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.