Author: PeteBrown

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It’s time we talked about cider

Because I’m something of an expert on beer, many people believe I know about cider (and perry).  It’s quite flattering I suppose, that they just assume I know loads about a drink that isn’t beer and that I don’t claim to be an expert on.  But it’s been going on for so long now that I feel obliged to learn a little.  I’ve been extending my consultancy activities into cider over the last couple of years, and this summer I’ve been boning up my product knowledge so that I can incorporate it into my tutored tastings, food matching and writing.

This image was created by someone looking to promote cider.  Not take the piss out of it.  Hmm.

Not many of the beer people I know talk about cider (or perry) that much – I get the impression that they treat it with disdain as inferior to beer, or that it’s a guilty secret.  For those among us who feel a little defensive about being called a beer geek, the bumpkin image of cider (and perry) makers and drinkers means there’s someone one rung down from us who we can turn on.

For those who’ve argued with CAMRA that they should support all quality beer rather than just cask ale, cider is a bone of contention – the organisation that responds to criticism about beer with “The clue is in the name: what is it about the Campaign for Real Ale that’s so difficult to understand?  That’s what we’re about, and that’s all,” cider (and perry) is an example of breathtaking hypocrisy, supported wholeheartedly by CAMRA at festivals and throughout the organisation despite the fact that it is clearly not real ale.

Cider is a sophisticated, quality drink.  No, it really is.

But if that’s all we think, we do cider (and perry) a disservice.

I wrote recently in the Publican about the ‘joyful anarchy’ of cider, how cider (and perry) producers all seem to have a great time and many seem to operate at a slight angle to reality.  ABVs tend to be approximate.  Labelling and packaging often seems a little rough and ready.  It’s gloriously shambolic.

But there’s also refinement at the other end of the spectrum.  We have this positioning problem with cider in the UK, in that we consider it a direct alternative to beer.  We see a farmhouse cider at 8% ABV and sigh and go, “Shit, a pint of this is going to get me arseholed,” and we shrug and order a pint anyway.

But why?  Cider is made from fruit, not grain.  It has a flavour range from dry to sweet, rather than bitter to malty.  Does that remind you of anything?  Yep, cider is a closer cousin to wine than beer.  Indeed sparkling perry was apparently the inspiration for champagne.  Cider is a hybrid, halfway between wine and beer, and yet different from each.

I’ve been enjoying the diversity and complexity of cider a great deal this summer, at least until what was shaping up to be a beautiful long hot summer got washed down a storm drain about two weeks ago.

I’m not a purist about cider, same as I’m not a purist about beer. If it tastes nice, I’ll drink it.  But I do have one rule: it’s ostensibly made out of apples.  Therefore it should taste of apples.  Or pears.  It doesn’t have to be be squeezed on a nineteenth century press by a yokel in a leather jerkin and come out unfiltered and filthy to be cider.  It can be carbonated, balanced, blended, contain sulphites and stabilisers, come from big manufacturers, be served over ice from a pint bottle… I don’t care.  So long as it’s recognisably made from what it’s supposed to be made from.  And tastes nice.

You would.  I bet you would.

I was helping an ad agency pitch for Magner’s last year.  I organised a tasting of the big commercial cider brands, and got a bit of a surprise.  We took Strongbow, Woodpecker, Magner’s, Bulmers, Gaymers and Westons Organic and tasted them next to each other.  As you’d expect, the Westons Organic was by far the most pleasant drink.  What surprised me was just how bad the others were – with one curious exception.  They didn’t actually taste like apples.  I’ve had cider lollies from ice cream vans that taste more of cider than these drinks did.  They were sweet, fizzy and synthetic, the sweetness artificial with no discernible link to anything that’s every been outdoors, let alone on a tree.  They weren’t cider: they were alcopops repacked as cider, cheap, nasty alcohol in a new set of clothes to suit changing mainstream trends.

The exception?  Magner’s.  Say what you like about it – and I know it certainly doesn’t look natural – but it tasted of apples.  It wasn’t a patch on the Westons, but it belonged in the same group, a class apart from its more commercial peers.

On a hot day I’ll take an Aspalls or an Addlestones over beer.  Hall & Woodhouse sent me a case of their Badger pear cider and it’s almost stupidly drinkable – shamefully I was hiding my last few bottles from people when we had out summer barbecue last month.

