily�class�for another that, even when we haven't the foggiest notion of what it signifies (Chokecherry, anyone? Lychee?), sure sounds nice. Call it the consumer pastoral.
Meanwhile, the American middle classes have fast become connoisseurs of everything�coffee, '80s Japanese garage-rock bands, environmentalist toilet paper. Now, Americans who want the exclusivity that connoisseurship offers but didn't want to seem like snobs can have it both ways. Beer's approachability became less of a virtue. Ironically, in the ultimate about-face, craft-brew drinkers lifted the language of wine. (Tasting notes for a pale ale from the Web site BeerAdvocate: "Nose is floral, like orange blossoms, with some citric rind and soft apple.")
At the same time, Americans, who had traditionally looked to a French and upper-class English model of the good life, one that emphasized refinement and formality, began in the 1980s to look farther south, to the Mediterranean, and particularly to an Italian ideal of good living, one that emphasized passion, spontaneity, and bounty; in other words, we went from Julia Child to Mario Batali. This American embrace of the Mediterranean spirit loosened things up�and the foodie tent got immeasurably bigger when food culture became better suited to the American temperament. Our fundamental attitude about the ceremony of food and the pleasures of the table changed: What counted was passion, which anyone can have, not refinement, which you must be born into, or cultivate very deliberately. |
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Treefarmer
Joined: 29 May 2007
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:21 am Post subject: |
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| never thought of it before, but American beer sucks, and American wine is ok on the whole |
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mehamrick
Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:27 am Post subject: |
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| Treefarmer wrote: |
| never thought of it before, but American beer sucks, and American wine is ok on the whole |
I wouldnt say American beer sucks... I mean if you want to say American Mainstream beer sucks ok.. I will go with that.. but the microbrews that are out there make some damn good beers. Just my opinion though.. |
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Ryst Helmut
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
Location: In search of the elusive signature...
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:40 am Post subject: |
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| mehamrick wrote: |
| Treefarmer wrote: |
| never thought of it before, but American beer sucks, and American wine is ok on the whole |
I wouldnt say American beer sucks... I mean if you want to say American Mainstream beer sucks ok.. I will go with that.. but the microbrews that are out there make some damn good beers. Just my opinion though.. |
I concur that US 'mainstream' beer bites the big kahuna...but, c'mon....we've dozens (if not hundreds) of brands to choose from (if one knows where to look).
Maybe it's bang-for-your-buck, I guess. My father has always been a Cuba Libre man...save when mowing the lawn, then a cold one did the trick. However, his doc had him switch to red wines...but to choose the red/white stuff???
Me? I'll enjoy a glass of wine with meals...but on the whole or one without the other????
Will.Go.Kicking.And.Screaming.
!shoosh,
Ryst |
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Treefarmer
Joined: 29 May 2007
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:53 am Post subject: |
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| mehamrick wrote: |
| Treefarmer wrote: |
| never thought of it before, but American beer sucks, and American wine is ok on the whole |
I wouldnt say American beer sucks... I mean if you want to say American Mainstream beer sucks ok.. I will go with that.. but the microbrews that are out there make some damn good beers. Just my opinion though.. |
I'm from England and all we get are Miller and Bud I think, both of which are just gassy chemical crap in my opinion |
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cangel
Joined: 19 Jun 2003
Location: Jeonju, S. Korea
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 7:04 am Post subject: |
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| Yeah, macro beer, particularly macro beer from the US, suucks... No question. But keep in mind, beer, the manufacturing of the golden nectar, is a much more complicated and detailed endeavor than wine making. And that's just plain old macro beer. It may be piiss, but even this piiss is harder to produce than the most discriminating wine. I know, I know, all you huge glass holding, wine swishing, index finger perpendicular to the glass holding wine drinkers, I am sure will go about providing ample fodder in defense of your liquid swill, but the truth remains the same; squash some grapes, stick it is old barrel and wait. Granted, that does not make all beer better than all wine. |
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Treefarmer
Joined: 29 May 2007
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 7:52 am Post subject: |
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| one thing with wine is that you get much more bang for your buck re: calories than beer |
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jmbran11
Joined: 19 Jan 2006
Location: U.S.
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 5:38 pm Post subject: |
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Cheap California wine is much more economical for a buzz than beer. It's got twice the alchohol, no carbonation, and comes in gallon jugs. I don't know why anyone but a connoisseur would bother with beer.
(Of course, I still prefer liquor . . . ) |
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jinju
Joined: 22 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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| cangel wrote: |
| Yeah, macro beer, particularly macro beer from the US, suucks... No question. But keep in mind, beer, the manufacturing of the golden nectar, is a much more complicated and detailed endeavor than wine making. And that's just plain old macro beer. It may be piiss, but even this piiss is harder to produce than the most discriminating wine. I know, I know, all you huge glass holding, wine swishing, index finger perpendicular to the glass holding wine drinkers, I am sure will go about providing ample fodder in defense of your liquid swill, but the truth remains the same; squash some grapes, stick it is old barrel and wait. Granted, that does not make all beer better than all wine. |
Thats like saying some super detailed painting of dog's playing poker is more artistic than a Picasso sketch.... |
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Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
Joined: 01 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 6:13 pm Post subject: |
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I like a cold beer on a hot day as much as the next guy, but wine is so much more interesting overall. There's just way more variety, literally hundreds (in the States alone) to choose from, each with the potential to change year to year as well. California has already established itself globally, but Washington state also has some terrific wines, as does Oregon (some of the best and priciest Pinot Noir on the planet). New world wine quality in general just gets better every year. The American west coast still has prime terroir that is being experimented on (unlike AOC wines in France, which are often excellent but for the most part well-established, and overpriced), so you can expect to see some good American wines get even better in the future.
Also, for those just interested in getting sloshed and nothing else, a bottle of cheap swill for less than $10 bucks is pretty hard to beat. Just beware the hangover... |
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cangel
Joined: 19 Jun 2003
Location: Jeonju, S. Korea
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| Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:49 am Post subject: |
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I don't get it jinju. Maybe I'm a dumb @ss or it's a bad analogy.
Last edited by cangel on Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:51 am; edited 1 time in total |
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cangel
Joined: 19 Jun 2003
Location: Jeonju, S. Korea
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| Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:50 am Post subject: |
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| Just to save you the effort, I'm probably a dumb @ss... |
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superacidjax
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 9:41 am Post subject: |
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| Wine is so much more interesting. I'm glad to see the change. In France, I drank wine all the time (it's cheaper than Evian.) It makes meals much better. Beer is ok, I suppose, but who the heck drinks a pint of beer with a grand steak? |
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