Friday, July 15, 2011

Wine? Pah!

I dunno but what Hardknott Dave seems to have got himself up a bit of a dead end on his Wine v. Beer thing. "What about wine's sense of place?", say the wine buffs. "Oooh, you've got us there", we're all supposed to say, before returning to our grimy sheds to slop out a few more buckets of scummy old beer.

Thing is, it's just not so. Commodity wine has managed to partake somewhat in the glory of the truly good stuff. This is nonsense. Affordable varieties of plonk (or even some quite pricey numbers) knocked up in some booze factory out of a few lorryloads of grapes from here and there, sugar, glycerine, tree bark, enzymes, fishguts, crab-shells, preservatives and colour, somehow get thought of (wrongly) in the same way as some remarkable, lovingly-crafted masterpiece of oenology.

Contrariwise for beer.

Tosh, I say. Also, Pah!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

That is the power of marketing my friend, simple as that.

This is why we need to market beer better.

StringersBeer said...

Well, me old mucker, the current story goes: Wine is aspirational, but beer is plebian.

We don't subvert this by saying "hey, beer is just like wine". It doesn't matter how many times you say it. We don't want to say that beer is as good as wine. Beer is better than wine. Beer is sincere, and above all, demotic, vernacular. Most people can afford (if they wish) the best beer.

Wine (the wine that people actually drink) is a trick, a ruse, an industrial commodity presented as a craft luxury.

If we're doing some marketing we look to the strengths of our product first. Not to the strengths of some other product. That's the kind of confused thinking that keeps the image of "craft" beer in this country so badly defined.