And if you’re lucky enough to encounter Dennis Gwatkin – probably the most celebrated cider maker of the moment – you’ll find stuff there to delight any craft beer enthusiast.  His cider aged in whisky barrels was one of the best drinks I encountered all last year.  Served in a wine glass, lightly chilled, it beats rose wine at its own game on long summer evenings.

So I like cider (and perry).  I’m drinking more of it/them.  I’m doing an event on (perry) at the Abergavenny Food Festival next month.  (I’m also doing one on Welsh microbreweries with a bit of cheese – but that’s already sold out!)

I’ll be cramming for this event on Bank Holiday Monday at the Alma on Newington Green, North London.  Fresh from the success of their first ever beer festival, they’re doing a cider festival over August Bank Holiday Weekend.  There’ll be twenty different ciders (and perrys) from five producers, including fruit ciders, perry, rum-oaked, whisky-oaked and wine-oaked ciders, and cider and food matching.

I think I’ll be on the Rioja-matured scrumpy myself.  Just don’t take the piss if I’m drinking it from a wine glass.

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Classy Pub Crawls

The Guardian is steadily featuring more stuff about beer and pubs.  Only little snippets here and there, but they’re growing in size and frequency.

Today has a short feature on pub crawls with a little extra class or quirkiness, and I was asked to contribute one.  Go here for my take on Sheffield by tram, ending with a night at the Hillsborough Hotel.

But please, drink responsibly.  *Tries to keep straight face*

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Exclusive: Wikio rankings for July

Yes, it’s the monthly blog post you love to hate: the Wikio rankings!

There have been some changes at Wikio this month so it’s all a little later than usual, but below are the movers and shakers for January 2010, due to be published in the Wikio site on 10th August:

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1 Pete Brown’s Blog (=)
2 Pencil & Spoon (=)
3 Brew Dog Blog (+2)
4 The Pub Curmudgeon (-1)
5 Beer Reviews (+7)
6 Woolpack Dave’s beer and stuff blog (+3)
7 Tandleman’s Beer Blog (-1)
8 Zythophile (+3)
9 Called to the bar (-5)
10 Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog (-2)
11 The Beer Nut (-4)
12 The Bitten Bullet (+1)
13 Spittoon (-3)
14 Reluctant Scooper (+1)
15 Are You Tasting the Pith? (+21)
16 “It’s just the beer talking” – Jeff Pickthall’s Blog (+2)
17 Travels With Beer (=)
18 Rabid About Beer (-4)
19 Taking the beard out of beer! (+1)
20 Brew Wales (-1)

Ranking made by Wikio

Beer blogs are now up to 18 of out the top 20 “wine and beer blogs”.  There’s also a creeping increase in the amount of beer coverage in the nationals – Young Dredge is getting some pieces on the Guardian’s Word of Mouth blog, and we’ve had two paid-for beer supplements in national press so far this year.  A few of us have also had more bits in the papers than we’re used to getting.

What do you think – is the beer message finally starting to come through?

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Eyes down for a full house!

It’s just a bit of fun, OK?

Have had a rollicking time at the Great British Beer festival this week.  Curiously I haven’t actually been drinking that much beer: had lots of meetings, work presentations and chats around the festival venue, and in between them was greeted by loads of people wanting to say hello, have their copies of Hops and Glory signed and stuff.  Absolutely wonderful and quite humbling, but also utterly knackering over the course of three days.

Anyway, between all the handshaking I’ve been keeping myself amused with a new game I invented called GBBF bingo.  I’ve been posting sights you often see at beer festivals, and asking people to tweet photographic evidence of them if they spot them.  The person who discovers the most gets a pint from me – a full house gets a signed set of my books.  Or just the pint if you’d prefer.

With two days of GBBF to go, the Twitter leader has a mere two.  So I’ve gathered the ‘numbers’ together and designed my own bingo card, below.  If you’re going to GBBF today or tomorrow, print this off and take it with you, capture the evidence, and you could win fantastic prizes!

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Come to my beer dinner, August 9th!

