Thursday, May 01, 2008

Wine is NOT the new beer

Wine is not the new beer. Oh, I got that wrong. It's beer that's not the new wine. Oh, it's ...

Stop, already!

The entire thing is wrong. A wine is a wine, an orange is an orange, a beer is a beer. "A rose by any other name", went the line.

I thought these were interesting points. I’ve had the occasional debate with a wine-lover about how sophisticated beer can be, how it can be just as complex as wine, but I’d never really thought about the origins of our cultural prejudices, or how common they were across Europe, despite the differences in drinking cultures.

UK bloggers Boak and Bailey raised this point, translating segments of a Spanish-language blog in the process. Read the rest here, even though even they —as do most of us— seem to fall into the same trap: "how sophisticated beer can be, how it can be just as complex as wine".


If a wino wishes to feel superior, let him! His loss. If a beer geek wants to get puffed up, let him! How silly!

Beer is not the new wine. Beer is beer. And that's a wonderful thing.

Oh, and by the way, beer had been a wonderful thing for nearly a thousand years before wine even was wine. (Whoops! I did it again.)

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2 comments:

  1. You know what else? You can love both wine AND beer! Nice post.

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  2. Cheers for the link, Tom. It's very easy to get caught into the trap of arguing the sophistication of beer, even if that's not what you intended to do, because of the prejudices against it! As indeed happened in the comments on the original post.

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