The barman says to her ‘he’s a beer expert, you’re a wine expert, you should all get on’. Then goes off to deal with a wanna-be ancient toff who is moaning about 50p added to his bill. It’s gone 10.20pm and I sip on a pint of Vale’s Gravitas, all tropical fruit and soft mellow hop. ‘Not bad is it,’ says her husband who confesses to drink London Pride until ‘it comes out of my ears’. What an unpleasant image. She works for one of the top wine houses and is down for a couple of days. ‘Would you like another drink,’ says a chap to my right. She says: ‘wine is best because it has layers of complexity that beer doesn’t.’ She looks smug and complacent when I counter with words that talk about the carbonation of beer cutting through fatty food, the yin and yang of hops and malt, the sweet and the sour of the lambic, the world of beer beyond London Pride — a good beer but hardly something that is the Bordeaux of beer, unlike Fuller’s’ Golden Pride, which Michael Jackson used to describe as the cognac of beer. After a lot of friendly banter, we end up like the other’s night’s Villa-Gooners match, a draw (I would have been thankful for that result with the Mancs yesterday) — there’s still a lot of work to be done with the wine world though.
The pic is not the pub where the chat took place, but somewhere I went last week and was totally enthralled by.