Thanks to my friend Niki, author of the fantastically successful Flavour Thesaurus, I was introduced to Dominique de Bastarrechea, who runs Hardy’s Brasserie and Wine Bar in a quiet corner of Marylebone.
Niki had done a very successful evening talking about her book, after which a meal followed based on some of the pairing suggestions in the book itself.
The event went so well Dominique wanted to do more, and Niki suggested me!  One blurry World Cup semi-final evening later, which was almost but not quite ruined by an exploding bottle of Worthington White Shield, Dominique was a beer convert, vowing to replace the perfectly acceptable but unimaginative selection of bottled lagers in the restaurant with a short but perfectly formed beer list that reflects the diversity and innovation of beer today.
She’s spent the month since then following a few recommendations of mine, visiting brewers and rapidly developing her own tastes and preferences with a work rate and dedication that’s inspiring and quite frankly a bit scary.
The result: this week if you go to Hardy’s you can vote for the new beer list.  We’ve got new lagers, fruit beers, wheat beers, pale ales, bitters, strong ales and porter/stout.  In each category there are two or three beers.  In each, the most popular will be kept on.  If they sell well, the list may then expand even further.  
So next Monday, I’ll be talking about beer and my books, and unveiling the winners in a tutored tasting. After that, there’s a three course dinner for the ridiculously reasonable price of £15.  Here’s the menu:
I’m going to be matching different beers with each dish and talking through the matches.
It promises to be a great evening – Niki’s event was an extraordinary success – so do book now if you think you’ll still have a liver left after this week!  Full details below.

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Over-hopped and over here?

There’s never been a better time to drink American craft beer in the UK than next week.  The Beer San Frontieres bar at the Great British Beer Festival, form Tuesday to Saturday, is bigger than it’s ever been and received some good coverage in the Independent recently.

And this Friday, 6th August, The White Horse at Parsons Green is hosting the American craft brewers for an evening with an amazing range of beers.  The list is below.  Break out the milk thistle.

·      Ballast Point Calico Amber Ale – 5.5%ABV
·      Ballast Point Big Eye IPA – 7% ABV
·      Butternuts Beer & Ale Porkslap 4.3% ABV
·      Butternuts Beer & Ale Moo Thunder – 4.9% ABV
·      Dogfish Head Midas Touch – 9%ABV
·      Great Divide 16th Anniversary IPA – 10% ABV
·      Great Divide Yeti Imperial Stout – 9.5% ABV
·      Great Divide Hoss Rye Lager – 6.2% ABV
·      Green Flash Double Stout – 8.8% ABV
·      Left Hand Milk Stout – 6% ABV
·      Left Hand Imperial Stout – 10.2% ABV
·      Odell IPA – 7% ABV
·      Odell 90 Shilling Ale – 5.3% ABV
·      Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale – 6.5% ABV
·      Oskar Blue Ten Fidy – 10.5% ABV
·      Smutty Nose Baltic Porter – 8.7% ABV
·      Southern Tier 2XIPA – 6.5% ABV
·      Southern Tier Mokah – 11% ABV
·      Stone IPA – 6.9% ABV
·      Stone Old Guardian Barley Wine 11.26% ABV
·      Tommyknocker Black Rye IPA – 7% ABV
·      Tommyknocker Maple Nut Brown Ale – 4.5% ABV
·      Uncommon Brewers Siamese Twin Ale- 8.5% ABV
·      Uncommon Brewers Bacon Brown Ale – 6.8% ABV
·      Victory Hop Devil – 6.7% ABV
·      Victory Golden Monkey -9.5% ABV

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Back Garden Bliss

OK while the weather holds, this is too good not to share.

A couple of people picked up on the reference to beer brined chicken in my Garrett Oliver post.  Now your barbecue has seen some sausage and burger action, it’s time to raise it to the next level.

The following recipe is adapted from this book, which has changed my life:

It looks like a novelty book.  It looks like it should be rubbish.  But it contains secrets, such joyful secrets.

The problem with bbq food is that it gets burnt and dry.  Now this might be common knowledge in the States, where barbecuing gets taken much more seriously, but we tend not to know it over here because bbq weather is so rare – the secret to moist, flavoursome barbecue meet is brining.  Marinade the meat in a herby, spicy solution with lots of salt and brown sugar, which tenderises and keeps it moist.

If you just did that, it would be pretty good.  But you can go further – once your meat is marinaded, about half an hour before putting it on the grill, just as the coals are flaming and you’re waiting for them burn down into embers, dry off your chicken/lamb/pork/beef and coat it in a salty, sugary rub.  This caramelises very quickly, giving you a tasty burnt layer on the outside but protecting the meat inside and locking in the moisture and flavour.

With these principles you can’t go wrong.  The following recipe is the one form the book that I’ve cooked six times in the last few weeks, but with the principle established, you can mess around with different seasonings.

