Wine vs Beer

I have been writing some silly posts of late, the word CAMEL springs to mind as one such post. Putting all silliness aside, I thought I might actually blog about something semi-serious.

The debate regarding the social standing of beer vs wine is starting to reach fever pitch in both the press and the blogosphere. Melissa Cole has challenged serial w@nker Malcolm Gluck to a beer food pairing challenge. The idea is to 'educate' Mr Gluck and hopefully challenge his point of view on beer. I have a couple of issues with this whole affair, the first being that this is starting to sound like a staged public relations exercise, one that I seem to be now drawn into. The second being that Malcolm Gluck takes an iconoclastic view to his journalism. The fact that he openly slanders beer in an attempt to provoke reaction is unlikely to be his true viewpoint, but is a useful tool in drawing an interest to his work.

For anyone who cares, I can simplify the whole situation.

Flavours in wine; Red and White. Rose is just a shade of Grey. Any talk of mild citrus and soft vanilla undertones is absolute rubbish. Anything produced from a simple fruit such as a grape does not have the capacity to be complex and these flavours do not exist in grapes, nor are they a character of yeast. The general rules of thumb concerning food wine pairings clearly demonstrates the simplicity of wine. Red wine with beef and white wine with fish. You don't need a wine critic to tell you that!

Beer on the other hand is made from more ingredients (malt, hops, water and yeast), and these ingredients have the scope to be modified (roasted, caramelized, acidified, hardened and softened). These produce a myriad of flavours that are infinitely more suited to food than the two dimensional flavours of wine. The following flavour wheel, supports this. A similar wheel for wine would have two sides, red and white with possibly some extra sub-nodes for production taints such as 'oaking' or 'botrytis infection'. Thats right, these flavours are actually defects.