The world of beer, the anti-wine

The blog entry "Supermarket Nation" by James Sucking described his holiday odessy (or captivity) in Southern California and focused on the deplorable wine selection at local supermarkets. The phrase that bothered me the most was

"the wine selections are dismal. It seems that they have all the same wines, mostly agro-industrial whites and reds from California and Australia, with a few imports such as Bolla, Dubeouf and Louis Jadot"

Firstly, what's wrong with agro-industrial wines? Quite a few mass-volume wines are very good. Columbia Crest, Cht Ste Michelle, Hogue to name a few Washington wines. Many of the big Australian producers such as Rosemount, Penfolds, Yellow Tail and Jacob's Creek make very nice $8 to $11 wines. And at the one million case levels. Some of the Chilean wineries such as Concha Y Toro or Santa Ema have made mass produced wines I've loved. And most of the New Zealand wineries might be considered agro-industrial, yet they make arguably the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world. You have to be a wine snob not to like these wines.

Secondly, what is the alternative to agro-industrial wines? Most of the produce we eat is from agro-industrial corporations. How else are you going to feed a few hundred million people. And the same holds true about wines. If you want to make a wine that people can reliably buy at a reasonable price, you need to make 500,000-1M cases of it and that means it is agro-industrial.

The comments to the blog echoed the distaste for agro-industrial wines. And I figured out these snobs want the stores to carry low production "craft" wines. But if you were the store owner, would you carry unknown craft wines? Or put in another context, would you carry "craft" chicken eggs or purely organic lettuce, dandelion greens and oyster mushrooms? If I were the store, these craft wines would be a poor financial choice. They are expensive and they can sit on the shelf. After all who has heard of that small Santa Cruz winery? Are you willing to spend $32 on a winery you've never heard of?

The wines Sucking and followers (I'm omitting the obvious pun on sychophants) want are interesting wines. Namely they reflect the terrior, so you have to spend time studying the region. And small wineries want to be distinctive, so you have to study the winery itself. And then the real kicker a "true" winery will have wines that vary year to year. So you can't even find a winery you like and rely on them, as you have to know the vineyard and the year, too. In short, these people want to make wine complicated. Really complicated.

So what is the problem with these mass produced wine? They are inexpensive, have a clean fruit flavor which is refreshing and palatable to most people. And they are reliable. You know exactly what you're getting with these wines. And it hit me, this is exactly what people want with beer.

With beer, you want the same taste everytime. You aren't expecting bottle variation. You aren't expecting terroir. You aren't expecting a surprise or taste adventure with every bottle. You don't want to buy it and then have to let it sit in temperature controlled storage for years. You aren't expecting the beer to evolve as it sits on your shelf. Or as it sits in your glass. You don't want to have to let it breathe or swirl your glass. You don't want a narrow temperature range of where it tastes best. You don't care if you finish the bottle (or can). What you want is a predictable, reliable, refreshing, not overly complicated beverage. And that's what you get.

Beer the ultimate agro-industrial beverage.