First you do the brine:

Half cup of firmly packed brown sugar
Half cup sea salt
1 cup hot water
1 tsp chopped/grated lemon zest
2 tsp chopped fresh thyme
2 tsp chopped fresh rosemary
3 bay leaves
2 tsp ground black pepper
2 bottles beer – I think anything works, but something quite fruity and mid-brown has worked best for me.

Dissolve the sugar and salt in the water, then add everything else. Marinade the chicken for as long as you can – four or five hours is perfect.

Then you’ve got the rub:

2tsp fennel seeds (it says ground but I use them whole)
Pinch of chilli flakes to taste
2 tsp chopped lemon zest
1 tsp brown sugar
3 tsp salt

Drain the marinade off the chicken, coat in the rub, stick it on the barbie!  Simple.

As I mentioned in the previous post, it’s a heavenly beer match waiting to happen.  Because of the variety of spicy flavours in there I’ve found an American IPA/pale ale – not a hop bomb of varnish-like bitterness but something with some nice resinous, spicy notes, such as Sierra nevada Pale Ale or Norrebro’s Bombay Pale Ale – goes amazingly – the latter is one of the most swoonsome matches I’ve ever tasted

And to follow? Well, while we’re outside, me and the Beer Widow went camping last weekend.  We had a campfire every night (No firelighters.  First night – paper and about five matches.  Second night – just kindling from the forest floor and three matches.  Final night – forest kindling and one match!)  I’d got a hunch from tasting whisky barrel-aged beers while judging the International Beer Challenge, which I wanted to check out – and I was right.  When you’re sitting around a campfire, as the moon rises and nearby campers launch lanterns into the darkening sky, you can play with beer and fire matching.  Something like an Ola Dubh 30 or 40 year old is the perfect accompaniment – the smoke from the air mingles in your nostrils and brings out nuances in the beer, and at the finish, as you swallow, you can taste the embers of the fire on your tongue.  One of the most remarkable, multi-sensory tasting experiences I’ve ever had.
Now where are those matches?

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Bavaria versus AB-Inbev/FIFA: a postscript

I’m not going to rant again about the whole ambush marketing/erosion of human rights in favour of commercial gain fiasco of this year’s World Cup, but I received an interesting press release yesterday from Hall & Partners, who were always the most intelligent and useful research agency we used back in my advertising days.

Their – ahem – WebWordTM tracker has revealed that during the World Cup, in the blogosphere (not the beer blogosphere, the whole kit and caboodle) Bavaria trounced Budweiser.

WebWord is a “social media listening tool” that tracks online conversations in real time.  Following the expulsion and detention of the 32 women wearing unbranded orange dresses at Holland’s game on 14th June, H&P tracked “Budweiser AND (FIFA or World Cup)” versus “Bavaria AND (FIFA or World Cup)” to see which combination of terms got the most mentions online for the duration of the tournament.

They found that Bavaria gained 371% more blog buzz than Budwesiser.  Interestingly, it also beat every other World Cup sponsor – Adidas, Coca-Cola, Emirates, Hyundai, Sony and Visa.

But who needs expensive research to prove this?  Simply Google ‘World Cup Beer’, and see how many stories come up about Bavaria before you get any mention of the official sponsors.

FIFA has shown itself to have an extraordinarily aggressive attitude to ambush marketing.  But these figures show that the more they fight against it, the more powerful they make it.  Big, ugly corporations still have much to learn about marketing in social media.

