Yankee Brew News Archive

In Vino Veritas?

Originally Published: 03/95

By: Kerry J. Byrne

"Ale...in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink."

- Guy de Maupassant

Twelve Men

I was on the phone talking to an editor of a prominent daily paper in the Greater Boston area. We were discussing beer and wine.

"Wine drinkers are more likely to read," he said to me. I'm sure he said it without batting an eye.

Needless to say, I was both stunned and insulted. Stunned that a supposedly up-to-date and well-educated editor could be so narrow-minded. Insulted that he thinks those of us who prefer Ceres to Bacchus are, for whatever reason, less likely to read. I can imagine what other generalizations this guy makes.

"People who eat Italian food are more likely to be fat and be named Vinny," he tells people at dinner parties.

"Catholics are more likely to be anal-retentive neurotics," he whispers to his pew-mates at church.

"Football fans are more likely to stink," he says to his partner during the fourth day of a cricket match.

Hey, I enjoy a glass of Merlot almost as much as a pint of good India Pale Ale. Almost.

But, unfortunately, this preference causes some, like my Dale Carnegie-trained editor friend, to think me illiterate. And I think I know why: Commercials.

People do not understand that there is more to the world of beer than they've seen in their frosted mugs of American bland. And they've made no effort to learn more. They're education comes from television, in a world where bikini-clad, bleached-blonde bimbos fall from the sky as you crack open a frosty one; a world where baseball and full-contact golf are the sports of choice; a world where men dress as women in an effort to get free beer.

No wonder why that editor, and those like him, think that beer drinkers are uneducated buffoons. In TV-land they are.

We don't see scruffy winos (notice they're not called beeros) on television gargling with the contents of their gallon jugs of cheap vino in the back alley-way of some all-night diner awash in aquamarine neon. This is also the world of wine. Do these likely readers sit down at poetry sessions thumbing merrily through their copies of The Antioch Review while discussing iambic pentameter? I don't think so.

We are, however, reminded daily that "we are our own dog," whatever the hell that means.

You know, I don't expect Madison Avenue to have a sudden change of heart upon the realization that not all beer drinkers are big, burly, "beer guy's beer" drinkers. I do feel the need to speak up for those of us who consider beer a pleasure to be coddled, not slugged down in massive, tasteless quantities; to remind this fellow that we are not all the same, that some of us beer drinkers can and do read, and that some of us can even write complete sentences.

Why do I feel the need to tell you this? Why ask why?