Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Wine people, Beer people


We went to a fancy wine tasting Saturday night at the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee. The Pfister is a beautiful old downtown hotel. It is only slightly tainted (sorry, splotchy) for me due to some unfortunate remarks made by the musician Beck when he stayed there during Summerfest. He compared the name of the grand old hotel to an act usually engaged in by homosexual men, portrayed rather unvarnished in the movie Caligula. Wow, I digress like Dennis Miller on crank.

I know beer people and I know wine people. They are very different. Here's my guess why: beer people make batches. Those batches don't keep. You put the happy in the bottle now. Very few beer people get really rich, but many, many try. Wine people make vintages. Much is left to the caprice of the weather; ocean breeze, rain, sun; bugs; timing. Wine keeps and everyone thinks they can get rich off of wine. Either by making your own or by making a buy low/sell high choice on something you've cellared.

Wine people compulsively brag about their cellars. They brag about a wine they tasted somewhere and how lucky they were to have a thimbleful. Beer people don't cellar, so they are a less snobby bunch. Some beer stakes its claim on terroir-the unique combination of global positioning and soil minerals that effects the hops, but not much. They aim for consistency.

Wine people say that it takes a lot of beer to make good wine. Beer people never say that it takes a lot of wine to make good beer.

16 comments:

Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein said...

I'm a beer guy who appreciates a good pinot noir every now and again.

Randal Graves said...

I'm a wine guy who doesn't really like beer all that much. But being a snob about stuff is pretty wankery. Except the stuff I like.

And cellars are first and foremost for keeping dead bodies.

dguzman said...

Beautiful contrast! For your next assignment, you can analyze the "cheap wine drinker" vs the "wine snob." I've known both, and I'll take the cheap winer any day. Wine snobs are a-holes.

Jess Wundrun said...

I like both wine and beer, my observations are based more on producers of each than strictly the drinkers. I like anyone that has a passion about what they do, I just find the passions to be very different in how they are expressed.

For the record, beer snobs can be assholes, too.

Fran said...

What Jess Wundrun said!!!!

All snobs can be assholes, can't they.

Now did I mention the delightful and pungent cheese that I sampled the other day...

It never ends.

Anonymous said...

Wine with dinner or on special occasions. Beer for the other 360 days in the year.

Splotchy said...

Damn you, Jess! I feel like I have been urinated on at a winetasting. Hmm... I distinctly smell the faint whiff of elderberries.

By the way, how do moonshine people figure in this equation?

Jess Wundrun said...

Sadly, I don't know any moonshiners nor their salespeople. The best I can do is the five minutes I saw of that horrible Willie Nelson film "The Dukes of Hazzard", which leaves me unqualified to comment.

Dr. Zaius said...

Of the two groups, which is most likely to be annoying when drunk? I'm guessing that both are about the same.

Jess Wundrun said...

Neither it's gin drinkers, or tequila (see Jimmy Buffett post below)

Distributorcap said...

i like both......

Anonymous said...

Big people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

Don't get me wrong, I loves me a glass full of the grape, Jess. But I also like beer. I honestly cannot picture dinner without wine (I'm French, non?), but I cannot picture bbq without beer.

Celebrate both, and be thankful that it is not an either/or proposition.

Regards,

Tengrain

Jess Wundrun said...

d-cap: I like it all!

tengrain: Hey! Jess Wundrun is available in all three sizes: big, average and small!

Sorghum Crow said...

I like beer and wine, but not in the same glass.

Matthew Hubbard said...

Wine makes me happy. Beer makes me sleepy, but I know I have to stay up long enough to pee.

One glass of Two Buck Chuck and half a bar of Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate (the stuff from Belgium) is about as happy as 75 cents can make me.

(Chuck is almost local; the chocolate... not so much.)

Suzy said...

For years we had a wine rack in our basement -- it was there when we moved in -- hanging right above the scary toilet. (You know scary toilets: the stand-alone kind that many older houses have in the basement for some reason. People could be more like my dad ... and pee in the laundry sink. But I digress.) Anyway, we never have enough money to buy more than a couple of bottles of wine at a time, but one year we went in on a case of maple syrup with my brother, and that was a pretty good place to store it. Why am I rambling so? I don't know. Chalk it up to exhaustion. Friday.