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Mr Oliver comes to London

This week I’ve been lucky enough to spend two evenings with Garrett Oliver, Brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and arguably the world’s most compelling voice about beer, especially when he’s talking about beer and food matching.
The first night was – to put it mildly – unexpected.  Last Saturday we had a barbecue at our house for my birthday.  I turned my friends on to my newly discovered masterpiece of beer-brined chicken in fennel rub – a recipe from one of those kitsch, 1950s-style novelty cookbooks that turns out to be the best thing I’ve ever cooked.  Sublime with a Sierra Nevada-style pale ale, perfect with Norrebro’s Bombay India Pale Ale.
The following day we were nursing hangovers, prodding at the tidying up and enjoying the sunshine when Garrett dropped me a line to say he was in London, had no plans and did I fancy a pint?  I explained that I was incapable of leaving the house but that he was welcome to join us for the last of the beer-brined chicken and the World Cup FinalTM if he wanted, and to my surprise and delight he said yes.  After the poor sod roamed Finsbury Park for an hour in search of a cab – bloody football – he finally made it to Stoke Newington.  I managed to find three beers in the cellar he’d not had before, and I think he liked two of them.  After watching the Dutch lose to Spain in the Ultimate Fighting Challenge, we stayed up talking till long after bedtime, drinking Ola Dubh 40.  A memorable and wonderful evening, entirely worth writing off the whole of Monday for.
Two nights later Garrett was at the White Horse giving a beer and cheese pairing.  I do this kind of thing quite a bit myself, but I don’t think I’ve ever uttered one word about how well cheese and beer go together that Garrett hadn’t said to me first.
If you haven’t seen Garrett do his thing before, here’s a brief summary of his spiel, after which I’ll say a note on the beers and the cheeses, and how well they went together.
The first thing he’s at pains to point out is that he loves wine as well as beer.  “Some of my best friends are sommeliers,” he didn’t quite say.  Seriously, he argued that people who are passionate about evangelizing any kind of food or drink are all “flavour people.  It’s natural that it’s intertwined.”
Having established this, he then talks about how beer is a better match with cheese than wine is.  He often participates in tasting duels versus sommeliers. A cheese expert chooses six cheeses, Garrett and the wine guy choose drinks to match with them, and in front of a voting audience Garrett usually wins. 
There’s a technical part to why and, in Garrett’s mind, a more romantic, esoteric explanation which is just as real.  The technical bit is that cheese is mainly fat and salt, which coat the tongue.  Wine simply bounces off this coating, can’t break it down, and therefore you don’t really taste much of what remain two very separate elements in the mouth.  But beer, with its carbonation, breaks through, scraping the fat off your tongue, revitalizing the flavours.  Sometimes beer enhances cheese, sometimes vice versa, and sometimes they combine to create a 3D flavour sensation that’s much bigger than either beer or cheese can achieve separately.
The more romantic part – which is not to say it doesn’t make perfect sense – is that beer and cheese are obvious natural pairings.  They both come from a farm, and historically they were both made by the same person.  “Both are essentially made from grass,” argues Garrett.  “Barley is a type of grass.  Cheese has a cow or a sheep in the middle, but it starts as grass.”
And so on to the tasting.  All the beers were Garrett’s own, some of them rarely if ever seen this side of the pond. 

ROSARY GOATS CHEESE WITH BROOKLYN SORACHI ACE

Sorachi ace is a rare, new hop with a powerful, unique aroma of lemon rind and lemongrass.  The beer of the same name is a Belgian Saison style ale that tastes like a warm summer evening. 
Goat’s cheese seemed like an obvious match, and this particular one was one of the best I’ve ever tasted – a bold initial tartness that melts into a lake of milkiness. 
Together, the lemon character of the beer and the strong citric hit of the cheese somehow cancel each other out and fade away to leave a new flavour, rounder and mellower with no sharp edges, sweet with the tiniest hint of malt.  Wonderful.

BRILLAT SAVARIN WITH BROOKLYN LOCAL 1

Brillat Savarin is to my mind the best ever writer on food, famous for his aphorisms, my favourite of which is “A meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye.”  I don’t much care for the cheese that was named after him though.  It’s like eating solidified cream.  I hate cream.  It’s too cloying and sickly and I don’t understand why everyone thinks it’s a treat. 
The beer though is something I’d be perfectly happy to receive as a birthday present.  And I mean a ‘proper’ present.  It’s recognizable as a Belgian Saison in style but it’s smoother, more elegant.  You want to say ‘dumbed down’ but that would be completely inaccurate.  Yes, it’s more accessible than some of the funkier farmyard Saisons, but the cheesy, musty, sweet and sour, spicy flavour journey of a Saison is all present and correct. 
This is a match where the beer comes out best.  The cheese helps push its tartness to the fore, a brief spike of flavour emerging slowly and elegantly, like the spine of a humpback whale cresting the ocean surface before, submerging again.  
On the other hand,  the cheese just tastes even creamier, which I could really do without. 

