Beer is NOT Wine, Deal With It!

Yesterday I tweeted the following:

"winos jumping on the beer bandwagon is a bad thing for the industry...discuss".

In response to a few requests for further elaboration, here goes. First though let me say that I quite enjoy wine from time to time, indeed I spent much of Saturday in vineyard tasting rooms in our local area sampling some very nice wines, and some bloody awful ones, so don't go getting it into your head that this is some kind of anti-wine rant, it isn't. Having said that though, I do think beer is an infinitely more interesting drink, but that for another post sometime.

The genesis of my tweet came from some comments I overheard in one of the vineyards on Saturday. The bar area at the final vineyard we visited, Barboursville Vineyards to be precise, was fairly crowded, so rather than adding to the mêlée with four extra bodies, Mrs V and our friends waited on the periphery whilst I went back and forth getting samples. During one such trip, a couple just in front of me was discussing how "craft beer is the new wine" whilst simultaneously complaining that brewery tasting rooms were "too industrial" and that they couldn't take beer seriously until it "became like wine".

Now, I don't want to tar all wine lovers with the same brush as these pseuds, but as I have posted about plenty of times before, I am not convinced that wine people are capable of appreciating beer on its own terms. Yes they may have refined palettes able to detect strawberries dressed in rubber gimp suits or some such bizarre combination, if you have never heard Jilly Goolden waffle on then count yourself fortunate, but trying to force beer into the wine frame of reference is pointless, and does a disservice to beer.

There are times, and I accept that I may be oversensitive about this, that I get the feeling that there are too many people trying to gentrify beer, to take it away from being the drink of the everyman and make it a niche product for those with pockets deep enough to pay for it. That's not say to that beer is the lowest common denominator drink, but rather that is transcends class and status, and it infuriates me when some people try to intellectualise beer by comparing it to wine.

As I said in a post a couple of weeks ago:

"I often find myself rolling my eyes at the seemingly endless attempts to turn the drink of the everyman into something antithetical to its very nature, something fancy. We often read and hear about beer "achieving the status of wine", as though middle class respectability with its chunky knit sweaters, Volvos and wine and cheese parties is something worth aping."

There are times when my sincerest wish is that the people trying to "raise" beer to the level of wine would just spit the dummy, throw their toys out of the pram and bugger off.