Wine. Beer.

What is the attraction of wine? Is it the acidity, the tannin-like firmness that keeps the palate in check, the colour, the collaboration it undertakes with food, its lack of sweetness, and maybe its antiquity? We in the North like to drink something associated with antiquity, we like to feel part of the Mediterranean civilisation from whence wine came, while those in the south of Europe might like to feel part of the North by drinking beer (or maybe they just like to wind up the older generation) — the perceived hardiness and warrior status of the North.

Then I ask — what is the attraction of beer? The length of its assignation in the glass, the join of sweetness, bitterness, dryness, fruitiness and — sometimes — sourness, the collaboration it undertakes with food, the patchwork palettes of colour. Oh and yes its antiquity. We in the North like to drink something associated with antiquity, we like to feel part of the North by drinking beer — the perceived hardiness and warrior status of the North. We also like to feel part of our history and heritage (a word I don’t really like using, it’s too National Trust for me) by drinking beer. 

And then I think of the beers I have drunk in Florence, Rome, Venice, Malaga and even Lisbon in the last few months; beers from the wine countries, beers that are artisanal, produced on a small scale, looking northwards for inspiration and motivation. And then I think: what is the attraction of beer? What is the attraction of wine?

A dry Gewutztraminer for me and the missus

To the Victorian Lego of Westminster for the launch of the World’s Biggest Pub Quiz (March 25 for the Family Charity Association, it provides hard-up families with their hols, does a good job, if you can get your boozer to help please do, see here). However, I’m not here with the begging bowl, what I wanted to write about was a pint I had beforehand at St Stephen’s Tavern, close to the Westminster Tube. It’s a Badger pub. I’m not a great fan of their fruit beers, and I often feel they could up the hop rate on their regulars. They’re good people though and I love their Oddfellows Arms in Wimbourne (right), which is straight out of an MR James novel. 

However, I do enjoy Hopping Hare and First Gold (the latter is always a good pre-cinema pint, I have memories of it providing me sustenance, when I went to see Saving Private Ryan when my wife was pregnant cause I thought the first 15 mins might help me cope if she had to have a c-section, which she did and it did, I suppose I should watch The Hurt Locker if I am called onto defuse a bomb). 

However, back to the present, I ordered Tanglefoot, which I have always enjoyed  and found myself comparing it to a dry Gewurtztraminer — there’s a dryness and a grape-like fruitiness which you half expect to topple over into sweetness but doesn’t; this was intriguing and something I hadn’t noted before. I look at my notes from last year’s visit and I didn’t get that (melon/peardrops on the nose, dark gold in colour, nose also spicy, hint of toffee), but if beer is the new wine (which it isn’t of course) then this is from Alsace (or even the Moselle if you really want to stretch things) rather than Mars. And that means I enjoyed it (I sent some tasting notes to a brewer the other day and on receipt he asked ‘but did you enjoy it’. Of course I did.).

A night in the pub

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.