HEREFORD HOP WITH BROOKLYN LAGER

The Brooklyn beer you can get fairly easily in the UK was the first they brewed, and is a faithful recreation of what beer used to be like in New York a hundred years ago, prompting Garrett to exclaim that the current craft beer boom is not a fad or a trend, but a return to normality after a the late twentieth century’s obsession with plastic and standardization. 
I realize that we spend too much time thinking about beer in terms of ‘hoppy’ or ‘malty’.  Brooklyn lager is neither, or rather, both.  It’s toffee in a very expensive designer label suit that makes it shine and sparkle.
The cheese is sticky and cloying and glutinous in a good way, sweet and salty and slightly acidic.  Together I don’t find much alchemy – both are nice separately and nice together, but with nothing much added.

OSSAU IRATY WITH BROOKLYN BROWN ALE

This is an interesting one.  Ossau Iraty is made from sheep’s milk and has an aroma of lanolin or ‘wool fat’, the smell you get off a wet woollen jumper and, once it’s been pointed out, the sweet smell you get from roast lamb.
The beer is all about chocolate and caramel, with a slight grassiness towards the end.
Together, they are in total harmony – beer and cheese blend into each other around an axis of sweet caramel.  Just lovely.

SOME OTHER CHEESE WITH BROOKLYN DARK MATTER

This one wasn’t on the menu and I’m starting to lose track.  Dark Matter is an 8% version of the brown ale that’s been aged for four months in bourbon and wine barrels to give it a strong American oak character.  To me it smells initially of nail varnish, but that’s a smell I’ve always liked.  On the second whiff I can isolate the coconut that Garrett’s talking about, and then you can get the strong vanilla essence behind it, a hint of sherry, and then a faint molasses character on the tongue.
I hardly notice the cheese.  I’m all wrapped up in the beer, and the match doesn’t change much about it.

MONTGOMERY’S CHEDDAR WITH BROOKLYN EAST INDIA PALE ALE

IPA with strong mature cheddar has always been my favourite match of any beer with any food, and this one doesn’t disappoint. The dry saltiness of the cheese ands the fruitiness of the beer just body barge each other, exploding in a carnival of colour and partying on your tongue.  Weirdly, Garrett compares it to a forceful physical dance, like a tango, just after I’ve written in my notebook that they’re slam-dancing.  I  might be on the same wavelength as him, but I just don’t have his class.

COLSTON-BASSET STILTON WITH BROOKLYN CHOCOLATE STOUT

This pairing was born by accident.  Garrett was at an event where he’d asked for either a barley wine to match with Stilton (which is another awesome match) or chocolate stout with truffles.  He turned up to find chocolate stout and Stilton, panicked, tried it, and found it worked wonderfully.
The dark chocolate character in the stout comes from chocolate malt only – no actual chocolate – and develops with a hint of sherry, followed by an inky Shiraz character on the palate with some bitter coffee grounds mixed in.
The Stilton is lovely.  “People who don’t like Stilton… well… they’re just bad people,” says Garrett.  “I’m serious.  If you don’t like Stilton you can’t come to my house.  You can’t pet my dog.”
The match is an elegant marriage which makes me think of high tea with a maiden aunt in a stately home.  Don’t ask me why.
So what did I learn?  The main thing is that in craft brewing there are craftsmen, artisans, entrepreneurs, chefs, mavericks, scientists, technicians, innovators and mad professors.  But Garrett is one of the few true artists.  The beers reflect the man: daring, elegant, refined, cultured, Europhile, principled and courteous. At my house on Sunday he was telling us about a beer he’s designed in honour of a legendary Italian filmmaker, and to hear him talk through his thinking, the influences he wanted to incorporate, and how he chose to weave them together, was enchanting.  All my guests – including the ones who never drink beer – were absolutely rapt.  And the brews we had on Tuesday demonstrated that he can deliver in the glass what he weaves in words.
I also learned that the best way to talk about beer versus wine is not to dismiss wine, or fight against it, but to complement it.  This is too long a post, so I’m just going to finish by quoting Garrett in summary:
“The frustration in the States, and now here, is people trying to force wine into places where it doesn’t want to go.  What we eat now, with Japanese and Indian and Thai food, is not what we were eating twenty years ago.  Let wine go where it wants, or it’s a recipe for misery. 
“Beer has a wider range of flavours than wine.  That’s not opinion, that is incontrovertible, verified fact.  When chefs and restaurants complement a great menu with a great wine list and just two or three industrial beers, it’s like an artist saying ‘I’m only going to use half the colours’, or a composer saying ‘I’m only going to use half the notes.’  It just doesn’t make sense.”
I’ll be in my salon if you need me.

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